Corruption and Legislature Size: Evidence from Brazil

Diogo Britto and Stefano Fiorin

No def054, DISCE - Working Papers del Dipartimento di Economia e Finanza from Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Dipartimenti e Istituti di Scienze Economiche (DISCE)

Abstract: This paper studies the role of council size on government corruption in Brazil. We leverage on the discontinuous relationship between the population size of municipalities and council size dictated by the law to implement a regression discontinuity design. We document a substantial positive causal effect of the number of city councilors on the incidence of corruption detected during federal audits. Results also show that hav- ing an extra councilor does not affect the size of the public budget, but in uences its composition. It increases expenditures related to public housing and recreation, which we interpret as items related to clientelis- tic policies. Finally, we find a negative relationship between council size and its productivity: namely, the numbers of legislative bills proposed by councilor and approved are both lower in municipalities with larger councils.

Keywords: Corruption; Council Size; Regression Discontinuity. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 D73 H72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 30
Date: 2016-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (17)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dipartimenti.unicatt.it/economia-finanza-def054.pdf First version, 2016 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Corruption and legislature size: Evidence from Brazil (2020)
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:ctc:serie1:def054

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in DISCE - Working Papers del Dipartimento di Economia e Finanza from Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Dipartimenti e Istituti di Scienze Economiche (DISCE) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Simone Moriconi ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).