Essays on the Political Economy of Development

My dissertation studies political economy issues in the development of China. Chapter 1 lies in the intersection of urban economics and political economy. This chapter exploits plausibly exogenous variation generated by a unique national policy in China that requires all residential buildings to receive sufficient hours of sunshine to study a central question in urban economics, namely, whether urban density facilitates the diffusion of information. The policy creates higher degrees of restriction on density at higher latitudes, where longer shadows require buildings to be further apart. Data on individual housing projects across China reveal that the cross-latitude variation in regulatory residential Floor Area Ratio can be described quite well by a formula linking structure density to latitude through the solar elevation angle. These differences in building density further induce differences in population density and land prices across latitudes. Using differential topic dynamics on a national petition platform to measure information diffusion, this chapter shows that people respond to shifts in government attention with varying speeds across latitudes. Increases in local governm