Chiefly Patronage and Schooling

In developing countries, indigenous chiefly systems can be a main driver of patronage, potentially hampering development. This paper explores how chiefly patronage shapes people’s incentives for schooling in Fiji. I develop a model to show how chiefly status can influence a household's child schooling decision, depending on whether the patronage operates in labor markets. I employ a triple-difference approach by combining the novel direct measures of chieftaincy from my original survey data with 1970 independence and 1987 coups as natural experiments, and gender. I show that indigenous chieftaincy interacted with British colonial rule to affect employment, and thus schooling, after independence for males but not females in chiefly networks. After this patronage weakened under post-coup reforms, males in the networks temporarily increased secondary schooling to compensate for their weakened advantage. The majority of male Fijians outside the networks were less encouraged to make schooling investments over time. As such, chiefly patronage persistently distorted male secondary schooling, thereby augmenting the outperformance of female education.