Working Papers:

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Leadership & Gender Composition in Top Positions: Evidence from the Brazilian Public Sector (Submitted)

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Despite major progress in fighting gender inequality over the past sixty years, women remain heavily underrepresented at the top of the status distribution in both the public and private sectors. Surprisingly, very little evidence exists about how female leaders may curb the underrepresentation problem at top positions. Only a few studies have evaluated this relation, presenting mixed results on general effects and scarce evidence on mechanisms.  Using a Regression Discontinuity Design on close elections in Brazil, I analyze how the election of a female mayor affects the gender composition gap of top municipal executives. I show that electing a female mayor on a close race increases the share of female managers by 17 %. This increase doesn't come at the cost of observed quality of employees. I also present evidence that public sector-specific and supply-side channels are unlikely to explain my findings; instead, an increase in gender-inclusive policies within female-led governments suggests that homophily may be a driver of the results. 

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Do Black Politicians Matter? Political Leadership and Racial Composition on Top Public Sector Positions

(w/ Fernanda Estevan,  Marcos Y. Nakaguma, Alexandre Rabelo)

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The lack of non-white leadership is often pointed out as one of the potential drivers of the racial representation gap in top positions. This paper investigates the impact of electing a non-white mayor on the share of non-white managers in the Brazilian public sector. Focusing on local elections, we use a regression discontinuity design to estimate the impact of electing a non-white mayor on a given municipality over the share of non-white municipal managers. We find that electing a non-white mayor is not associated with any significant increase in the share of non-white managers. We further perform a mechanisms analysis, that suggests that homogeneity across races among mayors' networks can explain the absence of compositional impacts of the election non-white managers.  

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Football and Anti-migration Sentiment: Evidence from the FIFA World Cup (With G. Ippedico) (Draft coming soon)

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Natives are often misinformed about immigrants' characteristics, underestimating the positive potential labor market impacts of their presence and overestimating the cultural differences between both. We investigate if the over-performance of high-migrant football national teams is able to affect migrant perception.  Using a triple difference methodology, we show that high-migrant over-performers experienced a significant increase in positive feelings towards non-E.U. migrants post 2018 FIFA world cup. Comparing respondents interviewed shortly before with others interviewed shortly after a qualifying matches match, we also show that victories in these matches  are associated with significantly more positive feelings toward non-E.U. migrants for women. In both cases, we do not observe any increase in proxies for national pride or views of E.U. migrants. 

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Corruption, Political Participation and Outsider Politicians (w/ Socorro P. Martínez)

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Recent events in democracies worldwide have drawn a lot of attention to the relationship between corruption and political participation. Some studies have focused on understanding the impact of corruption on the level of trust in institutions. This paper uses a random corruption audit program in Brazil to cast light on the relationship between corruption and political participation. Different from other studies, we analyze corruption impacts at a different electoral level from where the corruption act took place. Empirical analysis show that while being a standard deviation away from the mean of corruption violations and having random audits released before the election is not associated with a decrease in null voting on the local level, being in the same position of the corruption violation distribution and having random audits released prior to the election is associated with a 4\% decrease in null voting in gubernatorial elections. This result casts light on possible spillover effects of corruption and suggests that it may increase political participation when we isolate supply effects. Furthermore, higher corruption and pre-election report release also increase votes for outsider politicians when combined with media prevalence.    

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Work in Progress:

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How does discrimination affect performance at the workplace? Evidence from ghost stadiums. (With K. Kunze)

Public Sector and entrepreneurship: Evidence from a large public service exams in Brazil.

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