Dilip Mookherjee
Biographic Data
| ID | 994815 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Dilip Mookherjee |
| GIVEN NAMES | Dilip |
| FAMILY NAME | Mookherjee |
| SIGNATURE | MOOKHERJEE D |
| AFFILIATIONS | Boston University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8719-0991 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 32 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 464 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 31 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1982 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Is the Bangladesh Paradox Sustainable?
Bangladesh is widely seen as a 'paradox'. Over the last quarter of a century, it has maintained economic growth and has outperformed many countries on social indicators while scoring very low on the quality of governance. Moreover, its economic progress does not seem to indicate significant improvement in comparative institutional indicators. Is the Bangladesh Paradox Sustainable? thus examines whether such a paradoxical combination can be sustai…
Clientelistic politics and pro-poor targeting
Past research has provided evidence of clientelistic politics by local governments in delivery of private good benefits and manipulation of local budgets by elected officials at upper tiers. Using household panel survey data spanning 1998–2008 in West Bengal, India, we examine the consequences of replacing the observed allocation of local government, or gram panchayat (GP), program budgets based on discretion of higher level officials, with a gra…
Evaluating the distributive effects of a micro-credit intervention
Community origins of industrial entrepreneurship in colonial India
Welfare rationales for conditionality of cash transfers
Asymmetric Information and Middleman Margins
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 sales and prices were unaffected, but pass-through to farmgate prices increased. These results can be explained by a model where farmers bargain ex post with…
Towards a Comprehensive Social Security System
Few people would disagree that welfare programmes in India are characterized by corruption, mistargeting and poor coordination, and impose high financial and environmental costs. A more pernicious consequence is the political culture of clientelistic vote buying they help create. Parties woo swing voters with the delivery of private short-term benefits such as Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA) work, cheap food, liquo…
Financing smallholder agriculture
A General Equilibrium Analysis of Personal Bankruptcy Law
We analyse an economy where principals and agents match and contract subject to moral hazard. Bankruptcy law defines the limited liability constraint in these contracts. We analyse Walrasian allocations to generate the following predictions: (i) weakening bankruptcy law causes redistribution of debt and welfare from poor agents and principals to rich agents; (ii) exemption limits Pareto-dominate other bankruptcy laws if project size is fixed; (ii…
Evolution of land distribution in West Bengal 1967–2004
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 are successfully tested using household panel data from West Bengal spanning 1967–2004. The tenancy reform lowered inequality through its effects on hous…
A theory of interactions between MFIs and informal lenders
Mechanism Design with Communication Constraints
We consider mechanism design in which message sets are restricted owing to communication costs, preventing full revelation of information. A principal contracts with multiple agents each supplying a one-dimensional good at a privately known cost. We characterize optimal mechanisms subject to incentive and communication constraints, without imposing arbitrary restrictions on the number of communication rounds. We show that mechanisms that centrali…
Land acquisition for industrialization and compensation of displaced farmers
This paper addresses the question of how farmers displaced by acquisition of agricultural land for the purpose of industrialization ought to be compensated. Prior to acquisition, the farmers are leasing in land from a private owner or local government with a legally mandated sharecropping contract. Compensation rules affect the decision of the landlord to sell the land ex post to an industrial developer, and ex ante incentives of tenants and land…
State-led or market-led green revolution? Role of private irrigation investment vis-a-vis local government programs in West Bengal's farm productivity growth
Forests to the People
The Environmental Impact of Poverty
We investigate determinants of household firewood collection in rural Nepal, using 1995-96 and 2002-3 World Bank Living Standards Measurement Survey (LSMS) data. We incorporate village fixed effects, endogenous censoring, measurement error in living standards and heterogeneous effects of different household assets. We find no evidence in favor of the poverty-environment hypothesis. The evidence for the environmental Kuznets curve depends on the p…
Communitarian versus Universalistic Norms
The celebration of communitarianism by political philosophers (Sandel 1982) has apparently been extended to strategic analyses of ascriptively attuned norms (Fearon and Laitin 1996) — an intriguing development, given game theory’s individualistic premises. We believe, however, that game theory offers little comfort to prescriptive theories of communitarian rules: a hardheaded strategic analysis supports the Enlightenment view that such norms tend…
Decentralization and Local Governance in Developing Countries
Over the past three decades the developing world has seen increasing devolution of political and economic power to local governments. Decentralization is considered an important element of participatory democracy and, along with privatization and deregulation, represents a substantial reduction in the authority of national governments over economic policy. The contributors to Decentralization and Local Governance in Developing Countries examine t…
