Dmitriy Vorobyev (ERUNI, Czech Republic) - Professional Background and Budget Spending of Russian Regional Governors

BOFIT-seminarier

BOFIT Seminar - Dmitriy Vorobyev (ERUNI, Czech Republic) - Professional Background and Budget Spending of Russian Regional Governors

Co-author: Anna Kozlovskaia (Technical University of Munich, Germany)

Abstract
We analyze a unique dataset on personal characteristics of Russian regional governors serving their terms between 2005 and 2022, combined with a panel of detailed regional budgets, to identify relationships between governors' professional background and their spending preferences. Given that Russia has featured a substantial presence of regional governors who held officer-level positions in the military, police, or intelligence agencies before entering politics, we particularly focus on the effect of governors' military backgrounds on the structure of budget expenditures. Exploiting cross sectional and time variation in governors' turnovers, we find that governors with military backgrounds allocate regional budgets differently compared to those with business and political backgrounds, exhibiting stronger preferences towards defense and security expenses and weaker preferences towards spending on the economy, infrastructure and regional governance. We then discuss the potential mechanisms behind these results.

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