TY - JOUR
T1 - Building connections
T2 - Political corruption and road construction in India
AU - Lehne, Jonathan
AU - Shapiro, Jacob N.
AU - Vanden Eynde, Oliver
N1 - Funding Information:
We would like to thank the International Growth Centre (IGC) for supporting the data collection of this project through the grants “Building Bharat Nirman” and “Bidding for Roads”. We would also like to thank CEPREMAP for supporting additional data collection. We are grateful to Nawal Agrarwal, Ashish Modi, Anukriti Ranjan, Shrenik Sanghvi, Radha Sarkar, and Paolo Santini for excellent research assistance. This paper has benefited from discussions with Sam Asher, Anjali Bohlken, Tarek Ghani, Guy Grossman, Dan Keniston, Ariane Lambert-Mogilianski, Karen Macours, Paul Novosad, Alexander Plekhanov, Akiko Suwa-Eisenmann, Liam Wren-Lewis, and Maiting Zhuang, as well as excellent feedback from our anonymous referees and the editor. We also thank seminar participants in PSE's IRG and India-China Workshops, the Namur Indian Political Economy Workshop, the Graduate Institute (Geneva), and the Sussex Development Workshop. All remaining errors are our own.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 Elsevier B.V.
PY - 2018/3
Y1 - 2018/3
N2 - Politically-driven corruption is a pervasive challenge for development, but evidence of its welfare effects are scarce. Using data from a major rural road construction programme in India we document political influence in a setting where politicians have no official role in contracting decisions. Exploiting close elections to identify the causal effect of coming to power, we show that the share of contractors whose name matches that of the winning politician increases by 83% (from 4% to 7%) in the term after a close election compared to the term before. Regression discontinuity estimates at the road level show that political interference raises the cost of road construction and increases the likelihood that roads go missing.
AB - Politically-driven corruption is a pervasive challenge for development, but evidence of its welfare effects are scarce. Using data from a major rural road construction programme in India we document political influence in a setting where politicians have no official role in contracting decisions. Exploiting close elections to identify the causal effect of coming to power, we show that the share of contractors whose name matches that of the winning politician increases by 83% (from 4% to 7%) in the term after a close election compared to the term before. Regression discontinuity estimates at the road level show that political interference raises the cost of road construction and increases the likelihood that roads go missing.
KW - Corruption
KW - Kinship networks
KW - Political connections
KW - Public procurement
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85035091334&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85035091334&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.jdeveco.2017.10.009
DO - 10.1016/j.jdeveco.2017.10.009
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85035091334
SN - 0304-3878
VL - 131
SP - 62
EP - 78
JO - Journal of Development of Economics
JF - Journal of Development of Economics
ER -