Juan Felipe Riaño

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Political contributions can distort the allocation of public resources, yet the mechanisms that allow favoritism toward campaign donors to persist remain poorly understood. Using administrative data linking campaign contributions in mayoral elections to the universe of procurement contracts in Colombia from 2012 to 2025, we show that donors not only obtain more valuable discretionary contracts and experience more and larger cost overruns, but also retain these advantages, relative to non-donors, even long after their political connections disappear and despite strict regulations. To identify the frictions that sustain these persistent distortions, we implement a nationwide randomized controlled trial in partnership with the Inspector General's Office, investigative journalists, and two civil society organizations. The intervention provides recently elected mayors with information on procurement rules related to donations and equips their different principals with monitoring capacity. This design allows us to identify the source of informational asymmetries that limit principals' ability to detect and discipline favoritism. Cost-effective deterrence emerges only when both legal principals and mayors receive actionable information that reveals the identity and recent contracting activity of donors. Leveraging this variation and the administrative data, we estimate a dynamic structural model that jointly incorporates the two key selection margins, donation and entry, through which forward-looking individuals and firms choose how to behave over electoral cycles. The model estimates the sunk and operational costs that sustain favoritism and the rest of the reduced-form patterns, while reconciling the surprisingly low scale of political giving relative to its apparent large returns. Counterfactual policy exercises show how typical regulatory interventions can reduce welfare and why they rarely eliminate the distortions created by campaign contributions.

Why do authoritarian regimes exhibit subnational variation in their use of repression versus redistribution to manage local dissent? We develop a model in which an autocrat's localized response to dissent depends on incomplete information about the geography of people's discontent and the government's coercive capacity, a feature that authoritarian governments often inherit from the past. The model predicts that when dissent rises, rulers are more likely to rely on repression rather than on redistribution in areas with strong inherited coercive capacity. We then test these predictions using novel data from twentieth-century Mexico under PRI rule. Our empirical strategy exploits a sharp increase in overall dissent in the mid-1960s and three sources of subnational variation: (1) a large-scale land reform that redistributed over half of all agricultural land between 1910 and 1992; (2) the localized presence of regime-aligned rural militias with revolutionary origins; and (3) newly digitized archival records documenting individual instances of repression over time. Difference-in-Differences and Instrumental Variable estimates indicate that after the sudden increase in dissent, municipalities with a stronger militia presence experienced more repression events and less land redistribution than areas with weaker or no militia presence. Our findings demonstrate how historical variation in inherited coercive capacity and informational frictions can shape the subnational logic of authoritarian control.

How did decolonization shape the state? Using novel data on the universe of middle and senior-level civil servants in Tanzania, both prior to its independence and for a decade subsequently, we study how state-building investments in the bureaucracy were affected by political independence in 1961. First, we establish major increases in the scale of the bureaucracy. Leveraging spatial variation in socioeconomic conditions inherited at independence, in a difference-in-differences design we find that the initial post-independence years coincide with the de facto centralization of the bureaucracy in more urban, wealthier areas, before a gradual expansion to more rural areas. Second, we provide some evidence that the relationship between bureaucratic inputs and policy outputs gradually weakens over time. Third, we suggest that reductions in bureaucratic effectiveness were more likely driven by the increasing politicization of the bureaucracy than by changes in the composition and human capital of its agents.

Governments worldwide struggle to enforce regulations against illegal activities that are hard to detect and politically costly to confront. These activities create distributional tensions: some constituents benefit economically, while others bear social and environmental costs. How this divide shapes electoral outcomes, in general, and political accountability, in particular, is poorly understood. We combine a field experiment with a structural model of multi-party competition to ask how enforcing costly regulations reshapes elections. Across Colombian mining municipalities, we randomly disclosed machine-learning predictions of illegal-mine locations to local authorities, national authorities, both, or neither. Illegal mining fell uniformly across treated arms, yet conventional accountability outcomes do not move on average, whether measured by turnout, incumbent reelection, or incumbent vote share. The experiment instead reveals a recomposition of votes across parties: vote share concentration rises roughly 22 percent above its baseline, and environmental parties gain entry and support. The pattern is sharply heterogeneous. It appears only where voters can attribute enforcement to the mayor they elect, is absent under national disclosure, and fades within twenty kilometers of a disclosed mine; where constituents depend on extraction, it reverses into incumbent backlash. To interpret these reduced-form facts, we estimate voters' demand for parties, recovering the issue salience and party credibility primitives behind them. The structural results and counterfactuals show that the response is governed by whom voters hold accountable, not by how much mining falls, and that disclosure improves political representation for voters on both sides of the issue, while the economic cost of curtailing mining falls on the constituents who depend on it. Our results suggest that the political fallout of enforcing divisive regulations could impact the structure of party competition rather than the incumbent's fate, a margin that standard political accountability measures and studies usually overlook.

In this paper, we empirically investigate whether insider-initiated corporate philanthropy aligns with Milton Friedman's hypothesis that the primary social responsibility of business is to increase profits. Drawing on detailed data on corporate giving patterns and leadership characteristics, we examine how philanthropic activities change when key insiders (e.g., CEOs) transition, and whether these donations are driven by personal motives or by broader profit-maximizing strategies. By comparing the behavior of insider-led corporations to reasonable benchmarks—and by exploring any shifts in giving patterns following executive turnover—we shed light on the extent to which charitable contributions serve shareholder value or reflect personal agendas. Further, we consider the role of family and associated foundations, analyzing whether insiders leverage corporate philanthropy for social or professional networking. Our findings speak directly to Friedman's claim: are these philanthropic decisions primarily strategic, supporting corporate reputation, employee engagement, and long-term profitability, or do they persist in ways that cannot be easily explained by profit maximization? Through a rigorous empirical assessment, we aim to deepen our understanding of the motivations behind corporate giving and provide new insights into the conditions under which corporate philanthropy either corroborates or challenges Friedman's influential perspective.

