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 report results from a randomized policy experiment designed to test whether increased audit risk deters rent extraction in local public procurement and service delivery in Brazil. Our estimates suggest that temporarily increasing annual audit risk by about 20 percentage points reduced the...

Do the contests with the largest prizes attract the most able contestants? To what extent do contestants avoid competition? In this paper, we show, theoretically and empirically, that the distribution of abilities plays a crucial role in determining contest choice. Sorting exists only when the...

This essay reviews some findings in cognition sciences and examines their consequences for the analysis of institutions. It starts by exploring how humans’ specialization in producing knowledge ensures our success in dominating the environment but also changes fast our environment. So fast...

We offer complete characterizations of the equilibrium outcomes of two prominent agenda voting institutions that are widely used in the democratic world: the amendment, also known as the Anglo-American procedure, and the successive, or equivalently the Euro-Latin procedure. Our axiomatic...

How does transparency, a key feature of central bank design, affect the deliberation of monetary policymakers? We exploit a natural experiment in the Federal Open Market Committee in 1993 together with computational linguistic models (particularly Latent Dirichlet Allocation) to measure the...

This paper is concerned with the realism of mechanisms that implement social choice functions in the traditional sense. Will agents actually play the equilibrium assumed by the analysis? As an example, we study the convergence and stability properties of Sj\"ostr\"om's (1994) mechanism, on the...

We perform an experimental test of Maskin's canonical mechanism for Nash implementation, using 3 subjects in non-repeated groups, as well as 3 outcomes, states of nature, and integer choices. We find that this mechanism succesfully implements the desired outcome a large majority of the time and...

This paper studies the equilibrating process of several implementation mechanisms using naive adaptive dynamics. We show that the dynamics converge and are stable, for the canonical mechanism of implementation in Nash equilibrium. In this way we cast some doubt on the criticism of ``complexity''...

This paper explains why trade liberalizations occur in developing countries, and why they are often reversed. It does so by focusing on the use of lobbying for protection by import competing firms as a means to postpone costly product quality upgrades to keep up with foreign competitors. Given...