We use data from highway procurement auctions subject to California's Small Business Preference program to study the effect of bid preferences on auction outcomes. Our analysis is based on an estimated model of firms' bidding and participation decisions, which allows us to evaluate the effects of current and alternative policy designs. We show that incorporating participation responses significantly alters the assessment of preferential treatment policies.

We estimate a spatial model of liquor demand to analyze the impact of government-controlled retailing on entry patterns. In the absence of the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board, the state would have roughly 2.5 times the current number of stores, higher consumer surplus, and lower payments to liquor store employees. With just over half the number of stores that would maximize welfare, the government system is instead best rationalized as profit maximization with profit sharing. Government operation mitigates, but does not eliminate, free entry's bias against rural consumers. We find only limited evidence of political influence on entry.

We explore the implications of ownership concentration for the recently concluded incentive auction that repurposed spectrum from broadcast TV to mobile broadband usage in the United States. We document significant multilicense ownership of TV stations. We show that in the reverse auction, in which TV stations bid to relinquish their licenses, multilicense owners have an incentive to withhold some TV stations to drive up prices for their remaining TV stations. Using a large-scale valuation and simulation exercise, we find that this strategic supply reduction increases payouts to TV stations by between 13.5 percent and 42.4 percent. (D44, D47, H82, L13, L82, L88)