We show how the standard social welfare framework can be used to assess the performance of social safety nets (SSNs) in terms of targeting efficiency and budget effort. We apply this framework to the World Bank's ASPIRE database and find that the variation in poverty alleviation achieved by SSNs...

Social protection programs are crucial for stabilizing household income, especially during crises. Brazil's response to the pandemic, the Auxilio Emergencial (AE) program, demonstrated the value of a resilient social safety net and digital tools. This study assesses AE's effectiveness in income...

This essay brings a synthesize of the doctoral thesis named 'Essays in Political Economy: Evidence from Brazil', which provides relevant contribution towards our understanding regarding the incentives and constraints that local governments face in the context of a federalist system. The analysis...

We analyze close elections between male and female mayoral candidates in Brazilian municipalities to provide novel evidence on the role of women as policymakers. Using an objective measure of corruption based on random government audits, we find that female mayors are less likely to engage in...

[This item is a preserved copy. To view the original, visit http://econtheory.org/] The de Finetti Theorem is a cornerstone of the Bayesian approach. Bernardo (1996) writes that its "message is very clear: if a sequence of observations is judged to be exchangeable, then any subset of them must...