Research

PUBLICATIONS

• How Effective Are Monetary Incentives to Vote? Evidence From a Nationwide Policy (with Luis R. Martinez and Gianmarco León)

  • American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, Vol 14(1): 293-326. January 2022

  • Media coverage: GlobalDev, Vox, La República

WORKING PAPERS

• Politics never end: Patronage Effects of Increased Transparency

Abstract: Transparency that provides voters with negative information about politicians leads to electoral penalties. Do politicians strategically respond when confronted with this type of potential electoral backlash? I answer this question using exogenous variation generated by randomized audits to local governments in Brazil. I show that the execution of an audit leads to an increase in the number of public employees hired by the mayor. This effect is greater in municipalities where auditors uncovered higher levels of corruption. I find evidence consistent with mayors hiring more employees as a form of patronage to compensate for the loss of electoral support resulting from the audit. I closely examine the education sector using additional detailed data and find that hiring more school employees does not improve student outcomes, revealing limited direct consequences of audits on public goods production. Moreover, I show that an audit increases the share of payroll expenditures but decreases capital investment and that this substitution translated into a deterioration in the quality of school assets. These results suggest that patronage enables politicians to offset the potential electoral penalty of an audit by hiring employees who do not contribute much to public goods production.

SELECTED WORK IN PROGRESS

• The Effects of Climate Change on Coca Leaf Planting: Evidence from Colombia (with Tamma Carleton and Juliana Helo)

• Natural Resource Shocks, Pollution, and Support for Left-wing Parties: Evidence from Peru