based procurement records for a sample of 10,319 tenders from the same district-level procuring entities between FY2011-12 and FY2016-17. FY2011-12 serves as the baseline and FY2017-18 as the endline year, by which all three agencies exclusively procured through e-procurement. A survey of 600 procurement officials in the three agencies served to capture their perceptions of the new e-procurement system and to measure management practices. We also surveyed 600 firms that participated in public works contracts of the three agencies across 16 districts, to understand their transaction costs and perceptions about the e- procurement system.

10. Identifying the causal effects of e-procurement is challenging because e-procurement has been introduced and phased in at the discretion of implementing authorities and their choices may be strategic, for example trying to minimize the exposure of corrupt practices. The central identification challenge in our non-experimental setting is that the district-level procuring entities (PE) in our sample had the discretion to choose when and for which tenders to adopt e-procurement. This poses the risk of bias due to i) selfselection of PEs into e-procurement, ii) strategic sorting of tenders into e-procurement within each PE, iii) potential spillovers between electronic and paper-based tenders (for example because officials focus their attention on electronic tenders), and iv) potential learning effects to take place for procuring entities adopting the new system at different speeds. We combine Coarsened Exact Matching with fixed effects regressions in order to approximate causal effects. We run two parallel specifications. First, we match tenders within procuring entities but across years. Second, we match tenders within the same years, but across procuring entities that have similar baseline dependent variable values. In each of these cases, we look at the differences in the dependent variables of tenders least likely to be influenced by spillover effects. Specifically, we compare manual tenders administered by procuring entities that run mainly manual tenders with electronic tenders administered by procuring entities that run mainly electronic tenders.

11. We find overwhelmingly positive impacts of e-procurement on a wide range of outcomes tracked. First, e-procurement improves open and fair access to public tenders as bidder numbers go up, single bidding decreases and non-local firms gain market share. These positive impacts are largely due to effects on the “lower tail”. That is, e-procurement led to large improvements in access for PEs with low access at baseline. Second, e-procurement also improves value for money (i.e. economy) as winning rebates, that is discounts firms offer, increase. This impact results both from increasing the number of bidders and from enabling more intense competition among a given number of bidders. By contrast, we find no robust impact on contract implementation performance, namely on cost and time overruns. Third, e-procurement enhances administrative efficiency, as the total time for processing a tender—from the public call for tenders to contract signature—drops substantially. The time required for every major stage of this process shortens, 4