What happens when a woman wins an election? Evidence from close races in Brazil

This paper analyzes the effect of the gender of local policymakers on policy outcomes. Analyzing a rich dataset from Brazilian municipalities and using a regression discontinuity design, we find that municipalities ruled by female mayors have better health outcomes, receive more federal discretionary transfers, and have lower corruption. Additionally, male mayors hire more temporary public employees than their female counterparts when they are allowed to run for re-election, and when municipal elections are approaching. These findings suggest that male mayors may promote more political patronage than female mayors and that men and women may respond differently to local election incentives

Age Variations in Workers' Value of Statistical Life

This paper develops a life-cycle model in which workers choose both consumption levels and job fatality risks, implying that the effect of age on the value of life is ambiguous. The empirical analysis of this relationship uses novel, age-dependent fatal and nonfatal risk variables. Workers' value of statistical life exhibits an inverted U-shaped relationship over workers' life cycle based on hedonic wage model estimates, age-specific hedonic wage estimates, and a minimum distance estimator. The value of statistical life for a 60-year old ranges from $2.5 million to$3.0 million -- less than half the value for 30 to 40-year olds.

Absorptive capacity and the growth and investment effects of regional transfers : a regression discontinuity design with heterogeneous treatment effects

Researchers often estimate average treatment effects of programs without investigating heterogeneity across units. Yet, individuals, firms, regions, or countries vary in their ability, e.g., to utilize transfers. We analyze Objective 1 Structural Funds transfers of the European Commission to regions of EU member states below a certain income level by way of a regression discontinuity design with systematically heterogeneous treatment effects. Only about 30% and 21% of the regions - those with sufficient human capital and good-enough institutions - are able to turn transfers into faster per-capita income growth and per-capita investment. In general, the variance of the treatment effect is much bigger than its mean

Relative wage movements and the distribution of consumption

We analyze how relative wage movements across birth cohorts and education groups during the 1980s affected the distribution of household consumption. The analysis integrates the labor economics literature on time variation in the wage structure with the consumption insurance literature. In contrast to previous tests of consumption insurance, we examine the impact of systematic, publicly observable shifts in the hourly wage structure. To circumvent the extreme scarcity of longitudinal data with high quality information on both consumption and labor market outcomes, we draw upon the best available cross-sectional data sources to construct synthetic panel data on consumption, labor supply and wages. We find that low-frequency movements in the cohort-education structure of pre-tax hourly wages drove large changes in the distribution of household consumption. The results constitute a spectacular failure of the consumption insurance hypothesis, and one that is not explained by existing theories of informationally constrained optimal consumption allocations. We also develop a procedure for assessing the welfare consequences of deviations from full consumption insurance and, in particular, from the failure to insulate the consumption distribution from relative wage shifts across cohort-education groups. For a coefficient of relative risk aversion equal to two, fully insulating households from group-specific endowment variation would raise welfare by an amount equivalent to a uniform 2.7% consumption increase

Simulation of Tail Weight Distributions in Biological Year 1986–2006 Landings of Brown Shrimp, Farfantepenaeus aztecus, from the Northern Gulf of Mexico Fishery

