Research

Working Papers: 

Funding from UC Davis College of Letters & Sciences Dean's Graduate Summer Support Award

Abstract: Effective government leadership demands skills in planning, budgeting, and personnel management, areas where business experience may be valuable. Business owners could apply their management skills in public administration to optimize resources, enhance public service delivery, or promote private sector growth. However, these skills may not translate to the public sector, where different rules prevail, and a lack of political expertise could ultimately undermine the delivery of public services. This paper studies the impact of electing business owners as mayors in Brazilian municipalities. By leveraging a national business registry from the Brazilian Federal Revenue Agency that includes information on the owners, merged with candidates’ data from the Electoral High Court, I am able to identify business candidates. Using a regression discontinuity design for close elections, I find that electing a business mayor reduces municipal revenue by 7.5% and spending by 8%. Evidence suggests that the reduction in revenue may be due to challenges in accessing intergovernmental transfers, indicating that managerial experience may come at the expense of political skills. Despite the decrease in spending, business mayors do not negatively affect public service delivery or local economic activity. I find no impact on health outcomes and a small but positive effect on private sector employment. These results indicate improvement in cost-effectiveness by achieving equivalent service levels with fewer resources. I examine management as a driver of increased effectiveness and find that business mayors do not improve personnel management outcomes, suggesting a limited ability to transfer or adapt their management experience to the public sector. 


Funding from Economic History Association Early-Stage Dissertation Grant 

Abstract: Pay standardization schemes are commonly implemented in organizations to address pay gaps based on gender, race, or ethnicity. These schemes limit managerial discretion to determine wages, thereby limiting gender inequality within job titles. However, this may shift inequality to other margins such as position quality or promotions. This study examines the effects of the Classification Act of 1923, which standardized pay grades and position categories and required "equal pay for equal work'" in the US Civil Service, on women's earnings relative to men's. Using a differential difference-in-differences approach, we exploit the fact that the policy applied to civil servants working in Washington, D.C., but not to those working in federal field offices. We find that the law did not improve women's relative pay within job titles. Further, the law lowered women's relative compensation without controlling for job titles, suggesting changes in women's positions. We indeed find large negative effects on the position margin. In response to the law, departments downgraded women to lower-quality positions. These negative consequences predominantly affected newly hired women. Our findings underscore the importance of unintended margins of adjustment for policies related to gender equity.


Funding from UC Davis Global Affairs Seed Grant and UC Davis Public Impact Research Initiative

Abstract: Regulation and enforcement around the use of public funds can reduce corruption, but does it also alter incentives to spend? In this paper, we investigate whether compliance uncertainty around spending rules can stifle valuable-to-the-public spending and distort policy choice. We leverage administrative data and a collaboration with the Brazilian Council of Municipal Health Secretaries (CONASEMS), which organizes large conferences with municipal health secretaries responsible for managing, on average, a USD 1 million health budget. We first present three descriptive facts of the context consistent with the importance of compliance uncertainty for aggregate public spending. First, 20% of municipalities have experienced substantial incomplete spending for more than 10 years. Second, around one-fourth of the mayors are convicted with large penalties, even when there is no incidence of corruption. Lastly, regulation complexity is associated with incomplete spending (in the administrative data and a policymakers' perception survey). We then establish the causal link between compliance uncertainty and the spending decision in a low-stakes lab-in-the-field experiment in CONASEMS conferences. We offer a spending plan on a valuable-to-the-public policy, namely a children's kit to reward parents who complete the vaccination scheme. We vary whether the children's kit includes "toys and books’’ (vs. "oral hygiene items’’) to be purchased with health-earmarked funds. We show that the toys-and-books policy bundle is perceived to be equally effective but has a 20% reduced willingness to pay. Consistent with a risk-effectiveness trade-off, the toys-and-books policy bundle is perceived to have a higher risk. 


Abstract: Recent events in democracies worldwide have drawn considerable attention to the relationship between corruption and political participation. Corruption can erode voters’ confidence in public institutions, as well as compromise trust in the political system as a whole. Leveraging a random corruption audit program in Brazil, in this paper we study the relationship between corruption and political participation. A key empirical advantage of our context is that it allows us to analyze the effects of corruption at a different electoral level than where the corruption occurred, setting our study apart from previous literature. This is relevant because revealing corruption may alter the candidate pool and affect election competitiveness. Using a difference in differences strategy, we find that being one standard deviation away from the mean of corruption violations and releasing audit results before the election does not significantly impact null voting at the local level, where corruption took place. However, in gubernatorial elections, the same conditions are associated with a 4% decrease in null voting. This finding highlights the spillover effects of corruption and suggests it may increase political participation when we isolate supply-side factors.  


Work in Progress: