Suchergebnisse

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AbstractResearch into the detection of fraud and corruption has brought many new insights in recent decades, partly thanks to a decrease in the costs of data collection and processing. However, access to data often remains an issue, especially when fraud or corruption seems to be present. This article applies a simple detection method focussing on possible manipulations in the car registration process in the Czech Republic, where car registration plates are allegedly assigned in random order. As access to official data was denied, we collected data in the field for a random sample of 5,000 cars, and used this to examine the existence of statistical relationships between the cars' estimated price at registration and their registration plate numbers. The results show that cars with intuitively appealing registration plates are on average significantly more expensive than other cars. Moreover, this price difference corresponds to the relative scarcity of the given type of registration plate number, which could be a sign of discretionary behaviour in the allocation of such plates.

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This article focuses on transparency and contract publication in public procurement. Our main objective is to identify statistical associations between situations when a resulting contract is not publicly available and the outcomes of the procurement, esp. efficiency. By merging multiple databases and web scraping, we have created a unique dataset covering nearly 14,000 public procurements in the Czech Republic during the period 2018-2020. This dataset and recent legislation enable us to run empirical tests of new hypotheses, as well as control for variables already established in the empirical literature, such as procurement type, regime and authority. The results of our quantitative econometric models show that for selected types of projects, the unavailability of the contract is associated with smaller price savings as well as with more frequent single bid outcomes. For all types of projects, we found that failure to publish project prices is positively associated with single bid outcomes.