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Between 2021 and 2024, the United States experienced one of the most severe inflation episodes in decades, coinciding with renewed debate over the role of economic conditions for electoral outcomes. This paper studies the political economy of inflation and real wages using U.S. county-level data on family budget costs, nominal income, and electoral results for President and Congress during this period. Exploiting within-state, cross-county variation in changes in local prices over time, it examines how inflation, real wage growth, and purchasing power relate to changes in vote shares of incumbents, vote margins, and turnout. Real wage decline, rather than higher inflation, is predictive of Republican electoral gains, in line with an economic voting rationale. Inflation, however, retains an association with presidential vote shares beyond pure economic voting.

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As part of its Cold War counterinsurgency operations in Southeast Asia, the US government conducted a "Secret War" in Laos from 1964-1973. This war constituted one of the most intense bombing campaigns in human history. As a result, Laos is now severely contaminated with UXO (Unexploded Ordnance) and remains one of the poorest countries in the world. In this paper, we document the negative long-term impact of conflict on Laotian economic development, using highly disaggregated and newly available grid-cell data on bombing campaigns, satellite imagery, and development outcomes. We find that bombings have a negative, significant and economically meaningful impact on nighttime lights, expenditures and poverty rates. Almost 50 years after the conflict officially ended, bombed regions are poorer and growing at slower rates than unbombed areas. A one standard deviation increase in the total pounds of bombs dropped is associated with a 33% decrease in nightlights. To tackle the potential endogeneity of bombing, we use as instruments the distance to the Vietnamese Ho Chi Minh Trail as well as to US military airbases outside Laos established before the conflict started. Using census data at the village and individual levels, we show the deleterious impact of bombing and UXOs in terms of health, education, structural transformation, and rural-urban migration.

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This survey article reviews the literature on the multifaceted consequences of historical conflict. We revisit three key topics, which are especially relevant for the current Ukrainian context. 1) The negative long-term impact of bombing campaigns and political repression against civilians. 2) The interplay between forced migration, refugees and conflict. 3) The role of gender and war, with a special focus on sex ratios and conflict-related sexual violence. We conclude with an empirical investigation of the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian conflict, including historical determinants such as ethnic populations, historical political repression and voting outcomes.

Can the media determine the success or failure of institutional reforms? We study the adoption of secret voting in the US and the role of media in this arguably crucial step to improve democracy. Using a difference-in-difference identification strategy and a rich dataset on local newspapers, we find that areas with high levels of media penetration exhibited multiple improvements in democratization outcomes following the adoption of the electoral reform. Specifically, the press contributed to the decrease in partisan attachment and support for dominant parties. It undermined the unintended consequence of the manipulation of electoral boundaries and the fall in turnout. We consider multiple concerns about our identification strategy and address the potential endogeneity of newspapers using an instrumental variable approach that exploits the introduction of wood-pulp paper technology, and woodland coverage at the county level in 1880. Exploring the heterogeneous effects of our results, we argue that the media mattered through the distribution of information to voters, and the increase of public awareness about political misconduct.

How can clientelism impose restrictions on bureaucratic state capacity? We develop a model of the politics of state capacity building undertaken by incumbent parties that have a comparative advantage in clientelism rather than in public goods provision. The model predicts that, when challenged by opponents, clientelistic incumbents have the incentive to prevent investments in state capacity. We provide empirical support for the model's implications by studying policy decisions by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) that affected local state capacity across Mexican municipalities and over time. Our difference-in-differences and instrumental variable identification strategies exploit a national shock that threatened the Mexican government's hegemony in the early 1960s. The intensity of this shock, which varied across municipalities, was partly explained by severe droughts that occurred during the 1950s.

We examine the long-term impact of violence on educational attainment, with evidence from Colombia's La Violencia. Individuals exposed to violence during, and especially before, their schooling years experience a significant and economically meaningful decrease in years of schooling. This impact has consequences beyond human capital accumulation: exposed cohorts engage in activities with less human capital content. Violence thus influenced aggregate development—particularly the process of structural transformation, in which some sectors gain prominence as income increases. The effects result not so much from the direct destruction of physical infrastructure, but from affected households' responses to the hardships of conflict.

Tax evasion lies at the core of the relationship between citizens and the state: it reflects the level of trust in the state and compliance with society's implicit `social contract'. However, empirically analyzing it is challenging, with few direct and reliable measures. This has hampered the advancement of the theoretical and empirical literature, which is especially underdeveloped in the case of indirect tax evasion. We conduct list experiments on a large sample of households to estimate the incidence of value-added tax (VAT) evasion, as well as the extent of social desirability bias in respondent answers. Around 20% of respondents engage in evasion and, surprisingly, they are not ashamed to recognize this openly. Evasion is more prevalent in places with more informality and less physical presence of the state, as well as among poorer, less educated individuals, and those who disregard the rule of law.

Exchanging one's vote for particularistic benefits—practices usually grouped under clientelism—is often thought to weaken programmatic links between citizens and politicians and disincentivize public good provision, as well as undermine voter autonomy and the ideal role of elections. However, empirically analyzing this key phenomenon for the working of democracies entails formidable challenges. We conduct list experiments on a large sample of households to estimate the incidence of clientelistic vote buying, as well as the extent to which respondents refrain from openly recognizing this behavior. Nearly one out of every five respondents engage in clientelism, and, surprisingly, they do not feel ashamed to admit it. Guided by the existing literature and systematically verifying the sensitivity of the results to model specification, we examine the robust correlates of clientelism and discuss the implications of our key findings.

Juan Felipe Riaño

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