PUBLICATIONS AND ACCEPTED PAPERS

Sleeping with the Enemy: Effective Representation under Dynamic Electoral Competition  
(Accepted, American Journal of Political Science)
​(with Sergio Montero and Gabriel López-Moctezuma)
Pre-print  |  

​Can Descriptive Representation Help The Right Win Votes From The Poor? Evidence From Brazil 
(Accepted, American Journal of Political Science)
(with Zuheir Desai)​
Pre-print  |  

​Strategic Allocation of Irrevocable and Durable Benefits 
​(American Journal of Political Science, 2020)
​Pre=print  |  Link

​Do Reelection Incentives Improve Policy Implementation? Accountability vs. Political Targeting ​
(Quarterly Journal of Political Science, 2021)
Pre-print  |  Link

Cash transfers, clientelism, and political enfranchisement: Evidence from Brazil
​(Journal of Public Economics, 2019)
Pre-print​  |  Link

WORKING PAPERS

Larger Legislatures and the Cost of Political Brokerage: Evidence from Brazil
(Revision requested, Journal of Politics)

This article shows that larger legislatures reduce the electoral power of incumbent parties in the executive. The electoral effects of legislature size have been largely overlooked by a literature that emphasizes its impact on policy outcomes. I estimate the effects of municipal council size on the results of mayoral, gubernatorial and presidential elections in Brazil. The regression discontinuity design exploits variation from a law that set non-linear council size caps after 2012. In a nutshell, every additional seat triggers a 10% vote loss for the candidates backed by the mayor's party. I also show evidence that these losses are a consequence of a breakdown in the political brokerage relationships that often characterize developing democracies: in Brazil, mayors exchange patronage for the councilors’ electoral support. Larger councils raise this transaction cost for the executive, more so when council and mayor have unaligned electoral incentives at the state/national levels.
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A Variance Decomposition Approach for Bounding Neighborhood Effects
​(with Scott Abramson)
​(Submitted)

Political scientists have pointed to neighborhood contexts as an important factor explaining individual voter behavior. This paper presents a variance-decomposition method for placing bounds on the impact of neighborhood effects on political attitudes. The method should be used to complement rather than to replace other empirical approaches used by the discipline in the study of neighborhood effects, as it provides less restrictive assumptions than most observational studies, and a broader perspective on the aggregate influence of neighborhoods than the typical experimental design. We also present two applications using data from the universe of voters in North Carolina. We estimate that neighborhood effects explain at most 1.9% of the total variation in individual turnout decisions, and 4% of the observed variation in party registration, after accounting for the race of households. In both applications, household-specific traits are a much more relevant factor determining those individual outcomes.

Upon Request

Legislature Resizing with Rent-seeking Politicians: Evidence from Brazil
(Submitted)

Legislature size affects the quality of democracy. However, the existent scholarship still lacks a positive theory of resizing in contexts of low accountability and pervasive rent-seeking, where the often posed trade-off between greater efficiency and better representation might be irrelevant. This article fills this gap with a new logic: rent-seeking politicians decide whether to expand legislatures following a trade-off between better reelection prospects and a dilution in rents. Evidence comes from a regression discontinuity design, and a wave of 3,000+ council expansions in Brazilian municipalities. The likelihood that legislators approve an expansion decreases with the size of the mayoral coalition in the chamber, given that coalition councilors lose more from rent dilution. This effect is higher for politicians from office-seeking parties, and in areas with more patronage. Finally, this mechanism seems to trump concerns with representation, as I find no evidence that representation deficits in the council drive the expansion.
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WORK IN PROGRESS

Pricing Partisanship: Evidence From North Carolina's Housing Markets (with Scott Abramson)

Building Weak Parties with Ambitious Politicians (with Sergio Montero and Gabriel López-Moctezuma)

Bureaucratic Performance and Party Recruitment

Political Targeting in Rural Insurance

​Do Programmatic Policies Induce Political Engagement?