This dissertation engages with issues in governance and agriculture. The first essay explores the role of elites in institutional building by examining how political selection affects economic outcomes. I propose that a legislators' background i.e. how they entered politics is a key missing variable in the literature that has conventionally only focused on the role of politician's ascriptive identities such sex, religion and ethnicity. Findings from a close election regression discontinuity design indicate that electing parachuters leads to 0.2 percentage point lower GDP growth per year compared to constituencies where climbers are elected, and there is there is suggestive evidence that the underlying mechanism is increased corruption (which operates via misallocation of bureaucratic resources) and that the impact is neither driven by regulation of technology adoption nor factor price manipulation. The second (co-authored) essay assesses the health impacts of the adopting modern agricultural technologies on infant mortality in 36 developing countries between 1961 and 2000. Child-level, within-country difference-in-difference regression estimates reveal a robust, large, and statistically significant indication that the diffusion of modern varieties between 1960-2000 reduced infant mortality rates by around 4 percentage points and averted around 4.5 million infant deaths per year by 2000. These results are robust to controlling for a wide variety of flexible controls as well as health and education indicators.
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