Paulo Júlio

The Good, the Bad, and the Different: Can Gender Quotas Raise the Quality of Politicians?

This paper models, for the first time, the relationship between gender quotas and the quality of elected public officials. In our economy, females and males can be either high or low-skill. The number of high-skill individuals elected for public office determines the overall quality of politicians. Women suffer from gender discrimination in the labor market and in the political market, and are underrepresented in elected political bodies in the status quo. Introducing a quota increases the probability of election for women and decreases it for men. The impact of the quota on quality depends on the skills of those individuals from the discriminated (over-represented) group that are encouraged (discouraged) to run for office. We demonstrate that a higher gender quota only decreases the overall quality of those elected when the rewards from public oce are low, or when the rewards from pubic office are high but women are significantly discriminated against in the political market versus the labor market. In other cases, a quota either decreases quality only initially, but for sufficiently high values there is a positive effect on quality, or leads to immediate increases in quality. Our model also formalizes the role that policies fighting discrimination may have on the number and type of women elected.

The politics of growth: Can lobbying raise growth and welfare?☆

We consider a setup where lobbyist firms undertake contributions to an office-motivated policy maker in exchange for profit increasing regulations, in a general equilibrium model of R&D-driven growth. We find that, despite increasing concentration—which leads to higher prices and less varieties—lobbying may stimulate growth and increase welfare by means of an expansion in aggregate demand if its real costs are small. This conclusion is supported by a simple calibration exercise.

Endogenous Spillovers in the Trade-off between Centralization and Decentralization

In this paper, we revisit the classical trade-o between centralized and decentralized provision of local public goods, in a setting where in- terregional spillovers depend on the level of a national public good. We compare the standard benevolent planner approach with a political econ- omy in which decisions, in a centralized system, are undertaken by a non-cooperative legislature with no separation of powers. We observe that the policy-maker in a centralized system is able to play both with local public goods and spillovers, a mechanism that is not available un- der a decentralized system. When compared to the traditional exogenous spillovers assumption, this improves the case for centralization under the standard benevolent planner approach. However, the same is not neces- sarily true in the non-cooperative legislature, as in this case the interests of the legislator do not need to be aligned with those of the society. Fi- nally, we extend the traditional political economy analysis by considering a legislature in which decisions are undertaken by di erent committees (separation of powers), and show that it performs better than the original non-cooperative legislature, greatly improving the case for centralization. JEL codes: D70, H11, H41, H70