We study the causes and consequences of patronage in Brazilian cities since the country’s re-democratization. Local winning political coalitions increase their shares of civil servant workers and wages by 3-4 percentage points during a mayoral term, independent of their ideology. Over five...

We hand-collect new data on municipal bonds issued by all states and the largest 100 cities in the U.S. between 1920 and 2020 and study how the terms of municipal bond financing evolved over the last century. We document a striking decline of almost 50% in the maturity of these bonds. We analyze...

This paper investigates the effect of borrower-lender renegotiation of debt terms (loan forbearance) on the recovery of financial distressed firms. Based on a novel proprietary database of a large Brazilian bank, we estimate a dynamic difference-in-difference model to compare the revenue of...

Low-powered contracts do not provide proper incentives to reduce cost; still empirical studies show that they are quite pervasive in public and private procurement. This paper argues that low-powered contracts arise due to a free-riding problem when the contractor enjoys economies of scale/scope...

Discriminatory programs that favor local and small firms in government procurement are common in many countries. This paper studies the long-run impact of procurement discrimination on market structure and future competition in industries where learning-by-doing makes incumbent firms more...