Differential Treatment of Politically Connected Labor Traffickers: Evidence from the Brazilian Dirty List of Slave Labor

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Abstract/Contents

Abstract: Over 40 million people worldwide were victims of modern slavery in 2016, 369,000 in Brazil alone. As part of an ambitious anti-trafficking agenda, the Government of Brazil implemented the Dirty List of Slave Labor, a name-and-shame policy that imposes financial and reputational sanctions on traffickers. Despite its relevance, there have been no attempts to identify sources of bias in the listing criteria nor to evaluate the influence of rent-seeking on the List's outcomes. Using novel data on campaign finance of traffickers from 2004 to 2018, I document compelling evidence that politically connected perpetrators are not less likely to be listed unless they are large donors, but they benefit from early removal and stay in the List 5.5 fewer months than non-connected exploiters. Being linked to ruralist legislators intensifies these effects, long-term connections matter, and there are increasing marginal benefits to donations. Tests that consider variation in the List's visibility support the hypothesis that campaign finance is used as evasion tactics. Money-giving is significantly more generous and frequent in election cycles leading up to inspection and listing years, but it drops afterwards. Although the present results are not causal, they inform a comprehensive research agenda and policy design and evaluation.

Author	Rodrigues da Silva, Maria Clara
Degree granting institution	Stanford University, Department of Economics
Thesis advisor	Miller, Grant

Subject	labor trafficker, political connection, Dirty List, human trafficking, Brazil, campaign finance, corruption
Genre	Text
Genre	Thesis

Related item	Preferred citation Stanford University's Firestone Medal for Excellence in Undergraduate Research
DOI	https://doi.org/10.25740/ws781xf2707
Location	https://purl.stanford.edu/ws781xf2707

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License: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC).

Preferred citation: Rodrigues, M. C. (2022). Differential Treatment of Politically Connected Labor Traffickers: Evidence from the Brazilian Dirty List of Slave Labor. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at https://purl.stanford.edu/ws781xf2707

Stanford University, Department of Economics, Honors Theses

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