PhD Candidate, Department of Economics, LSE
Contact information
Email: g.xu2@lse.ac.uk
Phone number: +44 (0)74 2578 2893
Room number: 32L.3.01
Address: Department of Economics || London School of Economics and Political Science || Houghton Street || London WC2A 2AE
Research interests
Primary Fields: Development Economics || Labour Economics || Organisational Economics
Secondary Fields: Economic History
Job Market Paper
The Costs of Patronage: Evidence from the British Empire
Abstract
I study how patronage affects the promotion and performance of senior bureaucrats within a global organization: the British Empire. I combine newly digitized personnel and public finance data from the colonial administration 1854-1966 to study the inner workings of a bureaucracy that controlled close to a fifth of the earth's land mass at its peak. Exploiting the ministerial turnover in London as a source of within-governor variation in social connections, I find that governors are more likely to be promoted to higher salaried colonies when connected to their superior during the period of patronage. At the same time, they provide more tax exemptions, generate less revenue, invest less and are less likely to be recognized for their service. The promotion and performance gaps disappear after the abolition of patronage appointments. Exploiting a fixed allocation rule to predict the appointment of connected governors unrelated to colony characteristics, colonies administered for longer periods by connected governors during the period of patronage exhibit lower fiscal capacity today. Exposure to connected governors after the removal of patronage has no long-run impact.
Publications and Additional Papers
"The Costs of Bureaucratic Rigidity: Evidence from the Indian Administrative Service", with Marianne Bertrand, Robin Burgess and Arunish Chawla, 2016.
"How Does Collective Reputation Affect Hiring? Selection and Sorting in an Online Labour Market", EOPP Discussion Paper Series 54, 2015.
"Rewarding Schooling Success and Perceived Returns to Education: Evidence from India", with Sandra Sequeira and Johannes Spinnewijn (Forthcoming Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization).