The home bias in procurement. Cross-border procurement of medical supplies during the Covid-19 pandemic.
利用新冠疫情冲击，研究危机紧迫性和买方自由裁量权对公共采购本土偏好的影响，发现本土偏好并非不可避免，危机和放松管制显著增加了跨境采购。
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.