The home bias in procurement. Cross-border procurement of medical supplies during the Covid-19 pandemic

Philip Hanspach

International Journal of Industrial Organization, 2023, vol. 89, issue C

Abstract: Public procurement markets are often national despite a general agreement against national preferencing. I exploit shocks occurring during the Covid-19 pandemic to two important factors, crisis urgency, measured through local infection rates, and increased buyer discretion, to study home bias in public procurement. Two causal difference-in-difference analyses on novel data for medical supplies in Europe show that home bias is not inevitable. An increase in local infection rates by one standard deviation locally increases the share of cross-border procurement by 19.3 percentage points over a baseline of 1.5 percent. Also, deregulation that allowed for buyer discretion caused cross-border procurement to increase by more than 35 percentage points. A simple theoretical model systematizes these findings.

Keywords: Public procurement; Home bias; Regulation; Difference-in-differences; Covid-19 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H12 H57 L51 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:indorg:v:89:y:2023:i:c:s0167718723000577

DOI: 10.1016/j.ijindorg.2023.102976

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