Essays in development and political economy

This thesis studies three questions in economic development and political economy. Chapter 1 presents empirical evidence on the causal effect of close elections on political selection and performance in India. An extensive literature in political economy predicts electoral competition improves governance. Empirical work testing this theory is scarce, however, due in large part to the difficulty in identifying the causal impact of competition, which is itself an equilibrium outcome shaped by politician behavior. To address this identification challenge, this paper proposes a shift-share instrument that uses variation in aggregate party popularity over time ("shifts") and local party preferences across space ("initial shares") to predict the vote-margin gap in local elections.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctoral

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Economics

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2019

Author dc:creator

• Shaukat, Mahvish Ifrah.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Benjamin Olken and Esther Duflo.

• Economics.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/122108

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/122108