Commodity traders are often the focus of popular resentment. Food price hikes in 2007-2008 resulted in protests and food riots, and spurred governments to regulate traders. In March 2011, Government of Bangladesh banned delivery order traders in the edible oils market, citing cartelization, and...

West Bengal potato farmers cannot directly access wholesale markets and do not knowwholesale prices. Local middlemen earn large margins; pass-through from wholesale to farmgate prices is negligible. When we informed farmers in randomly chosen villages about wholesale prices, average farmgate...

This paper studies incentives in hierarchical organizations. Benchmark performance is given by the optimal revelation mechanism in which the principal communicates and contracts directly with all agents. We analyze under what conditions a general multi-tier hierarchy can replicate the...

We model political parties as adaptive decision-makers who compete in a sequence of elections. The key assumptions are that <italic>winners satisfice</italic> (the winning party in period <italic>t</italic> keeps its platform in <italic>t</italic> + 1) while <italic>losers search</italic>. Under fairly mild assumptions about losers' search rules, we show that...

This paper studies how land reform and population growth affect land inequality and landlessness, focusing particularly on indirect effects owing to their influence on household divisions and land market transactions. Theoretical predictions of a model of household division and land transactions...

We provide a theory of political clientelism, which explains sources and determinants of political clientelism, the relationship between clientelism and elite capture, and their respective consequences for allocation of public services, welfare, and empir

This paper reports results of a household survey in Singur, West Bengal concerning compensation offered by the state government to owners of land acquired to make way for a car factory. While on average compensations o.ered were close to the reported market valuations of land, owners of high...