Public-private partnerships (PPPs) are increasingly used to provide infrastructure services. Even though PPPs have the potential to increase efficiency and improve resource allocation, contract renegotiations have been pervasive.
We show that existing accounting standards allow governments to renegotiate PPP contracts and elude spending limits. Our model of renegotiations leads to observable predictions: (i) in a competitive market, firms lowball their offers, expecting to break even through renegotiation, (ii) renegotiations compensate lowballing and pay for additional expenditure, (iii) governments use renegotiation to increase spending and shift the burden of payments to future administrations, and (iv) there are significant renegotiations in the early stages of the contract, e.g. during construction. We use data on Chilean renegotiations of PPP contracts to examine these predictions and find that the evidence is consistent with the predictions of our model. Finally, we show that if PPP investments are counted as current government spending, the incentives to renegotiate contracts to increase spending disappear.
The government contracts with a foreign firm to extract a natural resource that requires an upfront investment and which faces price uncertainty. In states where profits are high, there is a likelihood of expropriation, which generates a social cost that increases with the expropriated value. In this environment, the planner’s optimal contract avoids states with high probability of expropriation. The contract can be implemented via a competitive auction with reasonable informational requirements. The bidding variable is a cap on the present value of discounted revenues, and the firm with the lowest bid wins the contract. The basic framework is extended to incorporate government subsidies, unenforceable investment effort and political moral hazard, and the general thrust of the results described above is preserved.
Public-private partnerships (PPPs) have been justified because they release public funds or save on distortionary taxes. However, the resources saved by a government that does not finance the upfront investment are offset by giving up future revenue flows to the concessionaire. If a PPP can be justified on efficiency grounds, the PPP contract that optimally balances demand risk, userfee distortions and the opportunity cost of public funds has a minimum revenue guarantee and a revenue cap. The optimal contract can be implemented via a competitive auction with reasonable informational requirements. The optimal revenue guarantees, revenue sharing agreements and auction mechanisms are different from those observed in the real world. In particular, the optimal contract duration is shorter in demand states where the revenue cap binds. These results also have implications for budgetary accounting of PPPs, as they show that their fiscal impact resembles that of public provision, rather than privatization.
Keywords: Bundling, Cost of public funds, Demsetz auction, Minimum revenue guarantees, Privatization, Revenue and profit caps, Scope of government, Subsidies
Infrastructure concessions are frequently renegotiated after investments are sunk, resulting in better contractual terms for the franchise holders. This paper offers a political economy explanation for renegotiations that occur with no apparent holdup. We argue that they are used by political incumbents to anticipate infrastructure spending and thereby increase the probability of winning the upcoming election.
Contract renegotiations allow administrations to replicate the effects of issuing debt. Yet debt issues are incorporated in the budget, must be approved by Congress and are therefore subject to the opposition’s review. By contrast, under current accounting standards the obligations created by renegotiations circumvent the budgetary process in most countries. Hence, renegotiations allow incumbents to spend more without being subject to Congressional oversight.
A principal, who wants prices to be as low as possible, contracts with agents who would like to charge the monopoly price. The principal chooses between a Demsetz auction, which awards an exclusive contract to the agent bidding the lowest price (competition for the field) and having two agents provide the good under (imperfectly) competitive conditions (competition in the field). We obtain a simple sufficient condition showing unambiguously which option is best. The condition depends only on the shapes of the surplus function of the principal and the profit function of agents, and is independent of the particular duopoly game played ex post. We apply this condition to three canonical examples — procurement, royalty contracts and dealerships — and find that whenever marginal revenue for the final good is decreasing in the quantity sold, the principal prefers a Demsetz auction. Moreover, a planner who wants to maximize social surplus also prefers a Demsetz auction.
Keywords: Demsetz auction, Double marginalization, Franchising, Joint vs. separate auctions, Monopoly, Procurement, Dealerships, Royalty contracts
Regulating seaports is difficult in general, even more so for the weak regulatory institutions common in developing countries. For this reason some countries have awarded these facilities via Demsetz auctions, to the port operator that bids the lowest cargo-handling fee. A major concern with Demsetz auctions in this context, is that the winning operator may integrate with a shipper and monopolize the shipping market, by worsening the service quality for competing shippers. The standard policy recommendation against service quality discrimination is to ban the seaport from operating in the shipping market. The effectiveness of such prohibitions is suspect, however, because they can be circumvented by an (illegal) underhand agreement between the port operator and the shipper. In this paper we show that a ban on integration increases welfare if it is combined with a (sufficiently high) floor on the cargo-handling fee that operators can bid in the auction. In the absence of such a floor, however, a Demsetz auction is worse than no regulation at all of the bottleneck monopoly. Our results apply beyond the port and shipping markets, to any essential facility that can monopolize a downstream market. The results only require that profits with underhand vertical integration agreements be less than with legal vertical integration.
Keywords: Auctions, ex ante vs. ex post rents, Demsetz auctions, hidden action, monopoly regulation, productive efficiency, vertical integration
It has become increasingly common to allocate highway franchises to the bidder that offers to charge the lowest toll. Often, building a highway increases the value of land held by a small group of developers, an effect that is more pronounced with lower tolls. We study the welfare implications of highway franchises that benefit large developers, focusing on the incentives developers have to internalize the effect of the toll they bid on the value of their land. We study how participation by developers in the auction affects equilibrium tolls and welfare. We find that large developers bid more aggressively than construction companies that own no land. As long as land ownership is sufficiently concentrated, allowing developers in the auction leads to lower tolls and higher welfare. Moreover, collusion among developers is socially desirable. We also analyze the case when the franchise holder can charge lower tolls to those buying her land (‘toll discrimination’). Relative to uniform tolls, discrimination decreases welfare when land is highly concentrated, but increases welfare otherwise. Finally, we consider the welfare implications of subsidies and bonuses for proposing new highway projects.
Keywords: Demsetz auctions, highway concessions, private participation in infrastructure