Reelection Incentives and Political Corruption: Evidence from Brazilian Audit Reports

As part of a recent anti-corruption campaign, the Brazilian government began to audit the municipal expenditure of federally-transferred funds. Using these audit reports, we construct a unique data set of political corruption to test whether reelection incentives affect the level of corruption in a municipality. Consistent with a political economy agency model, we find that mayors who are in their second and final term are significantly more corrupt than first-term mayors. In particular, second-term mayors on average divert, R$188,431.4 more than first-term mayors, which is approximately 4 percent of the total amount transferred to municipalities. We also find much more pronounced effects among municipalities where the costs of rent-extraction are lower, and the density of pivotal voters is higher. Our results also illustrate an important trade-off: second-term mayors, while more corrupt, provide a higher level of public goods. As Brazil and other countries continue their decentralization process, our findings promote the need for a better understanding of how local institutions can help reduce the incentives for corruption.Political Economy,

Motivating Politicians: The Impacts of Monetary Incentives on Quality and Performance

Recent studies have emphasized the importance of the quality of politicians for good government and consequently economic performance. But if the quality of leadership matters, then understanding what motivates individuals to become politicians and perform competently in office becomes a central question. In this paper, we examine whether higher wages attract better quality politicians and improve political performance using exogenous variation in the salaries’ of local legislators across Brazil’s municipal governments. The analysis exploits discontinuities in wages across municipalities induced by a constitutional amendment defining caps on the salary of local legislatures according to municipal population. Our main findings show that increases in salaries not only attracts more candidates, but more educated ones. Elected officials are in turn more educated and stay in office longer. Higher salaries also increase legislative productivity as measured by the number of bills submitted and approved, and the provision of public goods.politician salary, quality, political agency

Corrupting Learning: Evidence from Missing Federal Education Funds in Brazil

While cross-country analysis suggests that corruption hinders economic growth, we have little evidence on the mechanisms that link corruption to long-run economic development. We provide micro-evidence on the consequences of corruption for the quality of education. We use data from the auditing of Brazil’s local governments to construct objective measures of corruption involving educational block grants transferred from the central government to municipalities. Using variation in the incidence of corruption across municipalities and controlling for students’, schools’ and municipal characteristics, we find that corruption significantly reduces the school performance of primary school students. Students residing in municipalities where corruption in education was detected score 0.35 standard deviations less on standardized tests, and have significantly higher dropout and failure rates. We also provide evidence on the mechanisms that link corruption and mismanagement to learning and school attainment. The results are consistent with corruption directly affecting economic growth through the reduction of human capital accumulation. JEL Codes: D73, I21, H72

Motivating Politicians: The Impacts of Monetary Incentives on Quality and Performance

Recent studies have emphasized the importance of the quality of politicians for good government and consequently economic performance. But if the quality of leadership matters, then understanding what motivates individuals to become politicians and perform competently in office becomes a central question. In this paper, we examine whether higher wages attract better quality politicians and improve political performance using exogenous variation in the salaries of local legislators across Brazil’s municipal governments. The analysis exploits discontinuities in wages across municipalities induced by a constitutional amendment defining caps on the salary of local legislatures according to municipal population. Our main findings show that higher wages increases political competition and improves the quality of legislators, as measured by education, type of previous profession, and political experience in office. In addition to this positive selection, we find that wages also affect politicians’ performance, which is consistent with a behavioral response to a higher value of holding office.

Electoral Accountability and Corruption: Evidence from the Audits of Local Governments

Political institutions can affect corruption. We use audit reports from an anti-corruption program in Brazil to construct new measures of political corruption in local governments and test whether electoral accountability affects the corruption practices of incumbent politicians. We find significantly less corruption in municipalities where mayors can get reelected. Mayors with re-election incentives misappropriate 27 percent fewer resources than mayors without re-election incentives. These effects are more pronounced among municipalities with less access to information and where the likelihood of judicial punishment is lower. Overall our findings suggest that electoral rules that enhance political accountability play a crucial role in constraining politician's corrupt behavior.

The pattern of compliance with environmental regulation: evidence from the automobile industry

Air pollution concentrations have been rapidly increasing in the major urban areas of Brazil caused mainly by the increasing use of vehicles. In response, mandatory emission standards were introduced by the Programa de Controle da Poluigao Veicular (Proconve) in 1988. This paper uses pollution emission and characteristics data to analyze the compliance of the automobile industry with pollution regulation during the 1992-1997 period. We find that the compliance trend adopted by manufacturers was not homogeneous. Larger automobiles had the fastest compliance schedule while popular models adjusted very slowly. Also gasoline-fueled models had a faster adjustment pattern than ethanol cars. We conclude that although the regulation was successful in reducing car emissions, no further regulation was established after 1997. Additional policies that could create incentives for selling cleaner automobiles and driving fewer miles should be introduced together with a coherent policy for providing alternative public transportation systems

