The aim of this diploma thesis is an attempt to reveal a regularity and dependence in spatial distribution of the pork barrel (i.e. the parliamentary grants) in the case of Czechia in 2003-2009. Moreover, the thesis attempts to identify some undermining factors of the proven spatial pattern in allocation of pork barrel financial sources. The selection of supported projects highly depends on subjective preferences of particular deputies being influenced by many factors. Accordingly, the diploma thesis examines a role of the spatial distribution of deputies' places of living and their influences on the spatial allocation of the pork barrel through the state budget being approved in the Lower House.

An extensive literature examines how distributive (i.e., “pork barrel”) spending is allocated among congressional districts. Much of this research finds evidence that intra-chamber factors like ideology, party, and committee membership are the primary determinants of various forms of distributive spending. However, we know much less about how extra-chamber factors such as district-level demand and the economy impact the distribution of federal outlays. In this study, I find that district-level demand and variation in economic factors, in particular, income and unemployment, significantly predict the distribution of new bureaucratic awards in the 110th Congress. The results support the contention that districts get what they need, and this raises questions about the ability of members of powerful committees to steer awards selectively to their districts. It also provides evidence for the economic “law of increasing state activity,” by which districts with higher income levels receive a larger share of federal assistance.

Submitted by Alexandre Lima Baião (alexandrelimabaiao@gmail.com) on 2017-01-03T18:28:54Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Tese de doutorado.pdf: 1916644 bytes, checksum: 8e06df5b27af8f80dc7257fc8b3b65b7 (MD5) / Rejected by Pamela Beltran Tonsa (pamela.tonsa@fgv.br), reason: Bom dia Alexandre, Para que possamos aprovar seu trabalho são necessários alguns ajustes conforme norma ABNT/APA. FORMATAÇÃO Fonte: Arial Tamanho da fonte: 12 Margens: - superior e esquerda: 3 cm - inferior e direita: 2 cm Parágrafo: 1,0cm a partir da margem esquerda de 3 cm. Espaçamento entre linhas: 1,5cm Espaçamento entre Parágrafos: 02 enter; dar 01 enter e escrever no 2º enter. ESTRUTURA Capa (obrigatório)- Fonte: Arial / Tamanho da fonte: 12 Contra Capa - Fonte: Arial / Tamanho da fonte: 12 Ficha catalográfica/ Fonte: Arial / Tamanho da fonte: 12 Folha de aprovação - Fonte: Arial / Tamanho da fonte: 12 - nesta folha não tem São Paulo 2016 Cada tópico deverá estar em uma página. - DEDICATÓRIA Fonte: Arial / Tamanho da fonte: 12 (A PALAVRA DEDICATÓRIA DEVE SER MAIUSCULO/NEGRITO E CENTRALIZADO) - AGRADECIMENTOS - Fonte: Arial / Tamanho da fonte: 12 (A PALAVRA AGRADECIMENTO DEVE SER MAIUSCULO/NEGRITO E CENTRALIZADO) - RESUMO (A PALAVRA RESUMO DEVE SER MAIUSCULO/NEGRITO E CENTRALIZADO): espaçamento simples (150 a 500 palavras), com palavras-chave (obrigatório). - ABSTRACT (A PALAVRA ABSTRACT DEVE SER MAIUSCULO/NEGRITO E CENTRALIZADO) em língua estrangeira. A numeração só pode aparecer na lista de Figuras, antes não pode. Após os ajustes você deve submete-lo novamente para analise e aprovação. Qualquer dúvida estamos à disposição, Att. Pâmela Tonsa on 2017-01-04T12:28:49Z (GMT) / Submitted by Alexandre Lima Baião (alexandrelimabaiao@gmail.com) on 2017-01-04T23:17:15Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Tese de doutorado.pdf: 2009076 bytes, checksum: 64f0a7160a0d94b4fe49a522b7978501 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Pamela Beltran Tonsa (pamela.tonsa@fgv.br) on 2017-01-05T11:00:50Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 Tese de doutorado.pdf: 2009076 bytes, checksum: 64f0a7160a0d94b4fe49a522b7978501 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-01-05T12:17:43Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Tese de doutorado.pdf: 2009076 bytes, checksum: 64f0a7160a0d94b4fe49a522b7978501 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2016-12-06 / This thesis is composed of three articles. The first one seeks to resume the discussion over the effect of pork barrel politics on vote, using more detailed data and more precise methods to verify the electoral efficacy of budget amendments. In addition, this study explored which mechanisms could convert the amendments into votes, exploring the role of local political actors, like majors and non-profit organization leaders, in the mediation of deputy-voter relations. The second article presents