Understanding Poverty
This volume presents 28 essays on poverty by some of the leading experts in the field of economics. The book is divided into three sections, beginning with an essay about how poverty is measured. The first section is about the causes of poverty and its persistence, and the ideas range from the impact of colonialism and globalization to the problems of “excessive” population growth, corruption, and ethnic conflict. The second section is about poli…
Pro-poor targeting and accountability of local governments in West Bengal
Decentralisation and Accountability in Infrastructure Delivery in Developing Countries
Many developing countries are experimenting with decentralisation of public service delivery to elected local governments instead of bureaucrats appointed by a central government. We study the resulting implications in a theoretical model in which the central government is uninformed about local need and unable to monitor service allocations. Bureaucrats charge bribes for services as monopoly providers, resulting in underprovision of services, es…
Decentralizing antipoverty program delivery in developing countries
Fiscal Corruption
Inequality, Control Rights, and Rent Seeking
This paper presents a theory of rent seeking within farmer cooperatives in which inequality of asset ownership affects relative control rights of different groups of members. The two key assumptions are constraints on lump-sum transfers from poorer members and disproportionate control rights wielded by wealthier members. Transfers of rents to the latter are achieved by depressing prices paid for inputs supplied by members and diverting resulting …
Capture and Governance at Local and National Levels
135 Despite the importance of this issue, not much systematic research appears to have been devoted to assessing the relative susceptibility of national and local governments to interestgroup capture. Here we describe a model of two-party electoral competition with “probabilistic” voting behavior and lobbying by specialinterest groups based on David Baron (1994) and Gene Grossman and Elhanan Helpman (1996) that helps identify determinants of rela…
Decentralisation and Accountability in Infrastructure Delivery in Developing Countries
Many developing countries are experimenting with decentralisation of public service delivery to elected local governments instead of bureaucrats appointed by a central government. We study the resulting implications in a theoretical model in which the central government is uninformed about local need and unable to monitor service allocations. Bureaucrats charge bribes for services as monopoly providers, resulting in underprovision of services, es…
A Decomposition Analysis of the Trend in UK Income Inequality
Journal Article A Decomposition Analysis of the Trend in UK Income Inequality Get access Dilip Mookherjee, Dilip Mookherjee London School of EconomicsLondon School of Economics Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Anthony Shorrocks Anthony Shorrocks London School of EconomicsLondon School of Economics Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Economic Journal, Volume 92, Issue…
Corruptible Law Enforcers
We study the optimal compensation policy for a corruptible inspector, charged with monitoring pollution from a factory. Our utilitarian approach focuses on the trade-off among corruption, pollution, and enforcement effort. Owing to the strategic interaction between factory and inspector, changes in compensation policy have surprising effects, e.g., raising the penalty for corruption may cause pollution to increase. We find that bribery is an inef…
Institutional Structure and the Logic of Ongoing Collective Action
Work by Axelrod, Hardin, and Taylor indicates that problems of repeated collective action may lessen if people use decentralized strategies of reciprocity to induce mutual cooperation. Hobbes's centralized solution may thus be overrated. We investigate these issues by representing ongoing collective action as an n-person repeated prisoner's dilemma. The results show that decentralized conditional cooperation can ease iterated collective action di…
Pro-poor targeting and accountability of local governments in West Bengal
Inequality, Control Rights, and Rent Seeking
This paper presents a theory of rent seeking within farmer cooperatives in which inequality of asset ownership affects relative control rights of different groups of members. The two key assumptions are constraints on lump-sum transfers from poorer members and disproportionate control rights wielded by wealthier members. Transfers of rents to the latter are achieved by depressing prices paid for inputs supplied by members and diverting resulting …
Land acquisition for industrialization and compensation of displaced farmers
This paper addresses the question of how farmers displaced by acquisition of agricultural land for the purpose of industrialization ought to be compensated. Prior to acquisition, the farmers are leasing in land from a private owner or local government with a legally mandated sharecropping contract. Compensation rules affect the decision of the landlord to sell the land ex post to an industrial developer, and ex ante incentives of tenants and land…
Forests to the People
Evolution of land distribution in West Bengal 1967–2004
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 are successfully tested using household panel data from West Bengal spanning 1967–2004. The tenancy reform lowered inequality through its effects on hous…
Marginal Deterrence in Enforcement of Law
