Una gran cantidad de países alrededor del mundo presentan estructuras verticales de gobierno percibidas como ineficientes debido a un alto nivel de fragmentación jurisdiccional. La respuesta común a este diagnostico ha ...

This paper explores the extent of technical capacity constraints in Peruvian local governments. To do that, we study how effective municipalities are in using a significant income windfall due to central government transfers ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...