This research aims to understand politicians' careers, looking at the monetary and non-monetary outcomes of winning a mayoral election in Brazil. Specifically, we ask how becoming a mayor affects wage growth while in office and after the mayor mandate and other monetary dimensions such as firm ownership. Further, we investigate the impact of becoming a mayor on political career outcomes and occupational transitions in the formal labor market.

 The lack of non-white leadership is often pointed out as one of the potential drivers of the racial representation gap in top positions. This paper investigates the impact of electing a non-white mayor on the share of non-white managers in the Brazilian public sector. To do so, we leverage a close-election regression discontinuity design with a unique dataset on candidates' race, constructed using novel face-detection algorithms applied to photographs of all candidates who ran in Brazil's 2004, 2008, 2012, and 2016 municipal elections. We find that electing a non-white mayor by a close margin does not significantly increase the share of non-white managers in the local administration. While these results are surprising and differ from previous findings obtained for other minority groups and the private sector in Brazil, we show that they can be understood within a context where white and non-white mayors are similar in terms of their social networks and policy preferences. 

Concerns about labor qualifications and specific skills training have been routinely debated, especially in developing countries. In this context, much has been discussed about technical and vocational education, their deployment models, and which impacts expected policies and support for this skill set. This work aims to build a signaling model in the labor market to check public policies' effects on access to TVET courses.