This paper investigates the role that sanitation plays in upholding the social contract, whereby citizens pay taxes in exchange for governments providing public goods and services. We study the case of Manaus, Brazil, where sewer connections vary considerably across the city and property taxes are calculated in a presumptive manner that does not account for a household's level of sanitation. We find that households with access to the city sewer system are significantly more likely to pay their yearly property tax, relative to households that only have access to latrines or lack access to improved sanitation entirely. We also find evidence that the social contract plays a role in this decision, as households with sewer systems are more likely to have positive attitudes towards the government and the tax system. 

With E. Kresch, J. Naritomi, M. Best, and F. Gerard

Do bribes help or harm efficiency, and how willing are officials to extract them? Using salient movements in key export commodities' prices to capture exogenous variation in capacity to extract, this paper examines the distributional (larger versus smaller firms; importers versus exporters) changes in bribe extraction when officials have higher or lower capacity. Work in progress.

This paper investigates the transmission channels of real exchange rate (RER) shocks to US labor market regions. Using recently-developed shift-share methodologies, I find that regional spillover effects dominate, while sector-direct effects are imprecisely estimated. I decompose these regional effects into cross-sector spillovers (likely driven by changes in traded-sector workers' demand for other regional services) and "trade pattern" effects that illustrate how firms' international partnerships can shape their relative demands for productive factors locally.

This paper documents macro-scale evidence of electoral corruption in Russia, specifically, employers pressuring their workers to vote for the ruling regime. Previously, it has been difficult to estimate how widespread this practice is. This paper uses indicators of output concentration by firm size, labor market slack, and labor’s relative bargaining power to capture where workers' employment situations are most dependent upon employers (and thus, where workers are most susceptible to pressures from employers to vote for the ruling regime). Using these data in conjunction with electoral results, I find statistically-significant evidence which supports the hypothesis that employer vote mobilization helps to boost regime vote share at the regional level.