The Effect of the 2014 EU Public Procurement Directives on Tender Outcomes

Sammanfattning: The EU procurement directives of 2014 aimed to improve transparency through increased electronic bidding, to liberalize the international procurement market by removing 'buy local' policies, and to increase competition and international participation in procurement, leading to an overall more efficient public procurement process. One of the implicit channels through which they hoped to achieve higher efficiency is through the number of bidders (the 'competition effect' in auction theory). Using a differences-in-differences framework with interacted fixed effects, this paper analyzes whether the 2014 EU directives, which were supposed to be translated into national laws by April 2016, had the intended effect on competitive auction procedure usage, number of bidders, cross-border procurement, and market concentration. Furthermore, in addition to the fixed effects estimation within the DD framework, I apply a Lasso-type method of variable selection that has been shown to provide uniform inference. I do not find statistically significant results on the likelihood that a contract is tendered under the most open procedure or on the likelihood of an international bidder winning. I do find a statistically significant positive effect on the likelihood a tender is modified ex-post (in line with literature) and a negative effect on numbers of bidders.