We study how delivery times and prices for hospital medical devices respond to the introduction of centralized procurement. Our identification strategy leverages a legislative change in Italy that mandated centralized purchases for a sub-set of devices. The statutory centralization generated a...

We suggest an alternative indicator that can lead to price reductions in the public procurement market for goods, i.e., the elasticity of prices to quantities purchased. We apply the analysis to the procurement of medical devices by exploiting a survey from the Italian AntiCorruption Authority....

We explore which start-ups win in public procurement. Most notably, our analysis presents significant differences between firms applying for tenders with and without functional criteria. First, we use representative telephone survey data to estimate public procurement applicant and winner shares...

Public procurement offers sizable market opportunities for young firms. We investigate the firm- and founder-level characteristics determining young firms' decision to apply for public tenders, as well as the procurers' selection of an awardee. We distinguish between observable and unobservable...

Public spending (i.e., “G”) enables governments to fulfill their fiscal policies. This paper takes a micro perspective and quantifies the impact of procurement spending - a specific component of G - on firm survival. We find that firms that receive public contracts survive longer, ceteris...

This paper studies the existence of election cycles in public procurement in the European Union for the national level. We analyze different steps along the procurement process, namely the publication of the contract notice, the awarding of the contract, and the project completion. We point out...

Green public procurement has gained high political priority and is argued to be an effective demand-side policy to trigger environmental innovations. Its implementation usually takes the form of environmental award selection criteria in public procurement tenders. However, there is no direct or...

A well-functioning bureaucracy is a precondition for efficient public goods provision. However, bureaucratic decision-making is still largely seen as a black box. We provide novel insights into the preferences of bureaucrats regarding their work outcomes. We focus on a major public sector...

Does workload constitute a bottleneck to a public agency’s mission, and if so, to what extent? We ask these questions in the context of the US government’s procurement of R&D. We link tender, contract, patent, and office records to the identity of the officer responsible for the procurement...

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...