Bid preferences in procurement auctions allow firms from an identifiable group an advantage in bidding against unfavored firms. While economic efficiency is expected to fall as a result of bid preferences, government procurement costs may either increase or decrease depending on the competitive response of favored and unfavored firms. This paper uses data from California auctions for road construction contracts, where small businesses receive a five percent bid preference in auctions for projects using only state funds and no preferential treatment on projects using federal aid. I show that while firms' bidding behavior matches theoretical predictions, procurement costs are 3.8 percent higher on auctions using preferences. The higher procurement cost in preference auctions is attributed to reduced participation by lower cost large firms.Structural estimates of latent firm costs are then used to evaluate how efficiency and the division of surplus between firms and the government are impacted by bid preferences. Firm profits are 3.1 percent lower under bid preferences, however this is overwhelmed by the efficiency loss due to reduced large firm participation. The efficiency loss conditional on firm participation is estimated to represent around 0.1 percent of overall procurement costs. Including the adverse effect of preferences on the participation of large firms increases the estimated efficiency loss to 3.6 percent, which represents 27 cents for each additional dollar awarded to small businesses through the program. Counterfactual simulations indicate that if participation were instead inelastic to bid preferences, the 5 percent bid preference would be close to the optimal level. JEL Classification: H11, H4, H57, D44 * I would like to thank

This paper evaluates the impacts of new housing developments funded with the Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC), the largest federal project based housing program in the U.S., on the neighborhoods in which they are built. A discontinuity in the formula determining the magnitude of tax credits as a function of neighborhood characteristics generates pseudo-random assignment in the number of low income housing units built in similar sets of census tracts. Tracts where projects are awarded 30 percent higher tax credits receive approximately six more low income housing units on a base of seven units per tract. These additional new low income developments cause homeowner turnover to rise, raise property values in declining areas and reduce incomes in gentrifying areas in neighborhoods near the 30th percentile of the income distribution. LIHTC units significantly crowd out nearby new rental construction in gentrifying areas but do not displace new construction in stable or declining areas.

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We empirically examine the impact of relationships between contractors and subcontractors on firm pricing and entry decisions in the California highway procurement market using data from auctions conducted by the California Department of Transportation. Relationships in this market are valuable if they mitigate potential hold-up problems and incentives for ex post renegotiation arising from contractual incompleteness. An important characteristic of informal contracts is that they must be self-enforcing, so the value of relationships between firms and suppliers depend on the extent of possibilities for future interaction. We construct measures of the stock of contractors' prior interactions with relevant subcontractors and, most importantly, an exogenous instrument to measure the future value of ongoing relationships that is orthogonal to contractor-subcontractor match-specific productivity. We find that a larger stock of relationships leads to a greater likelihood of entry and to lower bids. Importantly, this relationship does not hold in periods of time and areas with little future contract volume, suggesting that the value of the future is crucial in providing value for informal contracts.

In simple models of taxation, the incidence of a tax is independent of the side of the market which is responsible for remitting the tax to the government. However, this prediction does not survive when the ability to evade taxes differs across economic agents. In this paper, we estimate in the context of state diesel fuel taxes how the incidence of a quantity tax depends on the point of tax collection, where the level of the supply chain responsible for remitting the tax varies across states and over time. Our results reject the proposition that the point of collection is irrelevant to incidence -moving the point of tax collection from the retail station to higher in the supply chain substantially raises the pass-through of diesel taxes to the retail price. Furthermore, tax revenues respond positively to collecting taxes from the distributor or prime supplier rather than from the retailer, suggesting that evasion is the likely explanation for the incidence result. JEL: H22, H26, H71 Keywords: tax incidence, evasion, diesel fuelThe independence between statutory and economic incidence of a tax is a wellknown and widely accepted result in the theory of taxation. The textbook presentation of the theory of tax incidence holds that the party responsible for remitting the tax to the government has no impact on who actually bears the burden, at least in the long run. Despite its prominent treatment, this result holds only under special circumstances. The primary contribution of this paper is to illustrate a new way in which the independence of economic incidence from the remittance regime may break down. If parties differ in their ability to evade taxes, the identity of the tax remitter may impact the pattern of post-tax prices and therefore the location of their burden. Due to different evasion technologies available to the different sides of a market, a tax levied on the demand side may shift the demand curve to a different degree than a similar tax levied on supply side would shift the supply curve.