Working Papers¶
Sourcing under Sanctions: Judicial Urgency and Pharmaceutical Procurement Costs¶
with Paulo Furquim de Azevedo (updated May, 2026 — v10, JPubE short paper) | PDF | Online Appendix
Abstract
Court mandates secure access to medicines, but they can also change how governments buy. We study São Paulo pharmaceutical procurement on BEC, covering 479,330 purchase-offer-item observations from 2009--2019. Higher prices under legal urgency can reflect two very different margins: incumbent suppliers charging more to sanctioned buyers, or fragmented sourcing that changes scale and supplier matching. Because court orders originate outside procurement offices, we interpret ordinary-versus-urgent estimates as the procurement effect of externally imposed legal urgency, conditional on item, time, and purchasing-unit fixed effects. A selected administrative urgent channel provides the closest feasible comparison without court sanctions; Lee bounds place the litigated-over-administrative price gap between 15.9% and 21.1%. The cost margin is not mainly a broad same-firm markup in deep repeated urgent markets: within the same firm, buyer, and item, prices are statistically indistinguishable across urgent regimes. Instead, judicial urgency operates through sourcing. Administrative orders are 3.3 times larger, and modal winners differ in 70.2% of item-buyer pairs. A residual within-firm price gap persists in thinner or earlier markets. The policy margin is not weaker access, but procurement capacity that preserves aggregation and supplier matching under legal urgency.
Media coverage
The Price of Exclusion: SME Set-Asides in Public Procurement¶
(updated May, 2026 — JPubE submission) | PDF | Online appendix | Highlights | Cover letter
Abstract
Set-asides expand SME access to public procurement by removing rival bidders from the auction. This paper shows that, when the excluded bidders are the price-forming ones, the policy replaces competition with eligibility at high static cost. I study São Paulo's centralized electronic procurement platform, where a legal reinterpretation expanded SME-only tendering into medical and hospital supplies. The platform's reverse auctions record drop-out prices that, under the maintained independent-private-values clock interpretation, reveal type-specific willingness to supply. I use these exits to decompose the set-aside price effect into lost competitive discipline from excluding non-SMEs and a protected-pool offset from the post-policy SME pool. In standardized non-pharmaceutical procurement, the protected pool responds but does not replace the excluded discipline: the full set-aside generates a static welfare loss of 28.9 percent of the open-regime price at \(\lambda = 0.30\). Pharmaceutical procurement exhibits larger but more model-sensitive losses. A 10 percent SME price preference, simulated as a static design benchmark, keeps non-SMEs in the auction at near-zero price cost in standardized markets, but delivers less redistribution than full exclusion. The relevant frontier is therefore not SME support versus no support; it runs between exclusionary redistribution and support that preserves the price-forming bidder pool.
Media coverage
Cheap Signals, Costly Proof: Award-Layer Evidence Triage in Cartel Enforcement¶
with Paulo Furquim de Azevedo (updated May, 2026 — JLEO submission-clean version) | PDF | Online appendix
Abstract
Cartel enforcement begins before legal proof exists. Agencies often observe contract-award records long before they recover the bid-level evidence needed to prove coordination. This paper asks whether that cheap award layer can allocate costly forensic attention. Using São Paulo's BEC procurement platform (2009--2019) and CADE adjudications, we construct a frequent-loser screen from award records alone: among zero-win firms, persistent participation ranks loser-side cartel-adjacency risk. The screen targets forensic priority, not cartel membership. We validate the ranking against adjudication-anchored cobidder labels, discipline it with participation and opportunity-set exposure audits, timing and leakage checks, and direct-defendant scope checks, and compare it with bid-distribution forensics on the same target. Used sequentially, the award-layer ranking reduces the bid-microdata pool for the forensic stage by 83% while recovering 131 of 193 adjudicated cobidders.