This seminar will take place on May 18 at 14:00. The seminar will be in a hybrid format with:
- in-person session in the IST Alameda Campus, Department of Engineering and Management's Meeting Room
- online, via Zoom https://zoom.us/j/93409037056?pwd=txOj4qB62898GgYb0gYadBpSgkrpDr.1
Our seminars are free to attend and open to everyone. Please share with whomever may be interested.
Summary
While prior research has examined the role of managerial skills among entrepreneurs and corporate managers and their effects on firm performance, little is known about whether such skills matter when held by elected political leaders and about their broader societal consequences. Leveraging close mayoral elections in Brazil between 2004 and 2020, we employ a Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD) and a comprehensive dataset covering more than 28 million births across all 5,570 municipalities to estimate the causal impact of mayors with formal management training on the incidence of low birthweight (LBW), a key public health outcome. Our results show that mayors with formal management training significantly reduce LBW. Mechanism analysis indicates that these effects are driven by increased efforts to obtain financial resources through federal transfers, higher investments in primary healthcare, and the expansion of local healthcare capacity, including physicians, nurses, and community health agents. We further find that mayors without formal management training partially offset performance gaps by appointing subordinates with management expertise to strategically important positions. Responding to recent calls to extend strategic management theory beyond firms, this study demonstrates that management skills held by elected political leaders and their high-ranking subordinates function as strategic assets that enable the mobilization and effective allocation of resources to address global challenges and create public value.
Speaker's bio
Gustavo Cordeiro is a PhD candidate in Strategic Management at Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV), with visiting research appointments at the London School of Economics and Nova School of Business and Economics. His research sits at the intersection of strategy, grand societal challenges, and health systems, examining how organizations, governance structures, and public-private collaborations address complex societal problems. Combining causal inference methods with large-scale administrative data, his work generates policy-relevant insights in areas such as healthcare governance, universal health coverage, and leadership. His international research experience across Brazil, the UK, and Portugal informs an interdisciplinary perspective bridging strategy, public policy, and health economics.