We estimate the causal real economic effects of a randomized anti-corruption crackdown on local governments in Brazil over the period 2003-2014. After anti-corruption audits, municipalities experience an increase in economic ...

We study the unintended consequences of the recent peace process in Colombia, that ended over five decades of internal armed conflict with the FARC insurgency. Using a triple differences empirical strategy, we show that ...

In all modern bureaucracies, politicians retain some discretion in public em- ployment decisions, which may lead to frictions in the selection process if political connections substitute for individual competence. Relying ...

What is the contribution of privatization to the formation of business groups and pyramids? We use new data to study how Pinochet’s privatizations in Chile (1973-1990) affected the evolution of ownership structures. Using ...

A large body of literature has documented negative effects of civil conflict on the educational outcomes of affected children across different countries and historical periods. The opposite is however not obvious. Because ...

Well-intended policies often have negative unintended consequences if they fail to foresee the different ways in which individuals may respond to the new set of incentives. When widespread and persistent, these may lead ...

Using rich micro data from Brazil, we show that multiple popular machine learning models display extremely high levels of performance in predicting municipality-level corruption in public spending. Measures of private ...