Working Papers
Targeting Online Voters: Internet and Government Spending in the US [Draft upon request]
Abstract: Politicians channel more public resources to traditional media users so as to increase their chances of re-election. The dramatic change in the news media market prompted by the introduction of high-speed Internet raises the question of whether this evidence is also present in areas with high Internet access. I investigate this question in the context of US federal spending to local governments for the fiscal years 1999 to 2010, the period of fastest broadband growth. To overcome endogeneity concerns of Internet supply, I develop a novel identification strategy exploiting the proximity to the closest Interstate highway as an exogenous cost factor for broadband provision. I show that the diffusion of this technology increased discretionary transfers from the federal government to municipalities. Moreover, these transfers were mostly in the form of domestic natural disaster assistance, housing assistance, and high-education scholarships. Consistent with the media accountability literature, I show that a plausible explanation is an increase of political engagement, captured by political donations.
Work in Progress
Affirming the Racial Divide? The Political Consequences of Affirmative Action in Brazil [draft available soon!] [poster] [video EEA-MinE]
Abstract: Does racial affirmative action, by making race a salient dimension in the allocation of resources, foster racial voting? In this paper, I investigate such unintended consequence of affirmative action by studying the implementation of the first race-targeted affirmative action policy in Brazil, the Law of Quotas, which mandated the reservation of half of admission seats in federal universities to underrepresented groups. To build my argument, I start documenting that the expansion of racial quotas in federal universities increased the enrolment rate of non-White students, while displacing White students to private universities. I then combine granular voting data with electorate demographics and predicted race of candidates from official pictures to investigate the effect of the policy on racial politics. I find that the expansion of racial quotas led to a racial divide in Brazilian politics, whereby non-white voters increased support for candidates of their same race. Oppositely to the literature, I find that this increase in racial voting did not translate into a selection of lower-quality policymakers.
Presented at: EEA MinE Virtual Sessions (February 2024), Vancouver School of Economics (May 2023), 11th Warwick PhD Conference (June 2023), RES PhD Conference (June 2023), 1st EUI PhD Workshop (June 2023), PSE-CEPR Policy Forum (June 2023), EEA-ESEM Congress (August 2023), CAGE Summer School 2022 (June 2022)
Racial Disparities in Political Representation: Evidence from Brazil, 2006-2022