The authors characterize optimal enforcement in a setting in which individuals can select among various levels of some activity, all of which are monitored at the same rate but may be prosecuted and punished at varying rates. For less harmful acts, marginal expected penalties ought to fall short of marginal harms caused. Indeed, some range of very minor acts should be legalized. For more harmful acts, whether marginal expected penalties should fa…
The Environmental Impact of Poverty
We investigate determinants of household firewood collection in rural Nepal, using 1995-96 and 2002-3 World Bank Living Standards Measurement Survey (LSMS) data. We incorporate village fixed effects, endogenous censoring, measurement error in living standards and heterogeneous effects of different household assets. We find no evidence in favor of the poverty-environment hypothesis. The evidence for the environmental Kuznets curve depends on the p…
Financing smallholder agriculture
State-led or market-led green revolution? Role of private irrigation investment vis-a-vis local government programs in West Bengal's farm productivity growth
A theory of interactions between MFIs and informal lenders
Clientelistic politics and pro-poor targeting
Past research has provided evidence of clientelistic politics by local governments in delivery of private good benefits and manipulation of local budgets by elected officials at upper tiers. Using household panel survey data spanning 1998–2008 in West Bengal, India, we examine the consequences of replacing the observed allocation of local government, or gram panchayat (GP), program budgets based on discretion of higher level officials, with a gra…
Welfare rationales for conditionality of cash transfers
Mechanism Design with Communication Constraints
We consider mechanism design in which message sets are restricted owing to communication costs, preventing full revelation of information. A principal contracts with multiple agents each supplying a one-dimensional good at a privately known cost. We characterize optimal mechanisms subject to incentive and communication constraints, without imposing arbitrary restrictions on the number of communication rounds. We show that mechanisms that centrali…
A General Equilibrium Analysis of Personal Bankruptcy Law
We analyse an economy where principals and agents match and contract subject to moral hazard. Bankruptcy law defines the limited liability constraint in these contracts. We analyse Walrasian allocations to generate the following predictions: (i) weakening bankruptcy law causes redistribution of debt and welfare from poor agents and principals to rich agents; (ii) exemption limits Pareto-dominate other bankruptcy laws if project size is fixed; (ii…
Income tax compliance in India
Productivity, contracting modes, and development
A Decomposition Analysis of the Trend in UK Income Inequality
Journal Article A Decomposition Analysis of the Trend in UK Income Inequality Get access Dilip Mookherjee, Dilip Mookherjee London School of EconomicsLondon School of Economics Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Anthony Shorrocks Anthony Shorrocks London School of EconomicsLondon School of Economics Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Economic Journal, Volume 92, Issue…
Institutional Structure and the Logic of Ongoing Collective Action
Work by Axelrod, Hardin, and Taylor indicates that problems of repeated collective action may lessen if people use decentralized strategies of reciprocity to induce mutual cooperation. Hobbes's centralized solution may thus be overrated. We investigate these issues by representing ongoing collective action as an n-person repeated prisoner's dilemma. The results show that decentralized conditional cooperation can ease iterated collective action di…
Marginal Deterrence in Enforcement of Law
The authors characterize optimal enforcement in a setting in which individuals can select among various levels of some activity, all of which are monitored at the same rate but may be prosecuted and punished at varying rates. For less harmful acts, marginal expected penalties ought to fall short of marginal harms caused. Indeed, some range of very minor acts should be legalized. For more harmful acts, whether marginal expected penalties should fa…
Income tax compliance in India
Productivity, contracting modes, and development
Corruptible Law Enforcers
We study the optimal compensation policy for a corruptible inspector, charged with monitoring pollution from a factory. Our utilitarian approach focuses on the trade-off among corruption, pollution, and enforcement effort. Owing to the strategic interaction between factory and inspector, changes in compensation policy have surprising effects, e.g., raising the penalty for corruption may cause pollution to increase. We find that bribery is an inef…
Comparing Centralized and Decentralized Institutions
Schwartz and Tomz (1997) have correctly pointed out an error in our 1987 article: We had neglected to analyze how changes in group composition improve the performance of centralized institutions over time. The change affects only the case of perfect monitoring, however. We argue, moreover, that even in this special context, our main qualitative conclusion—that the centralized structure has no positive advantage over the decentralized one—continue…
Capture and Governance at Local and National Levels
135 Despite the importance of this issue, not much systematic research appears to have been devoted to assessing the relative susceptibility of national and local governments to interestgroup capture. Here we describe a model of two-party electoral competition with “probabilistic” voting behavior and lobbying by specialinterest groups based on David Baron (1994) and Gene Grossman and Elhanan Helpman (1996) that helps identify determinants of rela…
Inequality, Control Rights, and Rent Seeking
