Essays in Political Economy and Governance: Lessons from the Philippines.

Abstract

This dissertation addresses a central question in modern political economy: How do we improve governance in low-income democracies? In the first essay, I employ formal modeling and use natural experiment to examine how politician behavior impact governance. In the last two essays, I use randomized field experiments to evaluate policy interventions that strengthen the ability of voters to hold politicians accountable and attract a more qualified pool of candidates to public office. This collection of works, therefore, advances the frontier of modern political economy, first, by understanding how the behavior of political agents impact governance, and then, by evaluating novel policies that can improve their quality and behavior and, ultimately, governance.