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Publications (18)
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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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In many African countries, decentralization has long been viewed as a means for improving local service delivery. Yet, despite various decentralization initiatives, poor service delivery continues to be problematic in two of Kenya’s largest cities, Nairobi and Mombasa. Despite various governance...
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– Does Politics Matter?
This study examines the role of politics on decentralization and service delivery in South Africa, with a specific focus on Johannesburg and Cape Town. The research delineates how national decentralization has affected service delivery responsibilities and resources, determines whether service...
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Uganda, like other African countries, has implemented reforms to decentralize political authority to local governments and reintroduce multiparty elections. This combination creates opportunities for national partisan struggles to emerge in local arenas and influence local service delivery. This...
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Sub-Saharan African cities have been growing at historically unprecedented rates. Since the early 1970s, they have welcomed international assistance involving a succession of major thematic objectives. The main agency involved in urban assistance has been the World Bank. But as its goals have...
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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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This paper addresses the question of how farmers displaced by acquisition of agricultural land for the purpose of industrialization ought to be compensated. Prior to acquisition, the farmers are leasing in land from a landlord, either a private owner or a local government. There are three sets of...
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– Role of Land Reform
This paper uses data from a household survey to estimate changes in land distribution in rural West Bengal between 1967-2004 and decompose these into contributions of different factors. There was a substantial drop in land per household and land per capita, while within-village inequality rose. The...
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