Mauricio Bugarin's Blog

Rodrigo Schneider (Skidmore College and EPRG) has published the paper: “Electronic vs. Traditional Paper Voting Systems in Brazil” in Latin American Politics and Society.

The paper shows that the introduction of electronic voting in Brazil let to a concentration of voter shares among viable candidates, away from nonviable ones.

Please check the entire paper here. The access is free for a short period. Please find the abstract below:

Scholars concur that free and fair elections are essential for proper democratic functioning, but our understanding of the political effects of democratic voting systems is incomplete. This article mitigates the gap by exploiting the gradual transformation of voting systems and ballot structures in Brazil’s 1998 executive elections to study the relationship between voting systems and viable and nonviable candidates’ vote shares, using regression discontinuity design. It finds that the introduction of electronic voting concentrated vote shares among viable candidates and thus exhibited electoral bias. We posit that this result occurred because viable candidates were better able to communicate the information that electronic voters needed to cast valid ballots than were their nonviable counterparts. The article uses survey data to demonstrate that electronic voters responded to changes in ballot design and internalized the information viable candidates made available to them.

O artigo intitulado “Leilões para conversão de dívida em investimento: Uma proposta da teoria de leilões para implantação dos Termos de Ajuste de Conduta (TAC) da ANATEL” foi aceito para publicação na Revista do Serviço Público. Coautor: Hélio M. M. da Fonseca.

Resumo: Desde a privatização da TELEBRÁS em 1998, o Brasil tem assistido a uma impressionante expansão nas telecomunicações. Paralelamente, cresceram assustadoramente as dívidas das operadoras de telecomunicação, com elevadas multas regulatórias. Em 2012 a ANATEL aprovou a celebração de termos de ajustamento de conduta (TAC) para conversão de dívida das operadoras em projetos de investimento. A questão crucial é como determinar a taxa de conversão. Este trabalho propõe um mecanismo de leilão para a determinação endógena dessa taxa. Nesse leilão as operadoras propõem taxas de conversão de dívida em um certo investimento, e a operadora que oferecer a taxa mais baixa (menos reais de dívida deduzidos para cada real investido) vence o leilão. Ademais, discute como a estrutura sequencial do problema permite desenhar um mecanismo inédito de leilões sequenciais que tem a característica de criar assimetria entre os jogadores, gerando maior bem-estar social e garantindo a implementação dos projetos selecionados.

Veja aqui o working paper que originou esse paper.

Veja aqui (https://bugarinmauricio.com/academic-agenda/) os demais artigos aceitos recentemente para publicação.

The working paper “Elections, Heterogeneity of Central Bankers and Inflationary Pressure: the case for staggered terms for the president and the central banker”, co-authored with Fábia A. de Carvalho, was published on September 23, 2019 in the Brazilian Central Bank’s Working Paper Series No. 501.

The journal Economics of Governance accepted the paper “Does Enfranchisement Affect Fiscal Policy? Theory and Empirical Evidence on Brazil” for publication on September 30, 2019. The paper is co-authored with Rodrigo Schneider and Diloá Arias.

Abstract

O artigo: “Responsabilidade fiscal, a atuação do Poder Judiciário e o Comportamento Estratégico dos governantes” acaba de ser publicado pela Economic Analysis of Law Review, 9(3): 30-51, 2018.

O artigo é co-autorado por Débora Costa Ferreira e Fernando Boarato Meneguin.

The Journal of Applied Economics accepted the paper “Electronic voting and Public Spending: The impact of de facto enfranchisement on federal budget amendments in Brazil” for publication on September 22, 2019.

The paper is co-authored with Rodrigo Schneider and Diloá Arias.

Abstract

This article examines whether an increase in political participation biased toward low-income voters —­and concentrated in legislative elections­— impacts federal representatives’ allocation of resources from the federal budget to Brazilian municipalities. We use a regression discontinuity design that exploits the assignment of electronic voting to municipalities based on population size to identify the causal effect of enfranchisement on allocation of federal public spending. We find that an increase of 1 percentage point in the valid-vote-to-turnout ratio for federal representatives in a municipality increases the allocation of funds from the federal budget by 3.3%, and that experienced politicians are more responsive to the enfranchisement of low-income voters.

Key words: Electronic voting; political participation; politically motivated transfers.

JEL classification codes: C21, D72, D78, E62