a study on the determinants of the budget amendments execution, focusing on three factors: a) the role of the parties that have representatives in the government ministries; b) the advantage received by the occupants of leadership positions at the Lower House; c) The influence of the fiscal rules that condition the receipt of earmarked grants by the town halls. Finally, the third article takes advantage of data about the amendments applied in health to develop a novel endeavor to assess the extent to which the amendments allocation among municipalities fulfill the local demands for fund resources. / Esta tese é composta de três artigos. O primeiro busca retomar a controversa questão sobre o impacto das emendas orçamentárias no voto, lançando mão de dados e métodos mais acurados para verificar a eficácia eleitoral destes recursos. Adicionalmente, buscou-se explorar quais mecanismos poderiam converter as emendas em voto, explorando o papel de atores políticos locais, como prefeitos e dirigentes de ONGs, na mediação da relação deputado-eleitor. O segundo artigo apresenta um estudo sobre os determinantes da execução orçamentária das emendas individuais, com foco em três fatores: a) o papel dos partidos que se acham representados nos ministérios do governo; b) a vantagem obtida pelos ocupantes de cargos de liderança na Câmara dos deputados; c) A influência das normas fiscais que condicionam o recebimento de transferências voluntárias pelas prefeituras. Por fim, o terceiro artigo utiliza dados sobre as emendas aplicadas na área de saúde para realizar o esforço inédito de avaliar em que medida a alocação das emendas entre os municípios atende às demandas locais por recursos.

The state plays a prominent role in the process of regional development. State interventions might bring radical influences into the entire socioeconomic system, to which the other actors of regional development have to adapt. Importantly, the state administrates a large amount of funds, creates large numbers of jobs, and it is led by "elites" which might influence the other people's opinions. The need for studying of the role of the state and the expenditure side of its budget for an understanding of the mechanisms of regional development is recognized by many authors. However, deep discussions of the function of the state could be hardly found in regional development theories. The aim of this dissertation thesis is to contribute to understanding of the role of the state as one of major actors in regional development via investigation of the regional impacts of public support programs. To provide concrete scrutiny, parliamentary grants (so-called "pork barrel") were depicted through which deputies annually sent large sums of money from the state budget during its approval process in the Chamber of Deputies on projects with local impact. The topic of parliamentary grants is a traditional topic for international studies within the concept of the so-called pork barrel politics, which includes all activities...

The aim of this thesis is to analyse empirically, proposing new methods to tackle disputed questions in the literature of political and labour economics, the Italian institutional setting both in a political competition context and in the occupational structure. The first paper explores the relationship between transfers from central state to political aligned municipalities and the effect of these transfers on local electoral consensus. This study contributes to the empirical literature of the political determinants of spikes in central transfers in pre-electoral periods and of the electoral benefits of pork barrel measures for incumbent politicians. Despite several findings of strong evidence that intergovernmental fiscal transfers rise during election years, in the Italian case researchers investigated little the political incentives that lay behind these increases or the success of these transfers in attracting votes. We focus on the so called swing municipalities, defined as those in which the probability of winning is close to one-half, analysing data of Italian comuni with more than 15 000 inhabitants, in the period 2007-2014. From an empirical perspective, every attempt to estimate the causal impact of political alignment on the amount of federal transfers is clearly complicated by endogeneity issues. Without a credible source of exogenous variation in political alignment, the empirical correlation between alignment and transfers (if any) can be completely driven by socio-economic factors influencing both dimensions. We propose a new model specification to account for the endogeneity issue arising when estimating