Ciro Biderman

Dry Laws and Homicides: Evidence from the São Paulo Metropolitan Area

Over the last 15 years, several Latin American cities have adopted dry laws, which restrain the sale of alcohol in bars and restaurants during specific hours of the week. Bogota, in 1991, was the first. Several more have followed suit, or are likely to do so in the near future. Policy makers and the general press have argued that these measures reduce crime. In this paper, we use a particular feature of the adoption of laws in the Sao Paulo Metropolitan Area (SPMA) to estimate the effect of dry laws on the ultimate form of violent crime: murder. Between March 2001 and August 2004, 16 out of the 39 municipalities of the SPMA have adopted, at different dates, dry laws. By comparing the dynamics of homicide between adopting and non-adopting cities, we estimate that dry laws reduce homicides by at least 10%, with an even higher effect in high crime cities. Results are robust to inclusion of a large set of controls, to propensity score matching, to outliers, and to correction possible spillover effects from adopting to non-adopting cities.

Na ante-sala da discriminação: o preço dos atributos de sexo e cor no Brasil (1989-1999)

O Brasil se caracteriza por elevados patamares de desigualdades nos rendimentos entre negros e brancos, homens e mulheres. Para analisar com medidas robustas o nivel de discriminacao prevalecente no mercado de trabalho procuramos, neste texto, controlar os efeitos de atributos individuais (como escolaridade e idade) e de caracteristicas dos espacos de trabalho (como formalizacao da relacao de trabalho, regiao geografica e posicao na hierarquia de ocupacoes). A partir da comparacao entre duas bases de microdados da PNAD - Pesquisa Nacional por Amostra de Domicilios, relativas aos anos de 1989 e 1999, foi possivel avancar tres ordens de resultados. Em primeiro lugar, que a discriminacao no mercado, no que concerne as mulheres, e ainda mais elevada que aquela medida pelo simples hiato entre os seus rendimentos e aqueles auferidos pelos homens; ja com respeito aos trabalhadores/as negros/as, o efeito liquido que poderia ser atribuido a discriminacao salarial parece menos elevado, na medida em que outros fatores, por vezes ainda mais importantes, atuam simultaneamente, explicando as significativas diferencas salariais que os separam dos/das trabalhadores/as brancos/as. Em segundo lugar, observamos que a decada de 1990 reduz a intensidade com que fatores ligados a discriminacao de sexo e cor atuavam sobre tais desigualdades; entretanto, tal reducao e ainda de pequena monta e se sustenta nas perdas importantes ocorridas no salario medio dos homens, notadamente brancos. Em terceiro lugar, quando observados ao longo das distintas posicoes na distribuicao de renda, os determinantes da desigualdade variam em sua importância, e os fatores ligados a discriminacao de sexo e cor mostram-se os mais decisivos, em especial entre as mulheres e negros que chegam a galgar posicoes no topo da hierarquia social.

Governance in managing public health resources in Brazilian municipalities.

This study contributes to the health governance discussion by presenting a new data set that allows for comparisons of the management of health resources among Brazilian municipalities. Research on Brazil is particularly important as the provision of health services was decentralized in 1988 and since then municipalities have been given greater responsibilities for the management of fiscal resources for public health service provision. Based on detailed information on corruption practices (such as over-invoicing, illegal procurement and fake receipts) from audit reports of health programmes in 980 randomly selected Brazilian municipalities, this study deepens understanding of the relationship between health governance institutions and the incidence of corruption at the local level by exploring the extent to which horizontal and vertical accountabilities contribute to reducing the propensity of municipal government officials to divert public health resources for private gain. The results of our multiple regression analysis suggest that the experience of health municipal councils is correlated with reductions in the incidence of corruption in public health programmes. This impact is significant over time, with each additional year of health council experience reducing corruption incidence levels by 2.1% from baseline values. The findings reported in this study do not rely on the subjectivity of corruption measures which usually conflate the actual incidence of corruption with its perception by informants. Based on our results, we provide recommendations that can assist policy makers to reduce corruption.

