Pablo Querubin

When Does Policy Reform Work?: The Case of Central Bank Independence

Questions of the effectiveness of economic policy reform are inseparable from the political economy factors responsible for distortionary policies in the first place. Distortionary policies are more likely to be adopted where politicians face fewer constraints. Hence reform should have modest effects in societies where the political system already imposes strong constraints, and in societies with weak constraints, because it does not alter the underlying political economy. Reform should be most effective in societies with intermediate constraints. Furthermore, effective reform in one dimension may lead to deterioration in others, as politicians address the underlying demands through other means—a phenomenon we call the seesaw effect. We report evidence that central bank reforms reduced inflation in countries with intermediate constraints but had no or little effect where constraints were strong or weak. We also present evidence consistent with the seesaw effect: in countries where central bank reform reduces inflation, government expenditure tends to increase.

Economic and Political Inequality in Development: The Case of Cundinamarca, Colombia

Is inequality harmful for economic growth? Is the underdevelopment of Latin America related to its unequal distribution of wealth? A recently emerging consensus claims not only that economic inequality has detrimental effects on economic growth in general, but also that differences in economic inequality across the American continent during the 19th century are responsible for the radically different economic performances of the north and south of the continent. In this paper we investigate this hypothesis using unique 19th century micro data on land ownership and political office holding in the state of Cundinamarca, Colombia. Our results shed considerable doubt on this consensus. Even though Cundinamarca is indeed more unequal than the Northern United States at the time, within Cundinamarca municipalities that were more unequal in the 19th century (as measured by the land gini) are more developed today. Instead, we argue that political rather than economic inequality might be more important in understanding long-run development paths and document that municipalities with greater political inequality, as measured by political concentration, are less developed today. We also show that during this critical period the politically powerful were able to amass greater wealth, which is consistent with one of the channels through which political inequality might affect economic allocations. Overall our findings shed doubt on the conventional wisdom and suggest that research on long-run comparative development should investigate the implications of political inequality as well as those of economic inequality.

Parties, Brokers, and Voter Mobilization: How Turnout Buying Depends Upon the Party’s Capacity to Monitor Brokers

Despite its prevalence, little is known about when parties buy turnout. We emphasize the problem of parties monitoring local brokers with incentives to shirk. Our model suggests that parties extract greater turnout buying effort from their brokers where they can better monitor broker performance and where favorable voters would not otherwise turn out. Exploiting exogenous variation in the number of polling stations—and thus electoral information about broker performance—in Mexican electoral precincts, we find that greater monitoring capacity increases turnout and votes for the National Action Party (PAN) and the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). Consistent with our theoretical predictions, the effect of monitoring capacity on PRI votes varies nonlinearly with the distance of voters to the polling station: it first increases because rural voters—facing larger costs of voting—generally favor the PRI, before declining as the cost of incentivizing brokers increases. This nonlinearity is not present for the PAN, who stand to gain less from mobilizing rural voters.

Family and Politics: Dynastic Persistence in the Philippines

In many democracies a small subset of individuals enjoys a de facto electoral advantage. The existence of political dynasties, where individuals from a narrow set of families obtain larger vote shares and are more likely to access office, illustrates this phenomenon. In this paper, I study political dynasties in the Philippines and provide evidence of dynastic persistence. More precisely, I provide evidence that incumbency has a causal effect on the probability of having future relatives in office. Using a regression discontinuity design based on close elections, I find that candidates who barely win their first election by a small margin are around 5 times more likely to have a relative in office in the future than individuals who barely lose their first election and never serve. I discuss alternative channels that may explain dynastic persistence in the Philippines. I argue that access to office and public resources — important in clientelistic democracies like the Philippines — allows incumbents to give relatives an electoral advantage if they first run while they are still in office. Occupational choice, while plausibly important, is less likely to be the main driver of dynastic persistence.

Political Dynasties, Term Limits and Female Political Empowerment: Evidence from the Philippines

We study female representation in the Philippines. We first provide evidence for a previously understudied channel for female access to office: binding term limits constitute critical junctures in which dynastic women are 240 percent more likely to access political office. We then show that in municipalities where a term-limited incumbent was replaced by a relative, there are no differences in policy outcomes between those governed by a male or female mayor. We argue that the channel through which women enter elected office matters for whether female descriptive representation translates into substantive female representation. When women access office through a dynastic channel there is no gender mandate. Female politicians may be more responsive to the interests of their family (rather than those of other women) or may be unable to represent female preferences, as they are often figureheads or benchwarmers of previous relatives.