the causal impact of political alignment on transfers: the unpredicted change in the government occurred in 2011 after the resignation of Silvio Berlusconi and the following appointment of Mario Monti as prime minister. We perform our empirical estimation in two steps: first, we apply the close-race RDD setup (Lee 2008) to assess the impact of political alignment on transfers. Results from the close-race RDD show that aligned municipalities receive more grants, with this effect being stronger before elections. At a second empirical stage, we perform a local linear regression of the re-election probability of the local incumbent on transfers, including the first stage error term to have our coefficient of interest measuring only the effect of politically-driven transfers on electoral outcomes, and we conclude that this probability increases as grants increase. The second paper stems from the observation of the most recent phenomena in the domestic and foreign labour market: technological progress has been associated to a crowding-out of cognitive-skill intensive jobs in favour of jobs requiring soft skills, such as social intelligence, flexibility and creativity. Soft skills can be defined as interpersonal, human, people or behavioural skills necessary for applying technical skills and knowledge in the workplace. The nature of the soft skills make them hardly replaceable by machine work, and Among soft skills, creativity is one of the hardest to define and to codify, therefore, creativity-intensive occupations have been shielded from automation. In our work, we focus on creativity, starting from its definition in order to get significant insights on which occupational profiles in Italy can be considered creative and to explore their dynamics in the labour market. A possible analytical definition of creativity comes from the seminal work of Edward De Bono. According to his pioneering research in the field, lateral thinking is strictly related to creativity and it can be described along four dimensions: 1) fluidity, as the ability of a subject to give the highest possible number of answers to a certain question; 2) flexibility, as the number of categories to which we can bring back these questions; 3) originality: ability of expressing new and innovative ideas; 4) processing: ability of realizing concretely one’s ideas. We apply this definition to a uniquely detailed occupational dataset on tasks, skills, work attitudes, and working conditions regarding all Italian occupations: the Inapp-Istat Survey on Occupations (Indagine Campionaria sulle Professioni, ICP hereafter), an O*NET-type dataset developed by the Italian National Institute for Public Policy Analysis. The Survey on Occupations, in fact, presents a list of skills and competences and workers are asked to identify those they make use of in performing their job. Inside this list, we identify 25 skills associated to creativity and we formulate a Matrix Completion (MC) optimization problem, as discussed theoretically in Mazumder (2010). Matrix Completion is the task of filling in the missing entries of a partially observed matrix, which we generate by obscuring randomly 10%, 25% and 50% of the entries in the columns associated with the creative skills, given a fixed row (occupation). In our analysis, we use a formulation of the problem known as Nuclear Norm Minimization and we solve it with the Soft Impute Algorithm. We conclude our analysis on social skills in our third paper where we analyse the effects of Covid-19 pandemic on soft skills in the context of Italian occupations, operating in about 100 economic sectors. We leverage detailed information from ICP, the Italian O*Net, and we simulate the impact of Covid-19 on those workplace characteristics and working style that were more seriously hit by the lockdown measures and the new sanitary dispositions (physical proximity, face-to-face discussions, working remotely, ecc.). We simulate three possible scenarios based on the intensity of the effects of COVID-19 on some working conditions, such as working from home, keeping physical distance and so on. We then apply matrix completion, a machine learning technique used in recommendation systems, in order to predict the levels of soft skills required for each occupation when working conditions change, as these changes might be persistent in the near future. Professions showing a lower intensity in the use of soft skills, with respect to the predicted one, are exposed to a deficit in their soft-skill endowment, which might ultimately lead to lower productivity or higher unemployment, thus enhancing the negative effects of the pandemic.