Articulações intrapartidárias e desempenho eleitoral no Brasil

Do Brazils political parties matter in elections? The article focuses on this problem by analyzing whether a mayors election influences his partys electoral performance in the same city. A regression discontinuity model (RDM) was used to identify the causal effect of mayors on their partys electoral performance in elections to National and State Deputies. The findings suggest that a mayors election (even by a difference of only 1%) should increase the votes for the same party in the elections to both National and State Deputy. This result is interpreted as evidence of intra-partisan linkage, whereby mayors act systematically to help elect National and State Deputies from their own parties.

A Concentração eleitoral nas eleições paulistas: medidas e aplicações

This article discusses indicators of electoral concentration published in the literature and proposes a new measurement, estimated for the elections to Members of the Brazilian National Congress from the State of Sao Paulo in the last five races (1994-2010). The resulting estimates show that the strategy of concentrating votes among the elected Representatives is less than expected according to the literature and that when the strategy is adopted, it tends to be more regional than local. Finally, the evolution in this indicator over time suggests that there are no clear trends in application of the strategy.

A Importância do Regime de Estimativa de ISS paraa Arrecadação Tributária dos Municípios Brasileiros

This paper aims to analyze the effect of a special regime of taxes, the Regime de Estimativa used on the tax on services (ISS) charged by the municipalities in Brazil. The first section analyzes the importance for municipalities to have their own tax system after the Federal Constitution (1988) and the Lei de Responsabilidade Fiscal (Fiscal Responsibility Law) (2000). In the second section the service sector is discussed and the role of the regime de estimativas as a way of simplification in the tax system. The third section presents three case studies. The first and the second case address how this regime can help the municipalities. The third case emphasizes that the simplification is an instrument to improve the tax system rather than a panacea. In the forth section some legal and public finance aspects regarding the ISS are discussed. Finaly some conclusions are drawn.

Assessing the effects of the São Paulo's metropolitan beltway on residential land prices

This paper estimates the effect of highways on land prices using the implementation of the west branch of a large beltway around Sao Paulo Metropolitan Area. This is a unique opportunity since the beltway is being implemented by branches. So, it is possible to use the zones surrounding the branches where construction has actually started as a treatment group to be compared with zones surrounding branches for which construction has not started yet. Since we have a proxy for land price data before and after construction, it is possible to estimate the impact by difference-in-difference. The evidence is that there are significant and asymmetrical effects caused by the highway construction. Parcels located close to ramps outbound of the track observed an increase in price faster than similar zones close to other (planned) branches. For parcels located inbound of the beltway, relatively far from the track (between 2.5 km and 5 km), the effects of construction and delivery/operation faced a (relative) decline in land prices. These results have consequences for transportation finance; betterment levies and value capture taxes; and welfare.

Economic impacts of São Paulo downtown rehabilitation: a simplified approach with micro-foundations

ABSTRACT Economic impacts of São Paulo downtown rehabilitation: a simplified approach with micro-foundations. Regional Studies. This paper evaluates the 2002 city proposal for renewing downtown São Paulo in Brazil. The model proposed estimates the impact on the composition of families by income strata and firms by industry if the proposal were actually implemented. Employment is key for downtown São Paulo because the deterioration of the area started when companies moved out, thereby reducing the incentive to live downtown. This paper contributes to the study of renovation programmes in terms of methodology, proposing a cost-effective strategy for forecasting fundamental variables and to the discussion of the future of downtown São Paulo, sharing characteristics with other cities.

A Concentração Eleitoral no Brasil (1994-2014)

Geographical Scattering of Votes in Brazilian Elections (1994-2014) The following article seeks to expand on a new indicator of the geographical scattering of votes presented by Avelino, Biderman and Silva in an article published in DADOS Journal in 2011, extending its use to encompass candidates in Brazilian elections held from 1994 to 2014. The results systematically demonstrate that support for successful candidates was more scattered than that for defeated candidates, with the article’s most original feature lying in the fact that such a finding contradicts theories assuming the predominance of votes for individuals in proportional Brazilian elections.

The evolution of the returns to education and wage differentials in Brazil: a quantile approach

This paper uses quantile regression techniques to analyze the returns to education across the conditional distribution of wages from individuals separated both by gender and skin color, while accounting for the endogeneity of the education decisions. Using data from the Brazilian households survey (PNAD) for the years of 1988 and 1996, the results indicate that the returns to education are significantly heterogeneous across the distribution of earnings, as well as the wage gap between the groups, according to gender and skin color. Moreover, there has been a significant improvement in the wage differentials between the groups across the years.