A recent FREE policy brief by Giancarlo Spagnolo, senior research fellow at SITE and professor of Economics at University of Rome II, and Elena Paltseva, research fellow at SITE, analyses the impact of procurement thresholds on strategic behavior of public buyers in Sweden.

In the policy brief authors summarize the results of their exploratory study of "Public Procurement Thresholds and Data in Sweden" drawn up by Roman Bobilev, Andrea Guglielmo, Elena Paltseva and Giancarlo Spagnolo and commissioned by Swedish Competition Authority. The report has documented signs of strategic bunching of public buyers at the EU thresholds. In other words, procurement thresholds affect not only the associated transaction costs, but also the strategic behaviour of procuring entities, a point overlooked in the current Swedish debate on public procurement. Media channels Publikt and Upphandling24 have also discussed the research results.

In the policy brief authors provide illustrative histograms of tender values around the relevant thresholds, test for the presence of distribution discontinuity at the threshold and describe their results in detail. Read more about their research results and signs of bunching at the threshold in their policy brief "Public Procurement Thresholds in Sweden" here or read it on our SlideShare channel below.