Three essays on public procurement

The core of thesis lays in quantitative analysis of microeconomic data on public procurement and alternative forms of dealing with public money. It consists of three essays with one common attribute: extensive groundwork with data, including overlaps into legal and technical disciplines. The fist essay examines the relationship between transparency of ownership structure and (i) profits of firms winning public procurement contracts and (ii) competition for the contracts and savings of the public authority. It identifies a significant advantage of firms with opaque ownership structure in terms of access to public money. It concludes with a possible explanation of conflict of interest and corruption, which might channel such advantages. The second essay proposes and tests a novel methodology for benchmarking of contracting authorities. The proposed rating measures a deviation from best practice recommendations in the areas of openness, competition and transparency. Indirectly it measures efficiency and corruption potential in public procurement. The pilot results of the methodology are provided and extensively discussed for a group of Czech municipalities. Third essay investigates issue of crowding out effect potentially introduced by EU funds provision. It studies direct budgetary impacts of..