Size distribution within re- ported landings is an important aspect of northern Gulf of Mexico penaeid shrimp stock assessments. It reflects shrimp population characteristics such as numerical abundance of various sizes, age structure, and vital rates (e.g. recruitment, growth, and mortality), as well as effects of fishing, fishing power, fishing practices, sampling, size-grading, etc. The usual measure of shrimp size in archived landings data is count (C) the number of shrimp tails (abdomen or edible portion) per pound (0.4536 kg). Shrimp are marketed and landings reported in pounds within tail count categories. Statistically, these count categories are count class intervals or bins with upper and lower limits expressed in C. Count categories vary in width, overlap, and frequency of occurrence within the landings. The upper and lower limits of most count class intervals can be transformed to lower and upper limits (respectively) of class intervals expressed in pounds per shrimp tail, w, the reciprocal of C (i.e. w = 1/C). Age based stock assessments have relied on various algorithms to estimate numbers of shrimp from pounds landed within count categories. These algorithms required un- derlying explicit or implicit assumptions about the distribution of C or w. However, no attempts were made to assess the actual distribution of C or w. Therefore, validity of the algorithms and assumptions could not be determined. When different algorithms were applied to landings within the same size categories, they produced different estimates of numbers of shrimp. This paper demonstrates a method of simulating the distribution of w in reported biological year landings of shrimp. We used, as examples, landings of brown shrimp, Farfantepenaeus aztecus, from the northern Gulf of Mexico fishery in biological years 1986–2006. Brown shrimp biological year, Ti, is defined as beginning on 1 May of the same calendar year as Ti and ending on 30 April of the next calendar year, where subscript i is the place marker for biological year. Biological year landings encompass most if not all of the brown shrimp life cycle and life span. Simulated distributions of w reflect all factors influencing sizes of brown shrimp in the landings within a given biological year. Our method does not require a priori assumptions about the parent distributions of w or C, and it takes into account the variability in width, overlap, and frequency of occurrence of count categories within the landings. Simulated biological year distributions of w can be transformed to equivalent distributions of C. Our method may be useful in future testing of previously applied algorithms and development of new estimators based on statistical estimation theory and the underlying distribution of w or C. We also examine some applications of biological year distributions of w, and additional variables derived from them

Electoral rules, political competition and fiscal spending : regression discontinuity evidence from Brazilian municipalities

We exploit a discontinuity in Brazilian municipal election rules to investigate whether political competition has a causal impact on policy choices. In municipalities with less than 200,000 voters mayors are elected with a plurality of the vote. In municipalities with more than 200,000 voters a run-off election takes place among the top two candidates if neither achieves a majority of the votes. At a first stage, we show that the possibility of runoff increases political competition. At a second stage, we use the discontinuity as a source of exogenous variation to infer causality from political competition to fiscal policy. Our second stage results suggest that political competition induces more investment and less current spending, particularly personnel expenses. Furthermore, the impact of political competition is larger when incumbents can run for reelection, suggesting incentives matter insofar as incumbents can themselves remain in office.Electoral Systems; Strategic Voting; Political Competition; Regression Discontinuity; Fiscal Spending. JEL Codes: H72; D72; C14; P1

Years of Schooling, Human Capital and the Body Mass Index of European Females

We use the compulsory school reforms implemented in European countries after the II World War to investigate the causal effect of education on the Body Mass Index (BMI) and the incidence of overweight and obesity among European females. Our IV estimates suggest that years of schooling have a protective effect on BMI. The size of the estimated effect is not negligible but smaller than the one found in comparable recent work for the US. We depart from the current empirical literature in three main directions. First, we use a multi-country approach. Second, we complement the standard analysis of the causal impact of years of schooling on BMI with one relying on a broader measure of education, i.e. individual standardized cognitive tests, and show that the current focus in the literature on years of schooling as the measure of education is not misplaced. Last, we evaluate whether the current focus on conditional mean effects should be integrated with an approach which allows for heterogeneous responses to changes in compulsory education. Although our evidence based on quantile regressions is mixed, there is some indication that the protective effect of schooling does not increase monotonically from the lower to the upper quantile of the distribution of BMI. Rather, the marginal effect is stronger among overweight (but not obese) females than among females with BMI above 30.obesity, human capital, Europe

Years of Schooling, Human Capital and the Body Mass Index of European Females

We find that the protective effect of years of schooling on the BMI of European females is non negligible, but smaller than the one recently found for the US. By using individual standardized cognitive tests instead of years of schooling as the measure of education we show that the current focus in the literature on years of schooling is not misplaced. We also investigate whether the response to changes in compulsory education is heterogeneous, and find that the protective effect of schooling is stronger among overweight than among obese females.Obesity, human capital, Europe