This paper presents a theory of rent seeking within farmer cooperatives in which inequality of asset ownership affects relative control rights of different groups of members. The two key assumptions are constraints on lump-sum transfers from poorer members and disproportionate control rights wielded by wealthier members. Transfers of rents to the latter are achieved by depressing prices paid for inputs supplied by members and diverting resulting …
Fiscal Corruption
Decentralizing antipoverty program delivery in developing countries
Decentralization and Local Governance in Developing Countries
Over the past three decades the developing world has seen increasing devolution of political and economic power to local governments. Decentralization is considered an important element of participatory democracy and, along with privatization and deregulation, represents a substantial reduction in the authority of national governments over economic policy. The contributors to Decentralization and Local Governance in Developing Countries examine t…
Understanding Poverty
This volume presents 28 essays on poverty by some of the leading experts in the field of economics. The book is divided into three sections, beginning with an essay about how poverty is measured. The first section is about the causes of poverty and its persistence, and the ideas range from the impact of colonialism and globalization to the problems of “excessive” population growth, corruption, and ethnic conflict. The second section is about poli…
Pro-poor targeting and accountability of local governments in West Bengal
Decentralisation and Accountability in Infrastructure Delivery in Developing Countries
Many developing countries are experimenting with decentralisation of public service delivery to elected local governments instead of bureaucrats appointed by a central government. We study the resulting implications in a theoretical model in which the central government is uninformed about local need and unable to monitor service allocations. Bureaucrats charge bribes for services as monopoly providers, resulting in underprovision of services, es…
Communitarian versus Universalistic Norms
The celebration of communitarianism by political philosophers (Sandel 1982) has apparently been extended to strategic analyses of ascriptively attuned norms (Fearon and Laitin 1996) — an intriguing development, given game theory’s individualistic premises. We believe, however, that game theory offers little comfort to prescriptive theories of communitarian rules: a hardheaded strategic analysis supports the Enlightenment view that such norms tend…
Forests to the People
The Environmental Impact of Poverty
We investigate determinants of household firewood collection in rural Nepal, using 1995-96 and 2002-3 World Bank Living Standards Measurement Survey (LSMS) data. We incorporate village fixed effects, endogenous censoring, measurement error in living standards and heterogeneous effects of different household assets. We find no evidence in favor of the poverty-environment hypothesis. The evidence for the environmental Kuznets curve depends on the p…
State-led or market-led green revolution? Role of private irrigation investment vis-a-vis local government programs in West Bengal's farm productivity growth
Land acquisition for industrialization and compensation of displaced farmers
This paper addresses the question of how farmers displaced by acquisition of agricultural land for the purpose of industrialization ought to be compensated. Prior to acquisition, the farmers are leasing in land from a private owner or local government with a legally mandated sharecropping contract. Compensation rules affect the decision of the landlord to sell the land ex post to an industrial developer, and ex ante incentives of tenants and land…
Evolution of land distribution in West Bengal 1967–2004
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 are successfully tested using household panel data from West Bengal spanning 1967–2004. The tenancy reform lowered inequality through its effects on hous…
A theory of interactions between MFIs and informal lenders
Mechanism Design with Communication Constraints
We consider mechanism design in which message sets are restricted owing to communication costs, preventing full revelation of information. A principal contracts with multiple agents each supplying a one-dimensional good at a privately known cost. We characterize optimal mechanisms subject to incentive and communication constraints, without imposing arbitrary restrictions on the number of communication rounds. We show that mechanisms that centrali…
A General Equilibrium Analysis of Personal Bankruptcy Law
We analyse an economy where principals and agents match and contract subject to moral hazard. Bankruptcy law defines the limited liability constraint in these contracts. We analyse Walrasian allocations to generate the following predictions: (i) weakening bankruptcy law causes redistribution of debt and welfare from poor agents and principals to rich agents; (ii) exemption limits Pareto-dominate other bankruptcy laws if project size is fixed; (ii…
Towards a Comprehensive Social Security System
Few people would disagree that welfare programmes in India are characterized by corruption, mistargeting and poor coordination, and impose high financial and environmental costs. A more pernicious consequence is the political culture of clientelistic vote buying they help create. Parties woo swing voters with the delivery of private short-term benefits such as Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA) work, cheap food, liquo…
Economics (31 works) · Political science (17 works) · Microeconomics (13 works) · Business (12 works) · Economic growth (10 works) · Law (9 works) · Microfinance and Financial Inclusion (9 works) · Geography (8 works) · Market economy (8 works) · Fiscal Policy and Economic Growth (7 works)