Endogenous elites: power structure and patron-client relationships

Persistence of Power, Elites, and Institutions

In this paper, we construct a simple model of simultaneous change and persistence in institutions. The model consists of landowning elites and workers, and the key economic decision concerns the form of economic institutions regulating the transaction of labor (e.g., competitive markets versus labor repression). The main idea is that equilibrium economic institutions are a result of the exercis...

Army Recruitment and Patron - Client Relationship in Colonial Punjab: A Grassroots Perspective

The Role of Civil Society and Patron-client Networks in the Analysis of Corruption

The endemic nature of corruption in developing countries and the potential damage this can cause if it remains entrenched is not in question. In the search for policy responses attention has increasingly turned to the possible role of civil society in controlling corruption. The argument is that if civil society can be strengthened and its efforts at monitoring the state encouraged, this would ...

Nber Working Paper Series Persistence of Power, Elites and Institutions

We construct a model of simultaneous change and persistence in institutions. The model consists of landowning elites and workers, and the key economic decision concerns the form of economic institutions regulating the transaction of labor (e.g., competitive markets versus labor repression). The main idea is that equilibrium economic institutions are a result of the exercise of de jure and de fa...

Endogenous insurance and informal relationships

Heterogeneously risk-averse individuals who lack access to formal insurance build and use relationships with each other to manage risk. I show that the composition of equilibrium relationships under pairwise matching and when group size is endogenous is determined by a mean-variance trade-o¤ across di¤erentially risky productive opportunities, though output distributions may have in…nitely-many...