Practitioners and scholars of public administration currently seem to have overcome comprehensive reform strategies and are focusing their attention on minor changes in public administration that generate short-term outcomes with lower transactional costs. In that sense, many have argued that...

To what extent does a more competent public bureaucracy contribute to better economic outcomes? We address this question in the context of the US federal procurement of services and works, by combining contract-level data on procurement performance and bureau-level data on competence and...