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Publications (20)
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– Landholding patterns and women’s low work participation rates in West Bengal, India
Compared with most other Indian states, women’s reported work participation rates have historically been low in West Bengal. This trend is more prominent in rural areas. Historians have tried to explain this phenomenon in terms of culture and the ideology of domesticity.While persisting cultural...
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– A comparison across different selection models
This study focuses on estimating the returns to education in non-farm self-employed businesses in the Indian context, using nationwide individual- and household-level data provided by the India Human Development Survey for the year 2011/12. Given that different studies have used different types of...
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– A regression discontinuity approach
This paper estimates returns to schooling in Thailand, applying a regression discontinuity approach to the change in the compulsory schooling law in 1978. This law helped to enhance human capital investment on the eve of rapid structural transformation. The returns to schooling based on our...
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– Evidence from Sierra Leone
Using data from Sierra Leone, I explore the role of cognitive ability in sorting across sectors and the importance of perceptions in the employment decision-making process. Crucial to the analysis is the introduction of the aid-industry/development sector as a ‘third sector’, which is shown to be...
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– When manufacturing is jobless and services are tradable
Globalization and robotics (globotics) are transforming the world economy at an explosive pace since they are driven by digital technology that is advancing in phenomenal increments. This paper—which should be considered a ‘thought piece’—argues that the globotics transformation is likely to disable...
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– The role of infrastructure development and gender norms
Traditional gender norms can restrict independent migration by women, preventing them from taking advantage of economic opportunities in urban non-agricultural industries. However, women may be able to circumvent such restrictions by using marriage to engage in long-distance migration—if they are...
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– Theory and Evidence from West Bengal, India
We provide a theory of political clientelism, which explains sources and determinants of political clientelism, the relationship between clientelism and elite capture, and their respective consequences for allocation of public services, welfare, and empirical measurement of government accountability...
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We study the effects of titles on parcel valuation and urban land market development (real estate transfers, rentals, and mortgages), and the dynamics of deregularization by exploiting a natural experiment in the allocation of land titles to very poor families in a suburban area of Buenos Aires...
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– Evidence from West Bengal
We use data on inter-generational gains in educational attainment by some 500,000 individuals in 200 West Bengal villages to explore gender-differentiated impacts of land reform on human capital accumulation at the individual level. While there are significant gains (of about 0.3 years for males) in...
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– Pilot Evidence from Rwanda
Although recent developments greatly increased interest in African land tenure, few models to address these issues at the required scale have been identified or evaluated. Rwanda’s nation-wide land tenure regularization programme is of great interest. A discontinuity design with spatial fixed...
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– Intergenerational linkage and interpersonal inequality in Senegal
Using original survey data on Senegal that include an individualized measure of consumption, we study the role played by land inheritance, other bequests and parental background as influences on an adult’s economic welfare and economic activities. While intergenerational linkages are evident, we...
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– Evidence from a Natural Experiment
While land reforms have long been motivated as a potential policy lever of rural growth and development, there is remarkably little evidence of the direct impacts of such reforms. In an effort to fill this lacunae, this paper examines South Africa's Land Redistribution for Agricultural Development...
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– A Study of China’s ‘Grain for Green’ Programme
Since 1999, China has spent RMB 50 billion (about US$7 billion) to implement the ‘Grain for Green’ programme, the largest land retirement programme in the developing world. From 1999 to 2003, over 7.2 million hectares of agricultural land were retired under the programme. However, many farmers...
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Most theoretical approaches to inheritance assume that parents are the key actors of bequest decisions. However, in a context of important migration, children may play an active role in the inheritance process. Based on a unique data set collected at both ends of the migration link in Bolivia, we...
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This paper uses household panel data from rural Vietnam to explore the effects of having a relative in a position of political or bureaucratic power on farmers’ agricultural investment decisions. Our main result is that households significantly increase their investment in land improvement as a...
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– Electoral outcomes of Mexico’s second land reform
The Mexican land reform, one of the most sweeping in the world, proceeded in two steps: it granted peasants highly incomplete property rights on more than half of the Mexican territory starting in 1914, creating strong economic and political dependence for beneficiaries on the ruling political party...
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