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 how countries choose intra-bloc tariffs and preferential margins in Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs). Our model indicates that countries should set systematically lower prefer-ential margins when the bloc takes ...

This paper studies the impact of high dismissal protection on bureaucratic turnover and productivity in the context of public school teachers in Chile. We take advantage of a law that required education administrators ...

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 ...

This paper provides evidence that domestic trade costs are a source of comparative advantage. First, I build an international trade and internal geography model with transportation features and input-output linkages. Then, ...

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 ...