This paper investigates the impact of automation on the U.S.labor market from 2000 to 2007,specifically examining whether more generous social protection programs can mitigate negative effects.Following Acemoglu et al.(2020),the study finds that areas with higher robot adoption reduced employment and wages,in particular for workers without college degree.Notably,the paper exploits differences in social protection generosity across states and finds that areas with more generous unemployment insurance(UI)alleviated the negative effects on wages,especially for less-skilled workers.The results suggest that UI allowed displaced workers to find better matches The findings emphasize the importance of robust social protection policies in addressing the challenges posed by automation,contributing valuable insights for policymakers.

Social protection programs are crucial for stabilizing household income, especially during crises. Brazil's response to the pandemic, the Auxilio Emergencial (AE) program, demonstrated the value of a resilient social safety net and digital tools. This study assesses AE's effectiveness in income stabilization, poverty reduction, and inequality. Results show that the pre-pandemic social protection system would have only buffered about a quarter of income loss, with unemployment insurance more significant for higher-income households, and social safety net transfers crucial for lower-income households, especially those in informal employment. AE successfully supported lower-income households during the pandemic, but its generosity went beyond the stabilization of income, resulting in large fiscal costs.

This paper assesses the additional spending required to make substantial progress towards achieving the SDGs in Pakistan. We focus on critical areas of human (education and health) and physical (electricity, roads, and water and sanitation) capital. For each sector, we document the progress to date, assess where Pakistan stands relative to its peers, highlight key challenges, and estimate the additional spending required to make substantial progress. The estimates for the additional spending are derived using the IMF SDG costing methodology. We find that to achieve the SDGs in these sectors would require additional annual spending of about 16 percent of GDP in 2030 from the public and private sectors combined.

We study spillovers in learning about the enforcement of Bolsa Familia, a programme conditioning benefits on children’s school attendance. Using original administrative data, we find that individuals’ compliance responds to penalties incurred by their classmates and by siblings’ classmates (in other grades/schools). As the severity of penalties increases with repeated noncompliance, the response is larger when peers are punished for ‘higher stages' than the family’s, consistent with learning. Individuals also respond to penalties experienced by neighbours who are exogenously scheduled to receive notices on the same day. Our results point to social multiplier effects of enforcement via learning.

Do politicians manipulate the enforcement of conditional welfare programs to influence electoral outcomes? We study the Bolsa Familia Program (BFP) in Brazil, which provides a monthly stipend to poor families conditional on school attendance. Repeated failure to comply with this requirement results in increasing penalties. First, we exploit random variation in the timing when beneficiaries learn about penalties for noncompliance around the 2008 municipal elections. We find that the vote share of candidates aligned with the president is lower in zip codes where more beneficiaries received penalties shortly before (as opposed to shortly after) the elections. Second, we show that politicians strategically manipulate enforcement. Using a regression discontinuity design, we find weaker enforcement before elections in municipalities where mayors from the presidential coalition can run for reelection. We provide evidence that manipulation occurs through misreporting school attendance, particularly in municipalities with a higher fraction of students in schools with politically connected principals.

We analyze how political discretion affects the selection of government workers, using individual-level data on political party membership and matched employer-employee data on the universe of formal workers in Brazil. Exploiting close mayoral races, we find that winning an election leads to an increase of over 40% in the number of members of the winning party working in the municipal bureaucracy. Employment of members of the ruling party increases relatively more in senior positions, but also expands in lower-ranked jobs, suggesting that discretionary appointments are used both to influence policymaking and to reward supporters. We find that party members hired after their party is elected tend be of similar or even higher quality than members of the runner-up party, contrary to common perceptions that political appointees are less qualified. Moreover, the increased public employment of members of the ruling party is long-lasting, extending beyond the end of the mayoral term.

The effectiveness of conditional welfare programs crucially depends on their design, such as the exact rules, benefit amounts and structure. Another important factor is the quality of enforcement of those rules. While the former relationship has been studied, the importance of the quality of enforcement for program effectiveness has rarely been addressed. In this paper we study the implementation of a large-scale conditional cash transfer program “Bolsa Familia” in Brazil, which conditions transfers to poor families on children’s school attendance. We analyze how people learn about the quality of enforcement and how this affects their behavior. We find that individuals respond to incentives and finetune their behavior in response to signals about the quality of enforcement of program conditions. They learn both from private signals, observing the consequences of own noncompliance, and from public signals, that is observing the consequences from peers’ noncompliance. Thus we show that enforcement does not only have a direct effect on the family affected, but also an important multiplier effect on other families, who learn from the experiences of their children’s peers.

We analyze close elections between male and female mayoral candidates in Brazilian municipalities to provide novel evidence on the role of women as policymakers. Using an objective measure of corruption based on random government audits, we find that female mayors are less likely to engage in corruption compared to male mayors. We also find that female mayors hire fewer temporary public employees than male mayors during the electoral year and tend to attract less campaign contributions when running for reelection. Moreover, our results show that female mayors have a lower reelection probability than male mayors. We interpret our findings as suggesting that male incumbents are more likely to engage in strategic behavior and this improves their electoral performance. Other explanations receive less support from the data.

