Camille Naudy

Abstract

Public investment in education is typically studied through aggregate spending or school finance reforms, with limited attention to the administrative channels through which these investments are implemented. In many education systems, however, local governments play a central role in translating public resources into material learning conditions through public procurement. This paper examines whether education-related municipal procurement affects student outcomes in France. While curricula and teachers are centrally managed by the national government, municipalities are responsible for primary school infrastructure, equipment, and services, most of which are delivered through procurement contracts. We combine the BeauAMP database of public contracts (2015–2023) with administrative data on standardized test scores at entry into lower secondary school (2017–2024) to construct a municipality-level panel. Using staggered difference-in-differences estimators robust to heterogeneous treatment timing, we analyze the dynamic effects of procurement activity on student performance. The results provide limited evidence that education-related procurement leads to improvements in average test scores. While some specifications suggest negative effects, these estimates are sensitive to the choice of estimator and are not consistently robust across specifications. By contrast, we document a clear and robust increase in the number of students taking standardized tests following procurement activity. This suggests that procurement primarily affects school capacity or the attractiveness of local schooling rather than measured learning outcomes. Additional heterogeneity analyses reveal that the negative score effects are concentrated among urban municipalities, while fiscal capacity strongly predicts procurement participation but does not systematically moderate its effects on learning outcomes. Taken together, these findings highlight the importance of distinguishing between different channels through which public investment affects education systems. They suggest that municipal procurement plays a role in shaping access to schooling and enrollment dynamics, while its short-run impact on measured academic performance remains uncertain