Spending Preferences of Russia's Regional Governors - Dmitriy Vorobyev (11.11.21)

Dmitriy Vorobyev analyzes a unique dataset on personal characteristics of Russian regional governors serving between 2006 and 2019. Many of these governors have professional or educational military backgrounds. He combines the data with a panel of detailed regional budgets over the same period to identify any relationships between governors’ backgrounds and their spending preferences, and finds that governors with military backgrounds tend to distribute regional budgets very differently from those with civilian backgrounds, exhibiting stronger preferences towards pro-social expenditures and weaker preferences towards spending on the economy and infrastructure. This lecture will discuss several potential explanations for these findings.