Essays in comparative political economy [electronic resource]
Keywords: Business.

Chapter 1: The idea that co-ethnicity is a proxy for social network proximity -- and that ethnicity is a vi- able political cleavage because of this relationship -- is an important motivating assumption in several political science literatures. To date, however, this "network-proximity" hypothesis has gone largely untested. This analysis provides the first direct test of the "network-proximity" hypothesis, and provides support for the idea that ethnically fractionalized communities tend to have fragmented social networks. Using seven months of telecommunications data from 9 million subscribers in Zambia to directly measure the structure of social networks and census data to measure ethnic fractionalization, this paper confirms this relationship between ethnicity and network structure. It finds that across Zambia's 150 electoral districts, social network frag- mentation is positively correlated with ethno-linguistic fragmentation (ELF), especially in rural constituencies. It also finds suggestive evidence that both voter knowledge and public goods provision are negatively correlated with network fragmentation. Chapter 2: For years, studies of state formation in early and medieval Europe have argued that the modern, representative state emerged as the result of negotiations between autocratic governments in need of tax revenues and citizens who were only willing to consent to taxation in exchange for greater government accountability. This paper presents evidence that similar dynamics shaped the formation of Somaliland's democratic government. In particular, it shows that government dependency on local tax revenues -- which resulted from its ineligibility for foreign assistance -- provided those outside the government with the leverage needed to force the development of inclusive, representative and accountable political institutions. Chapter 3: The emergence of rural, secular, affordable private schools across South Asia is one of the most promising developments in the education sector in decades. Yet the question of whether private schools are actually superior to government schools remains unsettled. Observational studies consistently show that private school students outperform government school students even when controlling for demographic characteristics and some unobservable heterogeneity. Nev- ertheless, it remains unclear whether this is because (a) private schools provide students with a better education, or (b) students attending private schools are more academically inclined in unobservable ways. This paper sheds new light on this question by comparing private school performance in villages where students are known to sort on intelligence with villages where school choice is motivated by caste politics, not academic potential. It finds observational esti- mates of private school performance fall by half moving from villages with sorting on perceived intelligence to villages without sorting on perceived intelligence, suggesting at least 50% of the perceived difference between government and private school performance can be explained by differences in student composition, not teaching quality.