Essays in Political and Cultural Economics

Pedro Henrique Thibes Forquesato.

01/04/2016

Orientador: Vinicius Nascimento Carrasco.

Co-orientador: Claudio Ferraz.

Banca: João Manoel Pinho de Mello. Juliano Assunção. Leonardo Rezende. Cesar Zucco Jr.

http://www.dbd.puc-rio.br/pergamum/biblioteca/php/mostrateses.php?open=1&arqtese=1213266_2016_Indice.html

Essays in Political and Cultural Economics

Nível: Doutorado

This thesis is composed of three papers, the first in organizational economics and culture; the last two in political economics. In the first chapter, we model the relation between dissemination of social norms of work ethic and incentives proposed by firms, which we motivate using evidence from three different datasets. In our model, when the effort of workers in a firm is complementary, high coworker's effort increases an agent's productivity, and consequently firms (endogenously) choose high-powered incentives, demanding more effort. Predicting this, parents prefer to transmit a cultural trait that favors effort in societies where firms choose high-powered incentives, because the dissemination of work ethic is wider, producing (dynamic) multiple equilibria.
In the second chapter, we examine whether neighbors' income affects voting, using data of election results for 2004-2012 Presidential Elections in Unites Stades, by precinct and block group. That way, we try to contribute to understanding the reason why there are different demands for income redistribution. As an identification strategy, we use year fixed-effects and tract year dummies; tract is the smallest geographic unit larger than block group (on average, each tract contains 4 block groups). Our hypothesis is that, within a tract and electoral cycle, living decisions are essentially random. We find that rich voters vote more progressively when living closer to the poor, while poor voters vote more conservatively when closer to the rich. We discuss theoretical explanations for these results.
In the third chapter, we study patronage, investigating the effect of a mayoral candidate's victory on the probability that members of his party (or parties in the same presidential coalition) occupy public jobs in the government, or on their income accrued from government, in case they are already public employees. We also analyze the effect of a party's victory over the number of registered members of that party in future years, which would indicate that voters affiliate to political parties as a way to signal support to the office holder. We estimate plausibly causal effects of a party holding mayoral position by comparing municipalities where that party nearly won with places where it nearly lost. We find no evidence of patronage or of support signaling in our database, which covers the 2008 election in Brazilian Northeast.

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