This paper explores the labor market returns to working on a victorious political campaign. Using unique administrative data from Brazil, we track the earnings and employment of campaign workers before and after close elections spanning nearly 20 years. We identify sizable returns to working for...

Does higher office always lead to more favoritism? We argue that firms may lose their benefit from a connected politicians ascent to higher office, if it entails stricter scrutiny that may reduce favoritism. Around close Congress elections, we find RDD-based evidence of this adverse effect that...

We investigate the relationship between the time politicians stay in office and the functioning of public procurement. To this purpose, we collect a data set on the Italian municipal governments and all the procurement auctions they administered between 2000 and 2005. Identification is achieved...

Senior officials in the ministerial bureaucracy are responsible for the coordination of public service activity and their number has grown enormously since World War II. We study the growth in employment of this politically sensitive high-profile occupational group from a political economics...

The challenge of public administration reform is well-known: politicians often have little interest in the efficient implementation of government policy. Using new data from 439 World Bank public sector reform loans in 109 countries, we demonstrate that such reforms are significantly less likely...

We examine the effects of corporate lawsuits in China and find that litigation announcements depress the stock prices of both defendant and plaintiff firms. Financially distressed defendants suffer lower stock returns. We find that politically connected defendants are favored in the judicial...

This article investigates the patronage phenomenon in the italian, so called, Second Republic. In particular, the analysis argues that (ex) members of parliament are appointed to managerial boards in italian (partially) state-owned enterprises responding to political selection rationales....

Why do politicians serve on the boards of private firms, and why do firms bring politicians onto their boards? We examine this question of "politically connected firms" by drawing on a new dataset of "moonlighting" activities by Japanese politicians. Specifically, we focus on incumbents who were...

Enduring violent conflict is the flip side of the coin of a weak state. In this article, I propose some political economy underpinnings for the persistence of conflict (and the weak state). Focusing on the case of Colombia, I discuss three broad sets of mechanisms that are also relevant...