Drawing on the Brazilian case, this paper develops a new measure of state capacity for evaluating the performance of specific bureaucratic agencies within national states. The measure, which is made possible by the rising ...

This paper investigates the optimal general income tax and audit policies when poverty is considered a public bad in an economy with two types of individuals whose income may not be observed. Our results depend on whether ...

Themes such as sprawl, compact city, leapfrogging, have been out of the economics literature for a long time despite the great interest of urban planners and citizens in general. This is changing fast since the 2000s. The ...

We address the issue of whether electing a mayor affects the same party performance at subsequent proportional elections in the same municipality. We employ a Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD) model to identify the ...

A consortium of three universities, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV), and Technische Universität Berlin, and the Municipality of São Paulo, Brazil, propose a study of urban ...

There is current a large concern with corruption around the world as it may be one of the causes for lagging development. There is also a concern that corrupt government will succeed to stay in power using the money obtained ...

During the period in which Latin America underwent the most lasting and widespread wave of democratization, we test whether governments targeted increases in social spending to coincide with presidential elections in a ...

While corruption is documented to have high social costs, the mechanisms that enable and deter corruption are not entirely understood. This paper takes advantage of the introduction of a random-audits program in Brazil, ...

This paper aims at identifying the effects of historical inequality in the Brazilian municipalities formation on the actual conditions of land and income inequalities and on institutions quality. In particular, we use, ...

How does parliamentary organization affect the legislative success rate of the Executive in presidential and parliamentary systems at the subnational level? Why are some governors much more successful than others even ...