Jayasri Dutta

Bio: Jayasri Dutta is an academic researcher from University of Birmingham. The author has contributed to research in topics: Corruption & Capital market. The author has an hindex of 18, co-authored 69 publications receiving 1626 citations. Previous affiliations of Jayasri Dutta include University of Cambridge & International Monetary Fund.

The Retrenchment Hypothesis and the Extension of the Franchise in England and Wales

Abstract: Does an extension of the voting franchise always increase public spending or can it be a source of retrenchment? We study this question in the context of public spending on health-related urban amenities in a panel of municipal boroughs from England and Wales in 1868, 1871 and 1886. We find evidence of a U-shaped relationship between spending on urban amenities and the extension of the local voting franchise. Our model of taxpayer democracy suggests that the retrenchment effect was related to enfranchisement of the middle class through nation-wide reforms and that these reforms might have been Pareto inferior in the average borough.

Fiscal Federalism and Electoral Accountability

Abstract: We study the efficient allocation of spending and taxation authority in a federation in which federal politicians are exposed to electoral uncertainty. We show that centralization may, but need not, result in a loss of electoral accountability. We identify an important asymmetry between positive and negative externalities and show that centralization may not be efficient in economies with positive externalities even when regions are identical and centralization does not entail a loss of accountability. We also show that decentralization can only Pareto dominate centralization in economies with negative externalities.

Economic analysis of corruption: a survey*

Abstract: Corruption is a persistent feature of human societies over time and space. The sale of parliamentary seats in 'rotten boroughs' in England before the Reform Act of 1832 and 'machine politics' in immigrant cities in the US at the turn of the 19th century are just two historical examples. Contemporaneous examples also abound and not only from developing countries such as Nigeria, India, and Philippines but also from transition economies such as Russia. Some of these and many other instances of corruption are extensively documented in The Politics of Corruption, edited by Robert Williams and associates. Its four volumes contain a large collection of articles published during the past 40 years in social science journals with contributions from political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, law scholars, and a few economists including Andrei Shleifer and Robert W. Vishny. It is not surprising to find the work of Shleifer and Vishny represented in this interdisciplinary collection. As is evident from the collection of articles reprinted in The Grabbing Hand, they have, with various co-authors, made a large number of important contributions to the study of corruption and other government pathologies throughout the 1990s. Currently, the study of corruption is also high on the research agenda of international organisations such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and some of the most significant studies on corruption coming out of the IMF in recent years are collected in Governance,

Why did the Elites Extend the Suffrage? Democracy and the Scope of Government, with an Application to Britain's “Age of Reform”

Abstract: A new rationale is presented for why an elite may want to expand the franchise even in the absence of threats to the established order. Expanding the franchise can turn politicians away from particularistic politics based on ad personam redistribution within the elite and foster competition based on programs with diffuse benefits. If these programs are valuable, a majority of the elite votes in favor of an extension of the franchise despite the absence of a threat from the disenfranchised. We argue that the evolution of public spending and of political competition in nineteenth century Britain is consistent with our model. I. INTRODUCTION At the beginning of the nineteenth century, in most countries, narrow elites had a disproportionate influence on public affairs. Even in England, where parliament was an influential institution, suffrage was mostly the privilege of the wealthy, and some members of parliament were elected in boroughs with as few as 100 voters, while cities such as Manchester did not have any representative. A century later, most western countries had universal male suffrage, with female suffrage to arrive shortly thereafter. What brought about this “democratic revolution?” In many cases, the elites were forced out of power after violent revolutions. However, there are important examples, such as England, where democratization took the form of gradual extensions of the suffrage, and these were accompanied by little overt violence. “It is the peculiar pride of England that [the record of social and political reform] is to be found on the statute book, not in the annals of revolution” [Cheyney 1931, p. vii]. Such peaceful democratizations are difficult to rationalize within the benchmark political-economic models. In those models, extending the franchise dilutes the elite’s power to influence policy and results

Corruption, institutions, and economic development

Abstract: Many scholarly articles on corruption give the impression that the world is populated by two types of people: the "sanders" and the "greasers". The "sanders" believe that corruption is an obstacle to de- velopment, while the "greasers" believe that corruption can (in some cases) foster development. This paper takes a critical look at these positions. It concludes that the evidence supporting the "greasing the wheels hypothesis" is very weak and shows that there is no cor- relation between a new measure of managers'actual experience with corruption and GDP growth. Instead, the paper uncovers a strong negative correlation between growth in genuine wealth per capita -a direct measure of sustainable development -and corruption. While corruption may have little average eect on the growth rate of GDP per capita, it is a likely source of unsustainable development.