Throughout much of the developing world, politicians rely on political brokers to buy votes prior to elections. We investigate how social networks help facilitate vote-buying exchanges by combining village network data of brokers and voters with broker reports of vote buying. We show that networks diffuse politically-relevant information about voters to brokers who leverage it to target voters. In particular, we find that brokers target reciprocal voters who are not registered to their party and about whom they can hear more information through their social network.

This paper documents an externality from the agricultural use of the most popular herbicide in the world -- glyphosate -- on birth outcomes of surrounding populations. Our empirical strategy explores the initial regulation of genetically modified seeds in Brazil, the potential gains in productivity from adoption of genetically modified soybean, and the fact that glyphosate was strongly complementary to the first generation of genetically modified soybean seeds introduced in the country.

Emerging economies are characterized by an extremely high prevalence of informality, smallfirm employment and jobs not fit for working from home. These features factor into how the COVID-19 crisis has affected the economy. We develop a framework that, based on accounting identities and actual data, quantifies potential job and income losses during the crisis and recovery for economies with different economic organization structures.

Este trabajo estima el impacto de ser beneficiario del programa crédito-beca de Colfuturo para llevar a cabo estudios de postgrado en las mejores universidades del mundo sobre los resultados en la calidad y cantidad de educación obtenida y en el mercado laboral. Para ello, explotamos la regla exógena utilizada por el programa para la asignación del tratamiento (ser beneficiario del crédito- beca) estimando los impactos a través de la metodología de Regresión Discontinua.