Economic development is a complex and multi-faceted process. Among its many causes, two are particularly consequential: government and technology. By shaping the landscape of economic incentives, they impact how agents interact, invest, and innovate, which in turn affects the creation of wealth. In this dissertation I explore how this interaction happens in three key ways. First, I analyze how administrative redistricting impacts local development. Second, I study how environmental policy can weaken local special interest groups and ultimately further improve forest protection. Finally, I explore whether the introduction of mobile internet can generate educational dividends to young children in poor municipalities. Chapter 1, coauthored with Christiane Szerman, asks whether and how the structure of local government affects the economy. We exploit a large redistricting episode in Brazil to examine if, and how, administrative unit splits impact local development. Using a rich panel of administrative and spatial data, we first document that requests to split are more likely to be initiated by poor and rural districts. Employing a difference-in-differences strategy with areas whose requests to split were never approved serving as a control group, we find that splitting leads to an expansion of the public sector, some improvements in public service delivery and children's education attainment, but no impacts on the private sector. Meanwhile, outcomes are unaffected in parent municipalities. Results are consistent with adaptations of policy to local preferences. Our results inform the equity-efficiency trade-off embedded in decentralization reforms worldwide. Chapter 2, coauthored with Arthur Bragança, turns attention to the interaction of federal policies and local politics. We argue that government policies may impact economic outcomes directly but also indirectly through effects on political equilibria. This chapter examines the effects of the PPCDAm -- a centralized environmental policy that synced real-time satellite deforestation data with enforcement on the ground -- on the behavior and electoral outcomes of a powerful special-interest group operating in the Amazon: farmers. Exploring close elections, we document that municipalities governed by farmer mayors had higher deforestation rates and CO2e emissions, earmarked more resources to agriculture, and experienced more land-related conflict before, but not after, the PPCDAm was implemented. Any electoral advantage these mayors had before the policy also disappear with the introduction of the PPCDAm. Our findings are consistent with a political agency model where candidates use their occupation to signal commitment to pro-deforestation policies. Chapter 3, coauthored with Pedro Bessone and Lisa Ho, studies whether mobile broadband internet impacts children's test scores. We compare standardized test scores before and after the staggered entry of 3G into Brazil's 5,570 municipalities using a heterogeneity-robust event-study design. We find no effects of mobile internet on test scores for 5th or 9th grade students, and can reject effect sizes of 0.04 standard deviations in both math and Portuguese. Taken together, our results indicate that the arrival of high-speed mobile internet is not sufficient to improve educational outcomes either through direct take-up by individuals or through broader changes to the economy.

Creator

• Dahis, Ricardo

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-s7hf-mf40

Subject

• Economics

Language

• en

Alternate Identifier

• etdadmin_upload_819533
• http://dissertations.umi.com/northwestern:15580

Date created

• 2021-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright