Independent and high-quality evaluations of government policies are an important input for designing evidence-based policy. Lack of incentives and institutions to write such evaluations, on the other hand, carry the risk of turning the system into a costly beauty contest. We study one of the...

There was substantial spatial variation in labor market outcomes in Brazil over the 1990's. In 2000, about one fifth of workers lived in apparently economically stagnant municipios where real wages declined but employment increased faster than the national population growth rate. More than one...

We describe econometric techniques to treat spatial autocorrelation in multiequation cross-section models. The cross-section approaches discussed here are heavily based on the spatial GMM procedure, proposed by Conley (1999). An extension for fullinformation instrumental variable models is...

In this paper, we examine the determinants of Brazilian city growth between 1970 and 2000. We consider a model of a city, which combines aspects of standard urban economics and the new economic geography literatures. For the empirical analysis, we constructed a dataset of 123 Brazilian...

In this paper, we study the extent to which ministers engage in regional favoritism. We are the first to provide a comprehensive analysis of a larger set of the governing elite, not just focusing on the primary leader. We hand-collect birthplaces of this governing elite globally. Combining this...

We study the economic implications of regional favoritism, a form of distributive politics that redistributes resources spatially within countries. We use a large sample of enterprise surveys spanning across many low and middle income countries, and utilize transitions of national political...