Felipe Valencia Caicedo

Chapter 2 analyzes the impact of private colonization on government size and public goods provision. We focus on the Donatary Captaincy system in Brazil, which split the Portuguese colony into strips of land and granted private citizens jurisdiction, rights, and ownership of the territory. Our findings suggest that longer exposure to private colonization led to smaller governments, measured by the number of public employees and public expenditures, and lower provision of public education and health in 1920, approximately 180 years after the end of the system. While some convergence was observed in 2010, negative effects on health outcomes persist over time.In Chapter 3, I study the long-run effects of female slavery in the 19th century on violence against black women. I take advantage of the draft of male slaves by the Brazilian empire during the Paraguayan war (1864-1870) and instrument the share of female slaves using the distance to the war front. I find that Brazilian municipalities with a higher share of female slaves in 1872 have more cases of physical and psychological violence against black women today. The same pattern is not observed for cases against white and brown women.In Chapter 4, we analyze jobseekers' strategic responses to (expected) discrimination in the job market. We run three field experiments with 2,200 jobseekers in the context of Rio de Janeiro's favelas. We partner with a private firm with real job openings to estimate how jobseekers' expected discrimination affects job application behavior and interview performance. Interview performance is 0.13SD higher for jobseekers randomly told their interviewer would know only their name, as opposed to their name \textit{and address}. In contrast, average job application rates are unaffected by (i) removing the need to declare an address at the application stage and (ii) information that we did not find evidence for discrimination in our audit study. Our findings show experimental evidence that expected discrimination may affect jobseekers' search, especially in in-person interactions.

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