Political connections can shape who gets hired, promoted and rewarded in both public and private organizations. While a growing body of research shows that politically connected individuals often enjoy privileged access to employment opportunities, much less is known about how these advantages affect educational investment and career decisions across generations. Rafael Macedo Rubião’s research examines whether the children of politically connected individuals invest less in education because political networks can substitute for skill acquisition in securing desirable jobs. More broadly, the project explores how patronage networks may distort talent allocation, weaken incentives for human-capital development and affect organizational efficiency.

Rubião’s research addresses an important management challenge with implications for firms, public institutions and labor markets around the world. If political connections alter the incentives individuals face when making education and career decisions, the consequences may extend far beyond individual outcomes, influencing workforce quality, hiring practices and organizational productivity. The project contributes to global management thinking by examining how political favoritism affects the development and allocation of talent and whether merit-based systems are undermined when social and political networks provide alternative pathways to employment.

The project relies on an extensive administrative dataset linking Brazilian school records, higher-education data, family registries, political-affiliation records, national exam results and matched employer-employee information. Over the past year, significant progress was made in building a comprehensive data pipeline that links millions of student records across these sources. The resulting dataset enables the study of educational outcomes, labor-market participation and the long-term effects of parental political access using rigorous causal research designs.

Support from the CGM played an important role in advancing the project. Funding supported a Brazil-based research assistant who helped develop and validate new econometric analyses, construct additional measures of political influence and independently replicate the project’s findings. CGM funding also enabled travel to Brazil to access restricted administrative data available only through a secure government research environment.  

The research has already produced a working paper, “Political Connections at School and Human Capital Investments,” which was submitted to the Latin American and Caribbean Economic Association (LACEA) 2026 conference. Preliminary findings show that the effects of political connections differ depending on a child’s stage of education. For students already in high school, parental political access substantially increases later public sector employment and may improve educational outcomes by reducing dropout and grade repetition. In contrast, younger students — particularly those already behind in school — appear more likely to enter the labor market earlier and less likely to complete high school, suggesting that political connections can substitute for continued educational investment.

Future work will expand the analysis to additional election cycles, introduce new measures of political influence and examine longer-run educational and labor-market outcomes. Findings from this project will contribute to ongoing discussions about talent allocation, workforce quality and organizational performance. The research is expected to result in a journal-quality paper and provide new evidence on how political networks shape human-capital formation and the allocation of talent across society, and will form an important component of Rubião’s broader research agenda on human capital, labor markets and political economy.