PUBLICATIONS

Cash transfers, clientelism, and political enfranchisement: Evidence from Brazil (Journal of Public Economics, 2019)
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WORKING PAPERS

Do Reelection Incentives Improve Policy Implementation? Accountability vs. Political Targeting
​(Under Review)

Although reelection prospects can improve policy implementation by incumbents, they can also create incentives for politically-motivated targeting of resources, which might jeopardize both distributional efficiency and electoral competition. While existing empirical tests typically focus on these potential countervailing incentives in isolation, this paper analyzes their net effect in the context of Bolsa Família (BF) in Brazil, using a regression discontinuity design and data on nearly seven million households from the program’s registry. The evidence supports political targeting over accountability: mayors with reelection incentives are four times more likely to include nonpoor, ineligible households into the policy. This inclusion also improves the performance of incumbents in their reelection attempt. Evidence from both a survey with 11,000+ households and the heterogeneity in the main results suggests that the poor fails to keep mayors accountable due to the lack of precise information about the policy. This mechanism is framed within the context of a simple accountability model. Finally, anomalous income reporting patterns in the registry also show that this electorally-driven fraud is more common for households enrolled by public servants politically connected to the mayor​.
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A Variance Decomposition Approach for Bounding Neighborhood Effects
​(Under Review)

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

Strategic Allocation of Anti-Clientelism Goods and the Breaking of Political Machines 
​(Under Review)

The success of clientelism depends on the machine’s ability to deliver benefits that elicit voters’support while still keeping them impoverished. This requires targeted goods to be valuable, but revocable. Exploring the flip side of this, this article explains why and how parties target voters with valuable but irrevocable goods: delivering these anti-clientelism goods erodes the grasp of opposing dominant machines. We empirically assess this redistributive logic with previously untapped administrative data on a Brazilian program of distribution of cisterns, an archetypal irrevocable good, employing panel data and a regression discontinuity design. Results indicate that incumbents primarily target cisterns to opposition strongholds, while avoiding their own. In contrast, they favor their their own strongholds with revocable goods. This mechanism is stronger in areas where cisterns are more valuable to voters, and where machines are more dominant.

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WORK IN PROGRESS

Sleeping with the Enemy: Dynamic Electoral Competition in a Clientelistic Environment (with Sergio Montero and Gabriel López-Moctezuma)

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)

Do More Representatives Improve Representation? Evidence from a Natural Experiment

​Do Programmatic Policies Induce Political Engagement?