Decentralization and Public Procurement Performance: New Evidence from Italy

We exploit a new dataset based on EU procurement award notices to investigate the relationship between the degree of centralization of public procurement and its performance. We focus on the case of Italy, where all levels of government, along with a number of other public institutions, are involved in procurement and are subject to the same EU regulation. We find that i) municipalities and utilities, which currently award the largest shares of contracts, perform worse than all other institutional categories; and ii) decentralization implies lower performance only when it comes with weak competences of procurement officials. The evidence seems to suggests that a re-organization of the procurement system, both in terms of partial centralization and better professionalization of procurement officials, would help improve overall procurement performance

Positive trend inflation and determinacy in a medium-sized New Keynesian model

This paper studies the challenge that increasing the inflation target poses to equilibrium determinacy in a mediumsized New Keynesian model without indexation fitted to the Great Moderation era. For moderate targets of the inflation rate, such as 2 or 4 percent, the probability of determinacy is near one conditional on the monetary policy rule of the estimated model. However, this probability drops significantly conditional on model-free estimates of the monetary policy rule based on real-time data. The difference is driven by the larger response of the federal funds rate to the output gap associated with the latter estimates

Recombinant Adenoviral Gene Transfer Does Not Affect Cardiac Allograft Vasculopathy

Background: Adenovirus serotype 5 has remained the pre-eminent vector in pre-clinical gene therapy applications in cardiac transplantation. Concerns over the potential effects of adenoviral vectors on the later development of cardiac allograft vasculopathy (CAV) are addressed in this study. Methods: Hearts (n = 22) harvested from Brown Norway rats were perfused ex vivo with either University of Wisconsin (UW) solution with no virus, Ad-CMV-LacZ or Ad-CMV-Null. Donor hearts were transplanted heterotopically into the abdomen of Lewis rats. All recipients received cyclosporine for the duration of the experiment. Transplanted hearts were recovered for analysis at 120 days. Sections of the heart were stained with elastic-van Gieson stain for morphometric analysis of the vessels to ascertain the degree of vascular luminal occlusion. Hematoxylin-eosin staining facilitated diagnosis of chronic rejection. Results: Seventy-seven percent of transplanted hearts showed signs of chronic rejection with no difference in the proportion of animals between groups (p = 0.797). No difference was noted in the degree of vascular luminal occlusion between the Ad-Null (0.57 \ub1 0.22), Ad-LacZ (0.62 \ub1 0.19) and UW (0.47 \ub1 0.29) groups (p = 0.653). Conclusions: Vascularized cardiac allografts transplanted from Brown Norway to Lewis rats demonstrated cardiac allograft vasculopathy CAV at 120 days. Adenoviral perfusion of the donor heart ex vivo did not affect the development of CAV. \ua9 2007 International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation