This paper is about cronyism, or the arrangements by which influential firms receive economic favors. This phenomenon has been documented in numerous case studies, but rarely formalized or analyzed quantitatively. We offer a formal voting model in which cronyism is modeled as a contract where...

This paper investigates how politicians' patronage connections affect privatizations in China. The connections to top political leaders (i.e., Central Committee of the Communist Party of China) make local politicians engage more in rent-seeking by selling state-owned enterprises (SOEs) at...