Corruption in Peru : evidence from nepotism in congress
Date
2023-05
Authors
Tuñón, Francisco
relationships.isContributorOfPublication
Murphy, Tomás
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Universidad de San Andrés. Departamento de Economía
Abstract
Studies of nepotism in public office tend to focus on its prevalence within politicians’
immediate area of influence—specifically how politicians employ their power to hire individuals within
the bureaucracy they oversee directly. Using a large database from Peru of all public employees
between 2013 and 2022 across all branches of government, as well as electoral data from 2016, I employ
an intra-party regression discontinuity (RD) design to identify the effect of an electoral victory on
hiring relatives to public positions within the country’s entire bureaucracy. I first examine the effects of
congressional victory on nepotism in the legislative bureaucracy. I find that, compared to non-elected
candidates of the same party and electoral district, individuals who barely won their congressional
elections hire more employees that share their last names and allocate a larger sum of money to
their contracts. I then analyze the effects of winning office on the hiring of potential relatives in
other branches of government. I document a positive effect of congressional victories on these hirings
in regional governments—over which members of Peru’s Congress exercise a sizable influence—but
find no effect within the Executive or the Judiciary. These results underscore the impact of nepotism
beyond a politician’s direct area of influence and suggest previous studies underestimate its prevalence.
Description
Fil: Tuñón, Francisco. Universidad de San Andrés. Departamento de Economía; Argentina.
Keywords
Citation
Tuñón, F. (2023). Corruption in Peru : evidence from nepotism in congress. [Tesis de maestría, Universidad de San Andrés. Departamento de Economía]. Repositorio Digital San Andrés. http://hdl.handle.net/10908/23151