Publications

• Money and Politics: Estimating the Effects of Campaign Spending Limits on Political Entry and Competition (with Claudio Ferraz, Frederico Finan and Carlos Varjão), American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 2022. 

This paper studies the effects of campaign spending limits on political entry and competition. We study a reform in Brazil that imposed limits on campaign spending for mayoral elections. These limits were implemented with a discontinuous kink that we exploit for causal identification. We find that stricter limits increase political competition by creating a larger pool of candidates that is on average less wealthy. Stricter spending limits also reduce the likelihood that mayors are reelected. We interpret our reduced-form findings using a contest model with endogenous entry of candidates.

• Do Government Audits Reduce Corruption? Estimating the Impacts of Exposing Corrupt Politicians (with Claudio Ferraz and Frederico Finan), Journal of Political Economy, 2018.

This paper examines the extent to which government audits of public resources can reduce corruption by enhancing political and judiciary accountability. We do so in the context of Brazil’s anticorruption program, which randomly audits municipalities for their use of federal funds. We find that being audited in the past reduces future corruption by 8 percent, while also increasing the likelihood of experiencing a subsequent legal action by 20 percent. We interpret these reduced-form findings through a political agency model, which we structurally estimate. Our results suggest that the reduction in corruption comes mostly from the audits increasing the perceived nonelectoral costs of engaging in corruption. 

Working Papers

• Beyond the Early Era of EVs: Evidence from the Staggered Rollout of the HOV Lane Network in California (with Jing Li and Katalin Springel).

Local policies like high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) lane exemptions play an important role in encouraging electric vehicle (EV) adoption, a key component of climate programs. Using tract-level vehicle registrations and detailed data on HOV lane openings from 2012 to 2024, we study the causal effect of HOV policies on EV adoption in California. We find that HOV exemptions significantly increased EV uptake, with effects that were stronger in later years as EV technology and markets advanced. The impact is also greater in more congested areas with longer commutes and concentrated in higher-income tracts, highlighting both the effectiveness and distributional implications of HOV incentives.

• Interest Groups, Campaign Finance and Policy Influence: Evidence from the U.S. Congress.

Do special interest groups use campaign contributions to buy influence from politicians? In this paper, I develop and structurally estimate a model which integrates interest group competition for influence and the spatial theory of voting. In the model, politicians weigh contributions against their ideological preferences when choosing how to vote, while interest groups allocate contributions across politicians to affect the probability of passage of bills. To estimate the model, I combine a new micro-dataset of interest group positions on over 10,000 bills with a dataset on campaign contributions. Exploiting shifts in contributions due to existing connections between interest groups and politicians, I find that contributions  have a significant effect on legislative votes. Moreover, I find that moderate Republicans are more influenceable than ideologically extreme Republicans, but there is no relationship between ideology and influenceability among Democrats. A counterfactual analysis of the 110th to 114th Congresses of the U.S House of Representatives indicates that interest groups altered the outcomes of 3 to 19 votes per Congress, including several on the passage of important bills.

• Language and Identity: Evidence from a Schooling Reform. 

This paper examines the effects of language of schooling on the assimilation of migrants, identity formation, and political preferences. We exploit the introduction of a 1977 law in Quebec that required younger cohorts of immigrant children to enroll in French instead of English schools. Using a difference-in-differences estimation strategy we compare cohorts required to be schooled in French with those exempted from the requirement. We find that 20 to 30 years later, children who were required to attend French schools were 6.6 percentage points more likely to adopt French as a home language and 6.6 percentage points less likely to adopt English. These shifts in language carry over to changes in identity and political attitudes: treated cohorts are more likely to identify as Quebecois or French-Canadian, less attached to Canada, and more supportive of Quebec independence. We find no evidence of effects on education or income, but families of treated children were more likely to leave the province, suggesting that linguistic integration policies can entail mobility costs.

Work in Progress

• Congressional Capacity and Productivity