Essays on State Capacity: Bureaucratic Quality, Corruption and Patronage in Decentralized Bureaucracies

Abstract

This dissertation provides a set of theoretical and empirical analyses of bureaucracies in Brazil. In the first chapter, I analyze how the educational sector is exposed to patronage appointments by executive leaders. A key driver for patronage appointments arises by institutional design: the need for mayors to coopt legislators, with negative consequences for the quality of educational services. In the second chapter, coauthored with Romain Ferrali, we analyze how bureaucrats decide to engage in corruption, leveraging randomized audits and structural estimation. We find that audits are largely ineffective at reducing bureaucratic corruption, but a policy redesigning exploiting complementarities can help mitigate corrupt behavior. In the last chapter, I leverage micro-level party affiliation data to identify the extent of partisan networks in local bureaucracies. I find that partisan bureaucrats are primarily wealthy elites, concentrating in the upper echelons of both the private and public sector economies.