I'm an Economics PhD student at the Department of Economics of Stockholm University.
My research interests include: Political Economics, Bureaucracy and Organizational Economics, Public Procurement.
You can find my CV here.
E-mail: juan.felipe.ladino@su.se
Twitter: @jfladino1
BlueSky: @jfladino1.bsky.social
GitHub: juanfladino
Revise and Resubmit, Nature. With Saad Gulzar (Notre Dame), Muhammad Zia Mehmood (Occidental), Daniel Rogger (World Bank)
A long-established approach to management in government has been the transmission of information up a hierarchy, centralized decision-making by senior management, and corresponding centralized accountability; colloquially known as "command and control". This paper examines the effectiveness of a centralized accountability system implemented at scale in Punjab, Pakistan. The scheme automatically identified poorly performing jurisdictions for the attention of central management. Using random variation in the intensity of the scheme’s implementation, we show that corresponding de facto punishments had negligible impact on school or student outcomes. We use detailed data on key elements of the education production function to show that a fundamental component of command-and-control approaches to managing the general public sector does not induce bureaucratic action towards improvements in government performance. Using naive before-after comparisons as policymakers’ prior beliefs on the impacts of the program, we apply a Bayesian framework to show that the posterior distribution lies very close to our estimated effects near zero. With the belief that the scheme was working, the pressures applied by senior management to lower levels of public administration were misaligned with the true areas of need and did not effectively motivate action towards strengthening the education system.
With Saad Gulzar (Notre Dame) and Juan Felipe Riaño (Georgetown)
Political contributions can distort the allocation of public resources, yet the mechanisms that allow favoritism toward campaign donors to persist remain poorly understood. Using administrative data linking campaign contributions in mayoral elections to the universe of procurement contracts in Colombia from 2012 to 2025, we show that donors not only obtain more valuable discretionary contracts and experience more and larger cost overruns, but also retain these advantages, relative to non-donors, even long after their political connections disappear and despite of strict regulations. To identify the frictions that sustain these persistent distortions, we implement a nationwide randomized controlled trial in partnership with the Inspector General’s Office, investigative journalists, and two civil society organizations. The intervention provides recently elected mayors with information on procurement rules related to donations and equips their different principals with monitoring capacity. This design allows us to identify the source of informational asymmetries that limit principals' ability to detect and discipline favoritism. Cost-effective deterrence emerges only when both legal principals and mayors receive actionable information that reveals the identity and recent contracting activity of donors. Leveraging this variation and the administrative data, we estimate a dynamic structural model that jointly incorporates the two key selection margins, donation and entry, through which forward looking individuals and firms choose how to behave over electoral cycles. The model estimates the sunk and operational costs that sustain favoritism and the rest of the reduced form patters, while reconciling the surprisingly low scale of political giving relative to its apparent large returns. Counterfactual policy exercises show how typical regulatory interventions can reduce welfare and why they rarely eliminate the distortions created by campaign contributions.
Best paper in Public Procurement at the World Bank Conference on Public Institutions for Development
Hiring in Plain Sight: Digitization and the Discipline of Political Discretion
With Anton Arbman-Hansing (IIES) and Arstchil Okropiridse (IIES)
Discretion in public hiring allows governments to staff bureaucracies based on policy needs, but under weak oversight it can also result in opaque decision-making. We study whether digitization can discipline such discretion in the context of Colombia's adoption of electronic procurement. A new digital platform forced short-term bureaucratic contracts awarded through discretionary procurement to be registered online and in real time, leaving a complete trace of hiring decisions. Using data on the universe of short-term contracts, we first show that rehiring is a key margin in the use of discretion. Municipalities where the incumbent coalition barely won rehire 17 percentage points more short-term bureaucrats than where it barely lost. Exploiting the staggered rollout of the reform, we find that adoption lowers rehiring by 11 percentage points after elections, but only where the incumbent coalition remained in power, precisely where rehiring is more valuable. This pattern is consistent with digitization reducing the hard-to-justify component of discretion rather than the part linked to administrative continuity. The decline is stronger where audit exposure and prior irregularities make oversight more credible, indicating that digital tools complement traditional oversight. Finally, using the text description of short-term contracts we find that rehired contractors and new hires substituting non-rehired contractors, receive more specific and less vaguely described contracts, pointing towards more discipline in political discretion operating through improved contracting quality. Our results suggest that technology can curb the abuse of political discretion.
Hot Bureaucrats: Heat and Effort in Public Administration
With Juan Esteban Garzon (Stockholm), Saad Gulzar (Notre Dame), Muhammad Zia Mehmood (Occidental), Daniel Rogger (World Bank)
Climate change imposes large costs on health, productivity, and learning, and governments are the institutions responsible for protecting populations from these costs. Whether extreme heat also degrades the functioning of government itself remains largely unknown. We combine high-resolution satellite temperature data with monthly administrative records covering roughly 42,000 public schools and the 6,000 front-line education officers who supervise them in Punjab, Pakistan. We first document that extreme heat strongly correlates with reduced bureaucratic effort: the probability that an officer fails to visit a school doubles in hot months, and a one standard deviation increase in days above 38C is associated with a 21 percentage point decline in the share of schools visited. Second, we show that the damage is greatest where the state normally works best. Officers cannot predict when the first heat wave of a month will arrive, so its timing operates as a natural experiment, and the more of the month's visits an officer still has pending when heat strikes, the more work is disrupted. Officers with the strongest performance records in cooler months cut back the most, erasing much of the gap between the bureaucracy's best and worst performers. Third, schools that lose their monthly visit see teacher presence fall and test scores decline in the month that follows. Extreme heat thus reaches beyond farms, firms, and households to the machinery of government itself, weakening the institutions on which adaptation to a warming world depends.
Journal of Public Economics (2021) [Data & Code]. With Santiago Saavedra (URosario) and Daniel Wiesner (Independent)
Collusion and Corruption in Public Procurement
With Lars Hoogstra (Stockholm)
The Political Economy of Environmental Protection: Evidence from India
With Muhammad Zia Mehmood (Occidental) and Suraj Nair (Standford)