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 ...

How do campaign contribution limits alter the influence of donors over elected officials? We propose a model to explore this question and test its implications using data from Colombian municipalities. Using a regression ...

A growing body of research has been investigating the role of management practices and managerial behaviour in conventional private firms and public sector organizations. However, little is known about managers’ behavioural ...

Capital-skill complementarity in production implies non-trivial interactions between availability of human capital and financial constraints. Firms that are constrained in their access to finance hire a lower proportion ...

A poorly understood but important way that economic conditions influence health is through the incentives that they create for health investments. In this paper, we study how individuals’ current health investments respond ...

Conventional wisdom holds that police corruption is a scourge across Latin America, undermining citizens’ trust in and collaboration with police officers. We find that this does not describe police-community relations in ...

Brazil began the implementation of SUS (Universal Health Insurance) in 1988. To the extent that SUS broke the link between employment contract and health insurance, it may have changed the incentives for individuals to ...

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 studies the design and welfare implications of an optimal age-dependent taxation scheme for an emerging economy. The setting is an overlapping generations economy with uninsured productivity risk, partially ...