Dilip Mookherjee - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Dilip Mookherjee

This paper examines allocation of benefits under local government programs in West Bengal, India ... more This paper examines allocation of benefits under local government programs in West Bengal, India to isolate patterns consistent with political clientelism. Using household survey data, we find that voters respond positively to private welfare benefits but not to local public good programs, while reporting having benefited from both. Consistent with the voting patterns, shocks to electoral competition induced by exogenous redistricting of villages resulted in upper-tier governments manipulating allocations across local governments only for welfare programs. Through the lens of a hierarchical budgeting model, we argue these results provide credible evidence of the presence of clientelism rather than programmatic politics.

We investigate political determinants of land reform implementation in the Indian state of West B... more We investigate political determinants of land reform implementation in the Indian state of West Bengal. Using a village panel spanning 1974-98, we do not find evidence supporting the hypothesis that these can be explained by differences in redistributive ideologies of the Left Front and the Congress party, i.e., their relative control of local governments. Instead, the evidence is consistent with the role of opportunism (re-election concerns) and electoral competition. 1 We thank the MacArthur Foundation Inequality Network for funding the data collection. We are grateful to various officials of the West Bengal government for giving us access to the data; to Sankar Bhaumik and Sukanta Bhattacharya of the Department of Economics, Calcutta University who led the village survey teams, and Indrajit Mallick for helping us collect the election data. For useful comments and suggestions we thank Debu Bandyopadhyay, Abhijit Banerjee, Partha Chatterjee,

Virtually every day newspapers contain stories of violence between ethnic groups and other ascrip... more Virtually every day newspapers contain stories of violence between ethnic groups and other ascriptively defined communities (religious, national, linguistic, and so forth). The events occur all over the world : the Serbian military attacks ethnic Albanians in Kosovo; several dozen people in Northern Ireland are killed by a bomb planted by a hardline rejectionist group, and so on. It has

No abstract is available for this item. ... To our knowledge, this item is not available for down... more No abstract is available for this item. ... To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options: 1. Check below under "Related research" whether another version of this item is available online. 2. Check on the ...

Journal of Political Economy, 2001

This paper presents a theory of rent-seeking within farmer cooperatives in which inequality of as... more This paper presents a theory of rent-seeking within farmer cooperatives in which inequality of asset ownership affects relative control rights of different groups of members. The two key assumptions are constraints on lumpsum transfers from poorer members and disproportionate control rights wielded by wealthier members. Transfer of rents to the latter are achieved by depressing prices paid for inputs supplied

Page 1. Contract Complexity, Incentives, and the Value of Delegation NAHUM MELUMAD Graduate Schoo... more Page 1. Contract Complexity, Incentives, and the Value of Delegation NAHUM MELUMAD Graduate School of Business Columbia University New York, NY 10027DILIP MOOKHERJEE Boston University Boston, MA 02215 STEFAN ...

We examine effect of randomized reservations of Pradhan (chief executive) positions in West Benga... more We examine effect of randomized reservations of Pradhan (chief executive) positions in West Bengal local governments (panchayats) for women and members of Scheduled Caste/Scheduled Tribes (SC/ST) following the 73rd and 74th Constitutional Amendments of 1993. Our sample consists of 89 villages spread throughout 15 rural districts of West Bengal, in which we examine effects on targeting to poor and SC/ST households of IRDP credit, agricultural extension programs, employment programs, and budgetary policies. We find the reservations were associated with improved targeting of the IRDP program, but poorer targeting of employment programs, and lower local revenues raised by the panchayats. Aggregating pecuniary effects of the IRDP and employment programs, the net effect of the reservations appears to have worsened targeting to SC/ST and landless households. The effects also differ with local land inequality and poverty among SC/ST groups: reservations improved targeting in villages with low inequality and poverty, but worsened targeting among the rest.

The Grossman-Hart principal-agent model of moral hazard is extended to the multiple agent case to... more The Grossman-Hart principal-agent model of moral hazard is extended to the multiple agent case to explore the use of relative performance in optimal incentive contracting. Under the assumption that the principal chooses incentive schemes to implement agent actions as Nash ...

