Download or read book Essays on the Applications of Matching Theory to Political Economy written by Ashutosh Dinesh Thakur and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this dissertation I use tools from market design and matching theory to study institutional design in political economy and development. How are personnel allocated within a public organization? What is the intended distribution of talent across institutions and are organizational procedures successful in attaining their stated goals? Who can exert influence in personnel allocation processes and what is the impact of these organizational choices on outcomes? How does an institution evolve? How should these systems be designed? My research tries to address such institutional questions at the heart of public administration and political economy. Matching theory in political economy is an unexplored space. In political economy, we often think of underlying voting processes determining allocations or outcomes. However, there are also many assignment problems where there is no voting, or where the voting process is embedded within a larger allocation procedure. At the heart of such assignment procedures is a matching mechanism. It takes as input, people's preferences of where they want to be assigned, incorporates priorities and other constraints to be instituted, and returns the set of assignments. I use and develop tools of matching theory in these instances to better understand the assignment problems (empirically and theoretically) and to design better mechanisms (an engineering perspective). I explore two new substantive applications in matching theory: mechanisms allocating elite civil servants to states in India (Chapter 1) and party-specific mechanisms for assigning politicians to committees in the US Senate (Chapter 2). These political economy applications share a unique feature that is new to the theoretical matching literature. Namely, the very people who are allocated by the matching mechanism choose, or agree upon, the choice of the matching mechanism. Chapter 3 studies the matching mechanism as an endogenously chosen institution and introduces the novel concept of majority stability. Collectively, my dissertation highlights two important themes at the intersection of matching theory and political economy: i) correlated preferences as a source of institutional imbalance and ii) the perspective of a matching mechanism being an endogenous institutional choice.