Working Papers
`Political Opposition, Legislative Oversight and the Performance of the Executive Branch' 2020. with Carlos Varjao
Featured on the Global Anticorruption Blog
Abstract: The separation of powers between the executive and legislative branches is a cornerstone of democracy. This system of checks and balances, however, can be circumvented by partisan loyalties if legislators strategically avoid exerting oversight when their own party controls the executive branch. It is thus an empirical question whether the separation of powers prevents the abuse of power in practice. We answer this question by measuring the extent to which members of political opposition parties in a city council effectively check the mayor's performance in Brazil. We employ a regression discontinuity design to estimate the causal effect of an additional politically opposed legislator, and we find that political opposition increases oversight action and decreases corruption, with the effect fully concentrated on mayors facing reelection pressure. We trace the impact of oversight, via a reduction in healthcare spending irregularities, all the way to impacts on healthcare service delivery and health outcomes.
'Decomposing the Urban Wage Premium in Brazil: Firms, Matching, and Compensating Wage Differentials' 2021.
Abstract: What contributes to the high wage premium observed in cities? In this paper I used detailed employer-employee matched data from Brazil to understand 3 important elements of the urban wage premium: (1) the role of firm sorting into cities, (2) the role of firm and occupational matching in creating agglomeration economies, and (3) the role of compensating wage differentials. I first exploit identification from multi-city firms to show that positive selection of high-wage firms into larger cities accounts for 44% of what is often considered `agglomeration economies'. Then I show that improved firm and occupational matching together account for 87% of agglomeration effects. I then turn my attention to compensating wage differentials--- a possible explanation for the high-wage firms in cities. I estimate revealed-preference valuation of jobs, and show that jobs in cities in fact have better non-wage characteristics, and so high urban wages cannot be due to compensating wage differentials. This evidence together suggests that in Brazil, cities exist because they provide thick labor markets where high-wage firms and high-wage workers can go to find productive matches.
'Teachers in Politics: Teacher-Politicians, Gender, and the Representation of Public Education' 2019.
Abstract: What happens to public education in a city when a school teacher is elected to the city council? It depends on the gender of the teacher. Using an RD design that exploits close elections, I find that when a female teacher is elected to the city council, the city hires both more teachers and more qualified teachers, and pays them more. Having a female teacher on the city council also increases the likelihood that the city's schools have necessary teaching resources, books, and financing, and possibly increases student test scores. No significant effect is found for male teachers elected to the city council. This difference may be due to different political career concerns for men versus women, a simple amplification of existing gender policy preference differences, or some mixture of the two.
Refereed Journal Publications
`Testing Stability of Regression Discontinuity Models.' Advances in Econometrics 38 (2017). with Giovanni Cerulli, Yingying Dong, and Arthur Lewbel
Abstract: Regression discontinuity (RD) models are commonly used to nonparametrically identify and estimate a local average treatment effect. Dong and Lewbel (2015) show how a derivative of this effect, called treatment effect derivative (TED) can be estimated. We argue here that TED should be employed in most RD applications, as a way to assess the stability and hence external validity of RD estimates. Closely related to TED, we define the complier probability derivative (CPD). Just as TED measures stability of the treatment effect, the CPD measures stability of the complier population in fuzzy designs. TED and CPD are numerically trivial to estimate. We provide relevant Stata code, and apply it to some real datasets.
Work in Progress
'Corruption and the Call to Public Service'
‘Crime and the Labor Market in Medellin’ with Gaurav Khanna, Carlos Medina, Anant Nyshadham, and Jorge Tamayo