Frederico Finan

About

Frederico Finan is a professor in the Haas Business and Public Policy Group at UC Berkeley. He received his PhD in Agriculture and Resource Economics from UC Berkeley in 2006. Prior to his current position, he was an Assistant Professor of Economics at UCLA and has held various consulting roles, including with the World Bank Group and the International Food Policy Research Institute. His research interests include applied microeconomics, development economics, and political economy, with a focus on understanding the functioning of government institutions, corruption, and state capabilities. He is an affiliate of the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD), and a research fellow at IZA and the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). Finan has contributed to the academic field through numerous publications and has been involved in various external service roles, including as an affiliate and research fellow at several economic research centers. His work emphasizes the analysis of political selection, government audits, and the personnel economics of the state, among other topics.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Computer Security
• Economics
• Computer Science
• Political Science
• Business
• Law
• Demographic economics
• Operations research
• Political economy

Selected publications

• Economic and Social Outsiders but Political Insiders: Sweden’s Populist Radical Right

  The Review of Economic Studies · 2022 · 89 citations

  Abstract We study the politicians and voters of the Sweden Democrats, a major populist radical-right party. Based on detailed administrative data, we present the first comprehensive account of which politicians are selected into such a party. Surveys show that politicians and voters of the Sweden Democrats share strong anti-establishment and anti-immigration attitudes that drastically set them apart from Sweden’s other parties. Searching for individual traits that link naturally to these attitud…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Money and Politics: The Effects of Campaign Spending Limits on Political Entry and Competition

  American Economic Journal Applied Economics · 2022-09-28 · 56 citations

  article

  This paper studies the effects of campaign spending limits on the political entry, selection, and behavior of local politicians in Brazil. We analyze a reform that limits campaign spending for mayoral elections. The limits were implemented with a discontinuity that we exploit for causal identification. We find that stricter limits reduce reelection rates and increase political competition by attracting more candidates who are also less wealthy and rely less on self-financing. Despite their effec…

  PublisherDOI

• Information Technology and Government Decentralization: Experimental Evidence From Paraguay

  Econometrica · 2021 · 51 citations

  Standard models of hierarchy assume that agents and middle managers are better informed than principals. We estimate the value of the informational advantage held by supervisors—middle managers—when ministerial leadership—the principal—introduced a new monitoring technology aimed at improving the performance of agricultural extension agents (AEAs) in rural Paraguay. Our approach employs a novel experimental design that elicited treatment‐priority rankings from supervisors before randomization of…

  PublisherDOI

• Political Power, Elite Control, and Long-Run Development: Evidence from Brazil

  Journal of the European Economic Association · 2024-04-22 · 6 citations

  article

  Abstract This paper analyzes how changes in the concentration of political power affect long-run development. We study Brazil’s military dictatorship whose rise to power dramatically altered the distribution of power of local political elites. We document that municipalities that were more politically concentrated prior to the dictatorship in the 1960s are relatively richer in 2000, despite being poorer initially. Our evidence suggests that this reversal of fortune was the result of the military…

  PublisherDOI

• Brokering Votes with Information Spread Via Social Networks

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01 · 5 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Claudio Ferraz

  University of British Columbia

  76 shared

• Ernesto Dal Bó

  48 shared

• Élisabeth Sadoulet

  41 shared

• Alain de Janvry

  University of California, Berkeley

  39 shared

• Laura Schechter

  16 shared

• Johanna Rickne

  15 shared

• Robert Tetlow

  Federal Reserve

  14 shared

• Maurizio Mazzocco

  11 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Agriculture and Resource Economics

  UC Berkeley

  2006

Awards & honors

• National Science Foundation, Research Grant (PI) 2009
• Senate Grant 2007
• Latin American Studies Grant 2007
• NICHD Pilot Grant, Population Research Center 2007
• NICHD Pilot Grant, California Center for Population Research…

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