Gestão de riscos em computação em nuvem para a Gestão de Identidade e Acessos aplicada ao Sistema Decom Digital do Ministério da Economia

Dissertação (mestrado)—Universidade de Brasília, Instituto de Ciências Exatas, Departamento de Ciência da Computação, 2019.As informações e os dados inseridos nos sistemas e serviços digitais do Governo devem ser protegidos contra fraudes e ataques de identidade e acesso que afetam a confidencialidade, integridade e disponibilidade dessas informações, principalmente dados sigilosos quando os ativos da informação são migrados para o ambiente de computação em nuvem. Diante desta necessidade, este trabalho realiza uma pesquisa exploratória e qualitativa a fim de realizar uma gestão de riscos em computação em nuvem considerando o Gerenciamento de Identidades e Acessos (GIA) aplicado ao Sistema Decom Digital (SDD) do Ministério da Economia. O Governo Federal adotou uma política de Governo Digital que tem como uma meta ousada a digitalização de boa parte dos serviços públicos. Por outro lado, cresce exponencialmente os casos de fraudes digitais e vazamento de informações que afetam qualquer tipo de organização inserida no mundo digital. Para oferta desses serviços o governo também passa a utilizar a computação em nuvem, o que aumenta o desafio de proteger dados sensíveis ou sigilosos. Legislações recentes têm surgido como forma de estabelecer diretrizes e metas para o tratamento dos riscos e efetivação de controles de segurança, como a Lei Geral de Proteção aos Dados (LGPD) e as políticas de gestão de riscos dos órgãos. Diante deste cenário, o governo precisa mitigar os riscos de concretização dessas ameaças adotando robustos controles de segurança a fim de proteger as informações inseridas em seus sistemas e serviços digitais. O Ministério da Economia possui uma ampla plataforma de sistemas e serviços, dentre estes o Sistema Decom Digital, que processa informações sigilosas e é um dos candidatos a migrar para a nuvem. A solução de GIA reúne políticas e tecnologias para tratar riscos como o de acessos indevidos, identidades ilegítimas e privilégios excessivos. A partir do resultado da avaliação de riscos serão identificadas e caracterizadas tecnologias de GIA e será aplicada computacionalmente uma dessas tecnologias, no caso a Autenticação por Contexto ou Autenticação por Comportamento, que é uma tecnologia que autentica o usuário de forma transparente a partir de seu contexto de acesso ou perfil comportamental, ela tem um funcionamento dinâmico para se adequar as mudanças de perfil de acesso no processo de autenticação dos usuários e estabelece uma camada adicional de segurança, podendo ser usada com outros mecanismos de autenticação. O uso de soluções de segurança mais eficazes no Sistema Decom Digital tem a finalidade de preservar as informações que muitas vezes são de terceiros e garantir maior confiabilidade no uso dos serviços e sistemas do Governo Federal.Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES).Information and data entered into Government digital systems and services must be protected against fraud and identity and access attacks that affect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of such information, particularly sensitive data when information assets are migrated to the computing environment. in the cloud. Given this need, this work conducts an exploratory and qualitative research in order to perform a risk management in cloud computing considering the Identity and Access Management (IAM) applied to the Decom Digital System (SDD) of the Ministry of Economy. The Federal Government has adopted a Digital Government policy that has as its bold goal the digitization of most public services. On the other hand, cases of digital fraud and information leaks that affect any type of organization in the digital world grow exponentially. To provide these services, the government also uses cloud computing, which increases the challenge of protecting sensitive data. Recent legislation has emerged as a way to set guidelines and targets for risk management and enforcement of security controls, such as the General Data Protection Act and agency risk management policies. Given this scenario, the government needs to mitigate the risks of realizing these threats by adopting robust security controls to protect the information entered into its digital systems and services. The Ministry of Economy has a broad platform of systems and services, including the Decom Digital System, which processes sensitive information and is a candidate to migrate to the cloud. The IAM solution brings together policies and technologies to address risks such as improper access, illegitimate identities and excessive privileges. From the result of the risk assessment, IAM technologies will be identified and characterized and one of these technologies will be computationally applied, in this case Context Authentication or Behavior Authentication, which is a technology that transparently authenticates the user from their context access or behavioral profile, it has a dynamic functioning to suit the changes of access profile in the user authentication process and establishes an additional layer of security and can be used with other authentication mechanisms. The use of more effective security solutions in the Decom Digital System is intended to preserve information that is often from third parties and ensure greater reliability in the use of Federal Government services and systems

Mercado de capitalização: o resgate da história e os cenários futuros

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Contas nacionais, indicadores sociais e qualidade de vida: uma tentativa de conciliação

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