A common presumption is that decentralization is prone to a potential pitfall owing to the greate... more A common presumption is that decentralization is prone to a potential pitfall owing to the greater vulnerability of local governments to capture by local elites. We investigate the determinants of relative capture of local and national governments theoretically, in the context of an extended version of the Baron-Grossman-Helpman model of electoral competition with lobbying by special interest groups. A number of factors do provide support to the traditional presumption, such as reduced cohesiveness of interest groups, higher levels of voter awareness, and greater electoral competition at the national level. A number of other factors may, however, create an opposite tendency for lower capture at the local level. These include less electoral uncertainty at the national level, and a higher value of campaign funds in national elections owing to their fungibility across different districts. Relative capture also depends on heterogeneity across districts with respect to levels of local inequality and poverty: accordingly decentralization will tend to increase capture in high inequality districts and lower it in low inequality districts. Power-sharing between parties at the national level, due either to coalition governments or proportional representation, limits the extent of national capture. We conclude that empirical research is necessary to investigate the extent and determinants of relative capture. vzlwfk dq| sduw|*v srolf| lv vwloo jlyhq e| +9,1 Dvvxplqj wkdw wkh sduwlflsdwlrq frqvwudlqwv elqg/ sduw| D zlqv hdfk glvwulfw zlwk suredelolw| J / dqg wklv lv dovr wkh iudfwlrq ri vhdwv lq wkh qdwlrqdo dvvhpeo| lw zlqv +l1h1/ j @ J ,1 Wkhq J lv dq h{rjhqrxv sdudphwhu wkdw wkh oree| grhv qrw wu| wr lqxhqfh1 Lw vhohfwv srolf| sodwirupv > wr pd{lpl}h X o + J . +4 J , , . Q ,qo^Z U + , . Z U + ,`/ zklfk uhgxfhv wr wkh pd{lpl}dwlrq ri Z U + , . Z U + , . o" o X o + J . +4 J , , +5<, Lq frqwudvw srolflhv dw wkh orfdo ohyho zloo eh fkrvhq wr pd{lpl}h Z U + , . Z U + , . o" o J X o + , . +4 J ,X o + , +63,

Failure to impose sufficiently high penalties for tax offences is often cited as a cause of wides... more Failure to impose sufficiently high penalties for tax offences is often cited as a cause of widespread tax evasion, especially in developing countries. This view obtains support from the theoretical analyses of Becker (1968) and Allingham and Sandmo (1972) which ...

Abstract This paper examines evidence for contracting distortions in procurement of sugarcane by ... more Abstract This paper examines evidence for contracting distortions in procurement of sugarcane by Indian sugar factories with differing ownership or management. The key incentive problem is that residual claimants to factory profits can exploit their ex post ...

In an experiment where potato farmers in randomly chosen villages in two Indian districts were pr... more In an experiment where potato farmers in randomly chosen villages in two Indian districts were provided information about prices at which middlemen resold their output, we find no significant average treatment effects on traded quantities or revenues, but both became more responsive to market price variations. The results confirm predictions of a model of ex post bargaining and sequential price competition between village middlemen and external middlemen, where farmers lack direct access to wholesale markets. Alternative explanations such as collusion, simultaneous price competition and insurance via relational contracts between middlemen and farmers can be ruled out. (JEL Codes: O120, L140)

A household panel data set is used to investigate the effects of economic growth on firewood coll... more A household panel data set is used to investigate the effects of economic growth on firewood collection in Nepal between 1995 and 2010. Results from preceding crosssectional analyses are found to be robust: (a) rising consumptions for all but the top decile were associated with increased firewood collections, contrary to the Poverty-Environment hypothesis; (b) sources of growth matter: increased livestock was associated with increased collections, and falling household size, increased education, non-farm business assets and road connectivity with reduced collections. Nepal households collected 25% less firewood over this period, mostly explained by falling livestock, and rising education, connectivity and out-migration. JEL Classification Numbers: D12, O1, Q2

The celebration of communitarianism by political philosophers Liberalism and the Limits of Justic... more The celebration of communitarianism by political philosophers Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) has apparently been extended to strategic analyses of ascriptively attuned norms . "Explaining Interethnic Cooperation." American Political Science Review 90: 715-735) -an intriguing development, given game theory's individualistic premises. We believe, however, that game theory offers little comfort to prescriptive theories of communitarian rules: a hardheaded strategic analysis supports the Enlightenment view that such norms tend to be Pareto inefficient or distributionally unjust. This survey uses a specific criterion -supporting cooperation as a Nash equilibrium -to compare communitarian norms, which turn on people's ascriptive identities, to universalistic ones, which focus on people's actions. We show that universalistic rules are better at stabilizing cooperation in a broad class of circumstances. Moreover, communitarian norms hurt minorities the most, and the advantages of universalism become more pronounced the more ascriptively fragmented a society is or the smaller is the minority group.

Journal of Political Economy, 2001