Does additional government spending improve the electoral chances of incumbent political parties? This paper provides the first quasi-experimental evidence on this question. Our research design exploits discontinuities in federal funding to local governments in Brazil around several population...

We estimate the effect of state judiciary presence on rent extraction in Brazilian local governments. We measure rents as irregularities related to waste or corruption uncovered by auditors. Our unique dataset at the level of individual inspections allows us to separately examine extensive and...

We propose a smooth multibidding mechanism for environments where a group of agents have to choose one out of several projects (possibly with the help of a social planner). Our proposal is related to the multibidding mechanism (Prez-Castrillo and Wettstein, 2002) but it is smoother in the sense...

I combine a field experiment with a change in voting laws reducing the fine for abstention to assess the effects of monetary incentives to encourage voter participation. Using individual-level experimental variation in the perceived reduction of the fine for abstention and an objective measure...

This note critically appraises the claim that Catalonia is being fiscally mistreated, both in terms of the financing of its regional government and in terms of its net fiscal balance with the Spanish Central Government. Its conclusion is that nationalist complaints regarding these matters are...

This paper provides regression discontinuity evidence on long-run and intergenerational education impacts of a temporary increase in federal transfers to local governments in Brazil. Revenues and expenditures of the communities benefiting from extra transfers temporarily increased by about 20%...

This paper uses a regression discontinuity design to estimate the impact of additional unrestricted grant financing on local public spending, public service provision, schooling, literacy, and income at the community (município) level in Brazil. Additional transfers increased local public...

We experimentally investigate in the laboratory two prominent mechanisms that are employed in school choice programs to assign students to public schools. We study how individual behavior is influenced by preference intensities and risk aversion. Our main results show that (a) the GaleShapley...

We observe that many salient rules to allocate private goods are not only (partially) strategy-proof, but also (partially) group strategy-proof, in appropriate domains of definition. That is so for solutions to matching, division, cost sharing, house allocation and auctions, in spite of the...