The Political Resource Curse

Fernanda Brollo (), Tommaso Nannicini, Roberto Perotti and Guido Tabellini

No 356, Working Papers from IGIER (Innocenzo Gasparini Institute for Economic Research), Bocconi University

Abstract: The paper studies the effect of additional government revenues on political corruption and on the quality of politicians, both with theory and data. The theory is based on a version of the career concerns model of political agency with endogenous entry of political candidates. The evidence refers to municipalities in Brazil, where federal transfers to municipal governments change exogenously according to given population thresholds. We exploit a regression discontinuity design to test the implications of the theory and identify the causal effect of larger federal transfers on political corruption and the observed features of political candidates at the municipal level. In accordance with the predictions of the theory, we find that larger transfers increase political corruption and reduce the quality of candidates for mayor.

Date: 2009
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm and nep-pol
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (17)

Downloads: (external link)
https://repec.unibocconi.it/igier/igi/wp/2009/356.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The Political Resource Curse (2013)
Working Paper: The Political Resource Curse (2010)
Working Paper: The Political Resource Curse (2010)
Working Paper: The Political Resource Curse (2010)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:igi:igierp:356

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://repec.unibocconi.it/igier/igi/

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from IGIER (Innocenzo Gasparini Institute for Economic Research), Bocconi University via Rontgen, 1 - 20136 Milano (Italy).
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().