Customs are often prone to corruption because it concentrates a lot of discretionary power in the hand of custom agents who take decisions with high economic stakes for the firms, providing an opportunity for custom agents ...

Political clientelism is considered a fundamental reason why politicians are not accountable and responsive to their constituencies. In this working paper, we study whether transparency initiatives – more specifically, ...

This paper explores the relationship between political influence activities by interest groups and benefits obtained in the form of public contracts. We propose an electoral competition model where interest groups make ...

There are many journalistic and anecdotal accounts about the prevalence of electoral corrals in Brazil, geographic areas where brokers, politicians, or community leaders influence residents to vote for a specific candidate. ...

This paper proposes a test to estimate the nature of political corruption in developing countries: embezzlement by self enriching politicians versus corruption that originates as a quid-pro-quo from campaign contributions. ...

We study whether the existence of opportunities to extract rents in a job affects the type of individuals who are attracted to it. We design a laboratory experiment in which individuals choose between two contracts, each ...

While previous research has thoroughly examined the consequences of external control on subnational governments, less is known about the drivers and consequences of internal control. This paper presents a series of findings ...