Submitted by Rodrigo Simonaio Morata (rmorata@gmail.com) on 2017-02-16T16:40:53Z No. of bitstreams: 1 LOCAL DE NASCIMENTO E TRANSFERENCIAS CONVENIADAS.pdf: 432198 bytes, checksum: ea42bcb5bbddd6e2add57e2fcbbd1d08 (MD5) / Rejected by Renata de Souza Nascimento (renata.souza@fgv.br), reason: Rodrigo, boa tarde Seu trabalho foi rejeitado por não estar de acordo com as normas da ABNT. Efetuar as seguintes alterações: - Retirar a acentuação do nome Getúlio. - Na capa, abaixo do nome da Fundação é necessário retirar o nome do curso (mestrado profissional) e incluir o nome da escola (ESCOLA DE ECONOMIA DE SÃO PAULO). - Nas páginas que constam o nome da cidade, retirar a sigla SP que consta ao lado. - Alterar a numeração das páginas: por exemplo, se a Introdução foi a página 9, incluir o número e seguir. - Verificar o tamanho da Fonte utilizada, que também precisa estar de acordo com as normas. ABNT: http://sistema.bibliotecas-sp.fgv.br/bkab_normalizacao clicar em Normas para Apresentação de Monografias - página 12. Em seguida, submeter o trabalho novamente. Att on 2017-02-17T18:38:33Z (GMT) / Submitted by Rodrigo Simonaio Morata (rmorata@gmail.com) on 2017-02-20T00:20:53Z No. of bitstreams: 1 LOCALDENASCIMENTOETRANSFERENCIASCONVENIADASv1.pdf: 966739 bytes, checksum: 8b8fda4c7da9b76fb7063b1c7c754fcf (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Renata de Souza Nascimento (renata.souza@fgv.br) on 2017-02-20T16:28:24Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 LOCALDENASCIMENTOETRANSFERENCIASCONVENIADASv1.pdf: 966739 bytes, checksum: 8b8fda4c7da9b76fb7063b1c7c754fcf (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-02-20T17:43:01Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 LOCALDENASCIMENTOETRANSFERENCIASCONVENIADASv1.pdf: 966739 bytes, checksum: 8b8fda4c7da9b76fb7063b1c7c754fcf (MD5) Previous issue date: 2017-02-07 / O presente trabalho tem como objetivo avaliar se o local de nascimento de deputados federais e senadores influenciam nas transferências conveniadas celebradas entre o governo federal e o governo municipal. Para isto, elaborou-se um banco de dados contendo dados pessoais dos deputados federais e senadores eleitos no período entre 1998 e 2010, além de informações dos prefeitos, governadores, presidentes, dados socioeconômicos e valores pagos via convênios para o mesmo período. Utilizou-se dados do DATASUS, RAIS, banco de dados do TSE e dados do Portal da Transparência para esta elaboração. Aplicou-se painéis de efeito fixo tanto para os deputados federais quanto para os senadores, variandose o tipo de convênio celebrado. Estes foram segmentados nos seguintes grupos: valor total liberado entre a União e os municípios, o total liberado entre cada Poder (Executivo, Legislativo e Judiciário) e os municípios e sobre o recurso liberado por tipo de custeio (Custeio e Não-Custeio) entre a União e os municípios. Os resultados sugerem que, na maioria dos casos, o local de nascimento independentemente de onde tenha sido eleito o parlamentar, possui impacto positivo e significante na celebração de convênios, que pode variar entre R$ 4,60 a R$ 32,25 per capita. Quando considera-se a região de eleição, o local de nascimento de deputados possui impacto significativo em cerca de R$ 0,21 per capita em acordos com o Poder Legislativo e entre tratados cujo objetivo seja de não custeio (aproximadamente, R$ 50,00 per capita). Já para os senadores, os resultados são não conclusivos. / The present study aims to evaluate if the birthplaces of federal deputies and senators are favored in the allocation of federal government transfers. For this purpose, was created a database containing personal data of federal deputies and senators elected in the period between 1998 and 2010, as well as information from mayors, governors, presidents, socioeconomic data and amounts paid through federal transfers for the same period. It was collected data from DATASUS, RAIS, TSE database and Portal da Transparência website. To estimate the impact, fixed-effect panels were applied to both federal deputies and senators. The regressions differ from each other depending of the kind of transfer used. These were segmented into the following groups: total amount released between Union and municipalities, the total released between each Power (Executive, Legislative and Judiciary) and municipalities and the released according to the destination of the transfer (Costing1 and Non-Costing) between Union and municipalities. It was indicated that, in most cases, the town of birth regardless of where the parliamentarian was elected, has a positive and significant impact on the transfers agreements, which can vary from R$ 4.60 to R$ 32.25 per capita. When faced with the region of election, the place of birth of deputies has a significant impact of around R$ 0.21 per capita in agreements with the Legislative Branch and in Non-Costing transfers (approximately R $ 50.00 per capita). But for the senators, no conclusion was presumed.