The short arm of the law: judicial institutions and local governance in Brazil

Stephan Litschig () and Yves Zamboni
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Stephan Litschig: http://www.econ.upf.edu/en/people/onefaculty.php?id=p4131

Economics Working Papers from Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Abstract: This paper estimates the effect of judicial institutions on governance at the local level in Brazil. Our estimation strategy exploits a unique institutional feature of state judiciary branches which assigns prosecutors and judges to the most populous among contiguous counties forming a judiciary district. As a result of this assignment mechanism there are counties with nearly identical populations, some with and some without local judicial presence, which we exploit to impute counterfactual outcomes. Conditional on observable county characteristics, offenses per civil servant are about 35% lower in counties that have a local seat of the state judiciary. The lower incidence of infractions stems mostly from fewer violations of financial management regulations by local administrators, fewer instances of problems in project execution and project managment, fewer cases of non-existent or ineffective civil society oversight and fewer cases of improper handling of remittances to local residents.

Keywords: Law enforcement; corruption; local governance; institutions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H75 K42 M42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-acc, nep-law and nep-ppm
Date: 2008-05

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Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:upf:upfgen:1143

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