Do Politicians’ Relatives Get Better Jobs? Evidence from Municipal Elections in the Philippines

Featuring
Julien Labonne
University of Oxford

Julien Labonne will present a new paper in which he estimates the positive and negative impacts of connections to local politicians on occupational choice. To do this, Labonne exploits naming conventions, as well as a large administrative dataset collected between 2008 and 2010 on 20 million individuals in 709 Philippine municipalities along with information on all 38,448 local candidates in the 2007 and 2010 elections in those municipalities.

Labonne provides evidence that family or other ties to locally elected politicians are associated with a better paid occupation. He also finds that the relatives of candidates that were close but not successful in being elected in the 2007 election (i.e., before the data were collected) suffer cost from their connections. This was not the case in the 2010 election (i.e., after the data collection had begun).