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Essays on institutions and development.pdf
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英文博士论文：Essays on institutions and development
斯坦福大学，2007年，pdf文件，140页，不可复制
This dissertation is comprised of three essays on topics in institutions and development.
The first essay, "Death and Development," argues that high adult mortality reduces economic growth by shortening time horizons. Higher adult mortality is associated with increased levels of risky behavior, higher fertility, and lower investment in physical and human capital. This is demonstrated through analysis of a variety of cross-national and sub-national data.
The second essay, "Regularized Rioting," examines popular protest in China. Protests are often seen as a harbinger of regime collapse. Yet China since the 1990s has seen a significant rise in popular protest while maintaining economic growth and its reform trajectory. Furthermore, the Chinese government has shown its ability to effectively suppress dissent when it chooses to. This paper argues that deliberate toleration of narrow economic protests serves the Chinese government's purposes in two ways. First, it allows the government to identify and defuse ontented groups. Second, it provides a useful signal of local government corruption that can be used to supplement and direct limited administrative monitoring resources. This mechanism has become particularly useful to the government of contemporary China as the processes of decentralization and market reform have made identification and investigation of local corruption more difficult.
The third essay, "Mutual Recriminations," examines reputational contract enforcement when outsiders to a transaction can only observe that a partnership has ended due to a dispute, not which party was at fault. In the model, agents match in partnerships to engage in a transaction with two-sided moral hazard. After one transaction, they can choose to stay with the same partner or to seek out a new partner. If one agent ends a partnership after being cheated, the fact that outsiders cannot distinguish between cheated and cheater means both suffer the same reputational damage. This makes agents reluctant to end relationships following a bad outcome, reducing incentives within the relationship. As a result, higher levels of cooperation and efficiency may be sustained if information about past relationships is limited than if it is widespread.
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