Tuesday, 1pm (GMT), EBRD HQ, London
The Office of the Chief Economist at the EBRD organizes the OCE Research Seminars in Economics & Finance. We invite top researchers from around the world to present their work in a one-hour academic format. The seminar is open to all EBRD staff as well as external researchers. The seminars will also be streamed online.
Contacts: if you want to present at or attend our weekly seminar series, please email us at loiaconf@ebrd.com (Francesco), coellif@ebrd.com (Federica) or benvenie@ebrd.com (Elia)
Upcoming seminar
10/10/2026
Marta Santamaria (Warwick)
"The US State Procurement War"
Abstract
Nearly all U.S. states have some form of buy-local policy favouring local firms when procuring goods and services, such as bid preferences that treat local bids as cheaper than they are, favourable tie-break rules, or reciprocity provisions. This paper studies how buy local policies shape inter-state trade and welfare in the United States. Using transaction-level data on state government procurement from several states, merged with federal procurement records from USAspending, we confirm a considerable local-bias in state purchases. State agencies buy much more locally than federal agencies purchasing in the same state in all sectors. In gravity regressions, the ratio of non-local to local purchases by state buyers is 21 to 95 percent lower than that of federal buyers. To understand the trade-offs a state faces when choosing its buy-local policy, we extend a standard multi-region trade model with private and public final-good producers, and state governments that perceive local varieties as cheaper than they are. The optimal policy depends on the size of the state government's import share relative to the private sector, and on the leakage of the policy to the private sector. We use the model to analyse the cost of these policies. We find that, absent retaliation, the optimal buy-local policy raises private consumption at the expense of public good provision, with modest welfare gains. Given observed retaliation, the optimal policy is close to zero. Removing all buy-local policies would raise welfare by about 0.14 percent on average in the states that currently use them, and lower it by about 0.02 percent in those that do not.
Schedule for 2026
03/02/26, Claude Raisaro (Geneva Graduate Institute): "Hidden Discrimination in Frictional Labor Markets"
03/03/26, Feodora Teti (Ifo and European Central Bank): "Missing Tariffs"
14/04/26, Francesco D’Acunto (Georgetown University): "Subjective Expectations and Financial Intermediation"
05/05/26, Edoardo Teso (Bocconi University): "State Capacity as an Organizational Problem"
19/05/26, Andrey Tkachenko (Nazarbayev University): "Language Affinity, Russian Media and Sanctions Evasion"
30/06/2026, Pauline Grosjean (UNSW Sydney): "HeforShe: Bargaining Power, Parental Beliefs, and Parental Speech Investments"
29/09/2026, Ebehi Iyoha: "Production Network Spillovers from EU Funded R&D Grants" (Harvard Business School)
13/10/26, Marta Santamaria (Warwick)
3/11/2026, Ieda Matavelli (Monash)
1/12/26, Christoph Albert (University of Turin & Collegio Carlo Alberto)
8/12/26, Martin Aragonenses (INSEAD)
Organizers: Francesco Loiacono, Federica Coelli, Elia Benveniste