We investigate the effect of job loss and unemployment benefits on criminal behavior, exploiting individual-level data on the universe of workers and criminal cases in Brazil over the 2009-2017 period. We match workers displaced upon plausibly exogenous mass layoffs with...

Can unemployment insurance (UI) affect the behavior of employed workers and the duration of their employment spells? I apply a regression kink design to address this question using data from the Brazilian labor market. Exploiting the UI schedule, I find that a 1% higher potential benefit level...

This paper studies the role of council size on government corruption in Brazil. We leverage on the discontinuous relationship between the population size of municipalities and council size dictated by the law to implement a regression discontinuity design. We document a substantial positive...