| The dissertation has three chapters. The first focuses on the spending pattern in MPLADS, a federally-funded public program in India, where the legislators get to sanction money for capital development projects in their constituencies. Each constituency gets the uniform, fixed budget every year but, unspent funds carry over for utilization in the subsequent years. This incentivizes the legislators to spend more towards the end of the term, so that more work during a short window of time can "signal" the electorate of "high efficiency" of the legislator and enhance her reelection prospects. The project involved manually building up the constituency-level panel database on annual aggregate spending, for the period 1993-2006, and match it to the constituencies' electoral history. The paper identifies that there are political cycles in the inter-temporal spending pattern such that spending spikes during election years. Moreover, keenly contested constituencies witness a better rate of fund utilization compared to the "safe" seats, even controlling for poverty. Furthermore, a higher rate of fund utilization leads to higher chance of reelection.;The second chapter looks at the lending cycles in the agricultural and the small scale industries (SSI) by the public sector banks in India during 1973-1998. The project involved manually building up the district-level loans database using the RBI annual abstracts. The public sector banks accounted for more than 90% of the industry during this period and hence merit investigation for possible political captures. The paper finds that indeed there are political cycles in agro and SSI sectors (collectively categorized as the priority sector) lending so that credit supply spikes before and during general election years.;The third chapter analyzes the pattern of annual incidence of property crimes like burglaries, robberies and thefts during 1974-1998. The project required setting up the district-level dataset by manually entering data from the Home Ministry reports and matching it with the credit panel. The initial finding is that crime goes down during election years. The paper then introduces agricultural and SSI credit to explain the crime cycle and finds that the pattern can be attributed to higher credit supply during the election years. |