The Political Resource Curse The paper studies the effect of additional government revenues on political corruption and on the quality of politicians, both with theory and data. The theory is based on a version of the career concerns model of political agency with endogenous entry of political candidates. The evidence refers to municipalities in Brazil, where federal transfers to municipal governments change exogenously according to given population thresholds. We exploit a regression discontinuity design to test the implications of the theory and identify the causal effect of larger federal transfers on political corruption and the observed features of political candidates at the municipal level. In accordance with the predictions of the theory, we find that larger transfers increase political corruption and reduce the quality of candidates for mayor. JEL Classification: D72, D73, H40, H77

This paper studies the effect of additional government revenues on political corruption and on the quality of politicians, both with theory and data. The theory is based on a political agency model with career concerns and endogenous entry of candidates. The data refer to Brazil, where federal transfers to municipal governments change exogenously at given population thresholds, allowing us to implement a regression discontinuity design. The empirical evidence shows that larger transfers increase observed corruption and reduce the average education of candidates for mayor. These and other more specific empirical results are in line with the predictions of the theory. (JEL D72, D73, H77, O17, O18)

Based on randomly allocated audit reports in Brazil, a recent empirical literature shows that the probability of re-election of an incumbent mayor decreases when corruption is released. By exploiting (i) the exogenous variation in the timing of the release of the audit reports; and (ii) the Brazilian institutions that regulates transfers blockages this paper sheds light on the mechanisms through which voters punish corrupt politicians. Two potential channels are empirically identified: (1) a loss of reputation directly linked to the dissemination of corruption information, and (2) a reduction in transfers from the central government. After the audit release every additional violation reported decreases transfers by 13.5%-19%. The impact of the dissemination of corruption information on the probability of reelection fades over time. Voters punish politicians when casting their votes if they can perceive this reduction in transfers due to the poorer supply of public goods.

This article uses a regression discontinuity design in close electoral races to disclose purely political reasons in the allocation of intergovernmental transfers in a federal state. We identify the effect of political alignment on federal transfers to municipal governments in Brazil, and find that-in preelection years-municipalities in which them ayor is affiliated with the coalition (and especially with the political party) of the Brazilian president receive approximately one-third larger discretionary transfers for infrastructures. This effect is primarily driven by the fact that the federal government penalizes municipalities run by mayors from the opposition coalition who won by a narrow margin, thereby tying their hands for the next election.

This essay brings a synthesize of the doctoral thesis named «Essays in Political Economy: Evidence from Brazil», which provides relevant contribution towards our understanding regarding the incentives and constraints that local governments face in the context of a federalist system. The analysis goes through theoretical and empirical analysis at the microeconomic level with specific reference to Brazil, including original and rich data on Brazilian municipalities.

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In 2003 the Brazilian central government (CG) launched an anti-corruption program. Since then municipalities have been randomly selected to be audited on a monthly basis. Evidence in the literature suggests that the probability of re-election of an incumbent mayor decreases as the number of reported corruption violations rises before the municipal elections. By exploiting the exogenous variation in the timing of the release of the audit reports and the Brazilian institutional scheme, this paper sheds light on the mechanisms through which the Brazilian anti-corruption program functions. After the release of the audit reports, municipalities where more than two corruption violations were reported receive 26% fewer transfers from the CG. Total expenditure on infrastructure is also reduced. While the CG increases the amount of transfers to municipalities where the mayor is both aliated with the partys president and found to be honest, it helps politically aligned municipalities with high levels of released corruption to move through the punishment process more quickly. The eects of the dissemination of corruption information on the probability of re-election of incumbent mayors seem to gradually disappear with time. Yet, when these eects have

One of the basic principles that allow a smooth operation of the markets is the equilibrium between supply and demand. According to this principle, when demand exceeds supply, the price mechanism will try to bring the system back into equilibrium. When this thinking is applied to the housing market, it leads to the conclusion that any inequality in housing supply or demand is transitory. Nonetheless, the fact that a considerable share of the population live in precarious homes for generations seems to speak against the virtues of market mechanisms in the resolution of housing disequilibria. Stiglitz and Weiss (1981) argue that in the face of asymmetric information, under some conditions the equilibrium of the credit market can be marked by rationing. Asymmetric information – working through the effects of adverse selection and of incentive – has impacts on the return function of bank loans, which leads to interest rates used in housing loans to be different from those that balance supply and demand for credit, causing credit rationing. Literature of the New Institutional Economics (NIE) in turn points out the fact that institutions can reduce the degree of uncertainty by lessening the effects of asymmetric information. Regarding the housing market, the degree of property rights, as well as the mortgage institution which acts as a contract enforcement tool, provide the credit market with information on the quality of the borrower and thus broaden the social scope of this market. The purpose of this article is to understand how the equilibrium in the housing market is influenced by credit rationing and to what extend institutional development affects this scarcity and the interest rates of housing loans. The model developed in this article, which combines the tradition of dynamic models of housing investment with the premises of the New Institutional Economics and the considerations of Stiglitz and Weiss (1981) and (1992) on rationing in the credit market, allows us to identify the role of institutions on housing development.