Do Transnational Digital Infrastructures Deliver Equally? Evidence from Erasmus Without Paper (EWP) Student Mobility Workflows

Transnational digital infrastructures are increasingly deployed to standardise and steer cross-border public services in Europe, yet their effectiveness—and equity—remain under-examined. This paper evaluates the Erasmus Without Paper (EWP) initiative, a European Commission–backed digital interoperability network that enables higher education institutions (HEIs) participating in Erasmus+ to exchange student mobility data via standardised workflows. Framed as part of the European Student Card Initiative, EWP aims to replace paper- and email-based processes with secure, efficient, and interoperable systems. Yet whether and how this infrastructure improves administrative performance, and for whom, remains an open question. We build a multi-level dataset linking monthly operational logs for 1,401 HEIs across 2023–2025 (48,495 HEI-month observations) to institutional baselines and national digital government capacity indicators. We conceptualise EWP implementation not as binary adoption, but as sustained operational engagement—measured through workflow-level activity logs over time. To assess effects while limiting measurement circularity, we construct a leave-one-out index of operational intensity. We estimate two-way fixed-effects models with cumulative and lagged exposure specifications, and explore mechanisms via institutional heterogeneity and cross-level interactions. Three key findings emerge. First, sustained engagement is associated with improved administrative performance, but the effects are both dynamic and workflow-specific. Outgoing learning agreement completion improves robustly, while incoming agreement approvals improve more slowly and become most evident under longer exposure windows. Second, national digital government capacity consistently amplifies performance gains—particularly for outgoing workflows—highlighting institutional complementarities between EU-level infrastructure and domestic state capacity. Third, and critically, performance gains are unequally distributed. The same standardised infrastructure yields divergent outcomes, shaped by organisational capabilities and programme structures. Agreement-processing improvements concentrate among larger, public, research-oriented, and mobility-embedded HEIs, while incoming completion gains are more pronounced in institutions with high STEM shares and deep Erasmus+ integration. Pre-2023 internationalisation levels further predict post-2023 intensive use and gains, suggesting institutional selection into high-performance trajectories. These findings speak to broader debates on digital governance and European integration. They suggest that transnational digital infrastructures can deliver measurable performance improvements—but only when embedded in enabling contexts and sustained institutional engagement. Moreover, effectiveness cannot be separated from distribution: standardisation does not produce uniformity. Rather, digital reforms can inadvertently reinforce existing asymmetries in organisational capacity and cross-national infrastructure readiness. By focusing on both performance and mechanisms, this paper contributes to understanding how EU-level digitalisation agendas interact with national capacities and institutional path dependencies. It calls for a more differentiated approach to transnational digital policy, one that foregrounds not only success metrics but also their distributional consequences across the European Higher Education Area.