Title: Essays on economic development
Description: This dissertation consists of three essays on the economics of developing countries. The first essay studies the social transmission of "know-how": for example, how to plant a new seed variety. In my model agents choose endogenously what to tell each other, sharing knowledge whenever its benefits exceed the costs of communicating it. I show that the aggregate implications of this transmission mechanism depend crucially on whether or not pieces of knowledge complement or substitute for each other. In both those cases generic externalities arise -- even if transmission between pairs of agents is locally efficient, there are global externalities. Externalities are most severe when knowledge is complementary. I explore the implications of these results in applications to technology adoption and productivity growth.

The second essay tests the hypothesis that rich countries attempt to influence elections in poor countries by adjusting bilateral aid flows. We find that recipient country administrations most closely aligned with a donor receive more aid during election years, while those less aligned receive less. This effect only holds in competitive elections, and U.S. aid to non-government entities follows an opposite pattern. Recipient administration corruption does not predict political aid cycles; rather, we find that political cycles are primarily driven by specific aspects of the donor-recipient relationship. The third essay studies dynamic incentives for corruption in one of the world's largest public transfer programs, India's National Rural Employment Guarantee Act. We exploit an exogenous change in the statutory wage to test the predictions of a simple, dynamic model of rent extraction. We find evidence for a "golden goose" effect: when expected future opportunities for rent extraction are high, officials extract less rent today in order to preserve tomorrow's opportunities. This behavioral response tends to stabilize levels of corruption in the face of external shocks.