We show that local politicians’ probability of being employed by a municipality increases when they have a strong party connection to its mayor. Using a regression discontinuity design, we compare the employment outcomes ...

Workers at subnational governments play a prominent role in the delivery of public services in most countries. Yet, information about their remuneration is scarce. Using data for Brazil, Mexico and Uruguay, we document ...

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 ...

We show that bureaucrats can exploit discretion in hiring decisions to engage in forms of favoritism that hinder organizational performance. We do this in the context of the Mexican federal judiciary. The arrival of a judge ...

The incidence of patronage can vary widely across levels of gov ernment within a country. We show this in the context of Brazil, which has been the focus of most recent research on patronage. In particular, we find that ...

Compensation schemes tend to differ markedly between public and private sector jobs, which can affect the relative preferences of potential employees towards those jobs. We explore this through two informational experiments ...