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...

Economics and innovation scholars have long recognized the potential of public procurement to trigger innovation. To what extent has this potential been realized so far? What can be done to improve the performance of PPI in this regard? This paper addresses these issues by providing a literature...