TY - JOUR AU - Lewis-Faupel, Sean AU - Neggers, Yusuf AU - Olken, Benjamin A AU - Pande, Rohini TI - Can Electronic Procurement Improve Infrastructure Provision? Evidence From Public Works in India and Indonesia JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 20344 PY - 2014 Y2 - July 2014 DO - 10.3386/w20344 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w20344 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w20344.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Sean Lewis-Faupel Office of the Comptroller of the Currency 400 7th Street SW Washington, DC 20219 E-Mail: sean.lewisfaupel@occ.treas.gov Yusuf Neggers 315 2nd Street Apt 302 Ann Arbor, MI 48103 E-Mail: yneggers@umich.edu Benjamin A. Olken Department of Economics, E52-542 MIT 77 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02139 Tel: 617/588-1437 Fax: 617/868-2742 E-Mail: bolken@mit.edu Rohini Pande Yale University Department of Economics 27 Hillhouse Avenue New Haven, CT 06520 Tel: 617-384-5267 Fax: 617-496-8753 E-Mail: rohini.pande@yale.edu AB - Poorly functioning, and often corrupt, public procurement procedures are widely faulted for the low quality of infrastructure provision in developing countries. Can electronic procurement (e-procurement), which reduces both the cost of acquiring tender information and personal interaction between bidders and procurement officials, ameliorate these problems? In this paper we develop a unique micro-dataset on public works procurement from two fast-growing economies, India and Indonesia, and use regional and time variation in the adoption of e-procurement across both countries to examine its impact. We find no evidence that e-procurement reduces prices paid by the government, but do find that it is associated with quality improvements. In India, where we observe an independent measure of construction quality, e-procurement improves the average road quality, and in Indonesia, e-procurement reduces delays in completion of public works projects. Bidding data suggests that an important channel of influence is selection -- regions with e-procurement have a broader distribution of winners, with (better) winning bidders more likely to come from outside the region where the work takes place. On net, the results suggest that e-procurement facilitates entry from higher quality contractors. ER -