Essays on political economy and development

This thesis includes three papers. In the first paper, I use a close election regression discontinuity design to study the development effects of political alignment between local legislative constituency representatives and state governments in India. I assemble a comprehensive annual dataset on India at a fine geographic unit and find that aligned politicians have lesser growth of visible long-term investment goods, although aligned constituencies do not get less of some other variables. In the second paper, I study the consequences as well as determinants of formation of new districts and district headquarters in the Indian context. There is evidence of an increased growth (or reorganization) of economic activity around newly formed district headquarters. However, the evidence of an effect on the entire district is mixed. In the third paper, I find a negative relationship between size of political constituencies and the various variates pertaining to the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Guarantee Scheme in India. The results are consistent with a simple theory of maximization of electoral prospects by electorally motivated government where the citizens' total demand from the government is not significantly increasing in the size of the electorate.

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

• Sarkar, Sourav,Ph.D.Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Abhijit Banerjee and Frank Schilbach.

• 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/1721.1/122110

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/122110