Three essays on political economy

Essay 1: Allies and Adversaries: The Roles of Appointees in Administrative Policymaking under Separation of Powers. In a system of divided power, public sector agencies are an important front in the day-to-day battle for political supremacy between the executive and the legislature. The executive's key agents in this conflict are his appointees, who are observed playing two broad roles: allies, where they work to help Congress implement policy and adversaries, where they fight with Congress to shift policy strongly in the executive's direction. This paper studies how these two roles arise and what implications they have for the interaction of Congress and the executive, in administrative policymaking. Thereby, it highlights how intrinsically motivated bureaucrats combined with hierarchical control affect the ability of the political principals to control the execution of policy. Furthermore, I explore how this interaction shifts under alternative institutional forms, and how it leads appointees to "marry the natives." The model makes several predictions concerning Congressional oversight of bureaucratic agencies. These predictions are broadly supported by an empirical analysis of audit reports released by the Government Accountability Office. Essay 2: State Parties and State Policies: A Double Regression Discontinuity Approach. This paper identifies the causal effect of partisan power on tax and labor policies in the context of U.S. state legislatures from 1970 to 2000. Using a two dimensional regression discontinuity design, I identify the effect of Democratic control of the state legislature, as compared to divided control or Republican control, on tax burden and the state minimum wage.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Economics.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2008

Author dc:creator

• Warren, Patrick L

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Daron Acemoglu and Robert Gibbons.

• Economics.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

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

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/43782

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/43782