The Costs of Patronage: Evidence from the British Empire
By Guo Xu. The American Economic Review, 2018
140 citations recorded by the source corpus.
I combine newly digitized personnel and public finance data from the British colonial administration for the period 1854–1966 to study how patronage affects the promotion and incentives of governors. Governors are more likely to be promoted to higher salaried colonies when connected to their superior during the period of patronage. Once allocated, they provide more tax exemptions, raise less revenue, and invest less. The promotion and performance gaps disappear after the abolition of patronage appointments. Patronage therefore distorts the allocation of public sector positions and reduces the incentives of favored bureaucrats to perform. (JEL D73, F54, H83, J45, M51, N43, N44)
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Political Science and International Relations
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ceffef3c3f9660d909e458b19131c930b4d3c479
How researchers see this paper
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In Economics and Econometrics
- Junyan Jiang
- Muyang Zhang
- Robin Burgess
- Guo Xu
- Arunish Chawla
- Marianne Bertrand
- J. Rud
- Dan-Olof Rooth
In Political Science and International Relations
Citations in the corpus
- The Glittering Prizes: Career Incentives and Bureaucrat Performance (2019, background): “…by providing objective, impartial criteria for career progression in settings where performance is difficult to measure (Iyer and Mani 2012, Xu 2018).2 The IAS shares these classic characteristics of modern professional bureaucracies around the world and this helps to give the findings…”
- Friends with benefits: Patronage networks and distributive politics in China (2020, methodology): “…random, existing evidence suggests that when rotation will happen is mainly a function of the incumbent leader’s tenure and (in some cases) high-level political factors orthogonal to city-level conditions.10 This identification strategy is similar to those used in Jia and Nie (2017) and Xu (2018).”