Research

How does anti-corruption enforcement change the way governments buy goods and services? We study Brazil’s municipal audit program, which randomly selected municipalities for audit through public lotteries, and link audit timing to administrative records covering 2,420,972 tenders. Using a staggered difference-in-differences design, we find no detectable change in procurement volume and the broad allocation across direct, restricted, and open procedures. Within direct contracting, the procurement modality that grants officials discretion over firm selection falls below half of its pre-audit mean. Audits also shift firm selection toward younger firms in direct and restricted tenders, but they do not expand firm entry. Overall, audits change how municipalities use discretion and some margins of firm selection, rather than expanding procurement competition.

This paper examines whether declines in men’s relative economic standing lead to a conservative backlash in political beliefs and attitudes toward gender equality. Using variation in Chinese import penetration across US commuting zones and exploiting baseline differences in gender industry shares, I estimate how shocks to male and female employment influence political participation, ideology, and policy preferences among young adults.

This project studies whether a dominant private funder’s change in priorities affects academic discourse and political polarization downstream. I use the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s June 2020 commitment to prioritize social justice as a common shock and universities’ predetermined exposure to Mellon as the source of differential treatment intensity. I first test whether universities that received unusually high Mellon funding before 2015 subsequently changed the content of their humanities curricula more than otherwise similar, less-exposed institutions. I then test whether the political gap between residents with and without a four-year college degree widened more in communities exposed to those universities. This study connects the literature on how research funding shapes knowledge production with work on how universities affect political attitudes, asking whether changes in private funding priorities have effects beyond academia.