We study the effects of parental job loss on children and how access to unemployment benefits can mitigate these impacts. We leverage unique nationwide data from Brazil linking multiple administrative datasets, and take a comprehensive approach studying impacts on education as well as other key dimensions of children’s lives. First, leveraging mass layoffs for identification, we show that parental job loss increases school dropouts and age-grade distortion by up to 1.5 percentage points. These effects are pervasive, last for at least six years and significantly reduce high school completion rates. Second, we document that other important dimensions of children’s lives are affected. Following the layoff, children are more likely to work informally, commit crime, and experience early pregnancy. In turn, parents reduce educational investments by moving children from private to lower-quality public schools. Using a clean regression discontinuity design, we show that access to unemployment benefits effectively mitigates some of the intergenerational impacts of job loss, notably on teenage school dropouts and crime, and on parental investments in school quality. Our findings indicate that the income losses following parental displacement are an important mechanism of the effects on children, highlighting the importance of policies that provide income support for displaced workers.

This paper studies how looser municipal campaign spending caps in Brazil affect the allocation of public-sector jobs to campaign donors. Identification combines a reform that introduced municipality-specific ceilings, generating a discontinuity in allowed expenditures, with close elections that quasi-randomly assign mayors. Linking electoral alliances, records on roughly 140,000 donors, and administrative labor-market data, I estimate the reform’s impact on donors’ post-election hiring. Financial supporters of elected candidates in municipalities with looser caps are 33% more likely to enter public employment. New appointments concentrate in low-skill positions, favor non-ideological donors, and are especially prevalent under term-limited mayors, suggesting the use of discretionary posts as a quid pro quo tool.

This paper examines how reduced individual influence leads politicians to use public-sector employment as a compensatory instrument. Identification exploits a Brazilian reform imposing population-based ceilings on municipal council size, generating quasi-experimental variation in political leverage. I combine electoral records for city councilors, campaign donation data on roughly 200,000 individuals, and matched administrative labor-market records. Reduced influence raises the likelihood that campaign supporters obtain public-sector jobs by about 26%. These gains concentrate in managerial and supervisory positions, include upward reallocation of already employed insiders, and are associated with lower education and greater skill and pay mismatchs. The results show that public employment operates as a personnel-based distributive instrument, through which politicians offset diminished influence, with consequences for bureaucratic quality and governance.

This paper studies whether female political leadership reshapes bureaucratic gender composition through gendered access within campaign donor networks. I exploit close mayoral elections in Brazil between male and female candidates and link election outcomes to individual-level campaign donations and administrative employment records covering the universe of public sector workers. I find that when a female candidate narrowly wins, public-sector entry rises for both genders, but the effect is substantially larger for women: female donors experience a 22% increase, compared with a 15% increase for male donors. These gains are concentrated in discretionary and senior managerial positions, while no comparable effects arise following male candidate victories. The findings identify discretionary hiring as a key channel through which women's electoral representation reshapes gender equity and authority within public administrations.