Essays in empirical microeconomics

• Ano de defesa: 2024
• Autor(a) principal: Santos, Kelly Gonçalves dos
• Orientador(a): Fuente Estevan, Fernanda Gonçalves de La
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: eng
• Palavras-chave em Português: Transparência; Auditorias; Qualidade do serviço público; Sementes de soja; Posse de terra de mulheres; Direitos de propriedade; Ambientes competitivos; Ação afirmativa; Disparidade de gênero; Tarefas domésticas; Desenvolvimento infantil
• Palavras-chave em Inglês: Transparency; Audits; Public service quality; Soy seeds; Female landownership; Property rights; Competitive environments; Affirmative action; Gender gap; Household chores; Child development
• Link de acesso: https://hdl.handle.net/10438/35393

The selection of public sector employees is a key determinant of the state's effectiveness. Given that politicians hold sway over bureaucracies, could increases in political accountability improve bureaucratic selection? This paper exploits randomized anti-corruption audits in Brazil to investigate this possibility. Our findings demonstrate that audits enhance the quality of the bureaucracy, especially for frontline positions that directly affect public service delivery and require qualifications to be performed effectively. The improvement occurs for positions hired discretionarily and hired via civil service examination. We also show that the effects are driven by a greater incentive to perform well in office, as opposed to changes in the politician in power. Finally, our findings show that the allocation of public sector jobs to politically connected individuals remains the same. Gender gaps in land ownership are common worldwide, favoring male-headed households. This paper studies the impact of agricultural modernization on female land ownership, focusing on the adoption of genetically engineered (GE) soy seeds in Brazil. We find a decline in female landownership in GE soy-exposed regions. We examine the role of mechanisms like credit access, property rights, and gender norms. The effects are more pronounced where rural credit is more abundant, property rights are stronger, and gender norms are more unequal. Our findings highlight the unintended consequences of the spread of new technologies on rural asset ownership, underscoring the importance of considering gender disparities in crafting agricultural and climate change strategies. The gender performance difference in competitive environments represents a relevant behavioral explanation for the observed wage gap persistence and the underrepresentation of women in the highest-ranked occupations in the labor market. We evaluate this explanation by investigating whether competitive pressure impacts the gender gap in a real-world setting from a highly competitive entrance exam. We exploit a change in competitiveness caused by the adoption of a non-gender-focused affirmative action (AA) policy aimed at increasing the enrollment of applicants from disadvantaged backgrounds. We show that policy makes the competition less fierce for eligible students. As a result, we find that eligible female applicants score about 0.1σ higher and are admitted with a higher probability relative to their male counterparts. Still, the net effect of competitiveness in performance does not change the prospects for admission. These results suggest that competitive pressure is a relevant explanation for female underperformance in settings with contest incentives. We document the allocation of chore time by gender among U.S. children aged 3-18 and examine its implications for human capital development. We observe a gender gap in chore time beginning at age 7, which widens as children age, with teenage girls dedicating over 80% more time to these activities than teenage boys. This gap persists across various demographic variables, including income, race/ethnicity, the mother's employment and marital status, family size, school attendance, and even in families with children of mixed gender. With a bunching selection-on-unobservables identification strategy, we show evidence that time spent on chores negatively impacts noncognitive skills, exclusively affecting girls. We also find evidence suggesting that chores negatively affect cognitive skills, exclusively in boys. These results are robust and remain broadly similar across a wide range of demographic characteristics.