publications
2026
- Quality of Public Projects and Procurement Officers Value AddedMarly Celis Galvez, Michal Šoltés , Vitezslav Titl , and 1 more author2026
Public procurement tenders are governed by complex regulations, yet procurement officers retain substantial discretion. How they exercise this discretion can influence both procurement efficiency and the quality of delivered projects. Using the universe of public procurement tenders in the Czech Republic, we estimate procurement officers’ value added to project quality, measured by the need for subsequent repair contracts. We find that moving from the 10th to the 90th percentile of the value-added distribution is associated with a 4.5 percent reduction in expected repair costs. This corresponds to a reduction in 5-year expected repair costs of CZK 520,000 (EUR 21,000) for a median-size contract and CZK 2.1 million (EUR 86,000) for a mean-size contract. We further show that officers with legal education, and those who are more engaged with developments in public procurement legislation, tend to underperform, resulting in higher subsequent repair costs.
- Competition, Entry, and Firm Dynamics in Public ProcurementMarly Celis Galvez2026
This paper studies how entry into public procurement markets affects firms’ financial performance. I implement an event-study design that exploits variation in entry timing by assembling a firm-year panel that combines administrative Dutch public procurement contract data with firm-level balance sheet information. I estimate dynamic post-entry changes for general entry events (first contract) and competitive entry events (first contract in an open tender with more than two competitors). General entry is associated with asset growth and higher liabilities, while liquidity declines. In contrast, gains from competitive entry are weaker and less persistent. Firm heterogeneity analysis suggests that established firms sustain improvements, capacity-constrained firms display limited persistence, and short-term participants experience only temporary gains. I discuss two mechanisms. First, short-term participants engage in aggressive underbidding consistent with winner’s-curse dynamics and learning-by-doing. Second, entrants sort into tenders with fewer bidders, suggesting information frictions. The results suggest that firm’s capabilities may play a role in leveraging public demand into firm growth.
2024
- Discretion and political favoritism: Evidence from two reforms in public procurementMarly Celis Galvez, Vitezslav Titl , and Fredo SchotanusSouthern Economic Journal, 2024
The misuse of bureaucratic discretion in public procurement risks political favoritism and corruption. Discretionary thresholds regulate this, with lenient rules below and strict oversight above these thresholds. We examine the impact of changes in these thresholds in the Czech Republic in 2012 and 2016 on discretion misuse and market competition, using bunching estimators, regression discontinuity, and comprehensive data on construction contracts, political ties, and firm productivity. Our findings show a concentration of contracts just below thresholds, both pre and post-reforms. Reforms reallocating contract values to new thresholds reveal that limiting discretion lowers final contract prices, indicating increased efficiency. However, when discretion increases, final prices are unaffected. Efficiency gains are not seen in contracts awarded to politically connected firms, suggesting that political favoritism hinders market outcome improvements from stricter regulations.