This paper investigates how non-tax revenues impact tax collection in Brazilian municipalities, focusing on shifts in intergovernmental transfers due to population updates. Our analysis reveals asymmetric effects of shocks: revenue gains lead to increased spending without tax reductions, while...

Audits are a common mechanism used by governments to monitor public spending. In this paper, we discuss the effectiveness of auditing with theory and empirics. In our model, the value of audits depends on both the underlying presence of abuse and the government's ability to observe it and...

When organizations have limited accountability, antifraud measures, including auditing, often face barriers due to institutional resistance and practical difficulties on the ground. This is especially true in development aid, where aid organizations face incentives to suppress information about...

One frequently overlooked aspect of the U.S.-style electoral college system is that it discourages election fraud. In a presidential election based on the popular vote, competing political parties are motivated to manipulate votes in areas where they hold the most significant influence, such as...

We offer a new analysis of a large-scale trial of an early-childhood education program that targeted premature, low-birthweight children. This targeting heavily oversampled twins, whose outcomes differed significantly from singletons'. Singletons' gains in short-term cognition and age-18...

Infrastructure costs in the United States are high and rising. The procurement process is one potential cost driver. In this paper we conduct a survey of procurement practices across the 50 states. We survey both employees at each state department of transportation (DOT) and the road builders...

find strong evidence that strategic misreporting was present but conclude that its remaining quantitative extent after enforcement actions already taken by the tax authorities was relatively small. Firms tend to misreport 4 percent more often than expected, and the actual support paid out was 5...

We present a mechanism based on managerial incentives through which common ownership affects product market outcomes. Firm-level variation in common ownership causes variation in managerial incentives and productivity across firms, which leads to intra-industry and intra-firm cross-market...