India

This is the seventeenth in this year's series of posts by PhD students on the job market.

Aquinos, Bhuttos, Trudeaus, Yudhoyonos, Gandhis, Lees, Fujimoris: political dynasties remain ubiquitous in democratic countries.  Though many societies democratised to end hereditary rule, nearly half of democratic countries have elected multiple heads of state from a single family.  Politics is significantly more dynastic than other occupations in democratic societies.  Individuals are, on average, five times more likely to enter an occupation their father was in.  But having a politician father raises one's odds of entering politics by 110 times, more than double the dynastic bias of other elite occupations like medicine and law.  Despite their prevalence and influence, we know little about the economic effects of political dynasties.

Effects of dynastic politics are theoretically ambiguous

Economic theory makes ambiguous predictions about how dynastic politics affects development.  On the one hand, bequest motives might lengthen politicians’ time horizons  and encourage them to make long-term investments. These founder effects could be good for economic development.  However, if some political capital is heritable (e.g., a prominent name or a powerful network), dynastic politics may render elections less effective at selecting good leaders and disciplining them in office.  These descendant effects are likely bad for development.  The overall impact of dynastic politics is ambiguous, because it is the net result of founder and descendant effects.

This is the second in this year's series of posts by PhD students on the job market.

Each evening the sun sets more than 90 minutes later in west India than in the east of the country. This is because time on clocks across India are set to Indian Standard Time, regardless of location. In China all clocks are set to Beijing Time, which means in western part of the country the sun sets 3 hours later than the east of the country. The sun sets at least an hour later in Madrid than in Munich because Franco’s Spain switched clocks ahead one hour to be in sync with Nazi Germany in 1940, even though Spain is geographically in line with Britain, not Germany. Similarly, for a range of historical reasons, clocks in large parts of the planet – e.g., France, Algeria, Senegal, South Sudan, Russia, and Argentina – are set to be ahead of their (solar) time. Therefore, these places see the sun set later in the day. In my job market paper, I show that these arbitrary clock conventions -- by generating large discrepancies in when the sun sets across locations -- help determine the geographic distribution of educational attainment levels.