The Effects of Electing a Miner Mayor: Evidence from Brazil

Advisor: Ricardo Dahis

This paper analyses whether electing a miner as mayor in a Brazilian municipality has implications on municipal environmental expenditure and general health. First, by merging different public administrative data, this paper identifies candidates for municipal office in Brazil who hold a mining permit. Then, I use close elections to apply a regression discontinuity design to estimate the impact of electing a miner mayor on public environmental expense. Furthermore, by using a difference-in-differences approach, I focus on the election of mayors who mine gold, a highly contaminating activity, and check whether potential mercury contamination due to gold mining affects health outcomes in neighboring municipalities. In both cases, this paper does not find a statistically significant causal effect, however, the analysis lacks statistical power due to the small sample size.