We use a unique natural experiment in order to assess the impact of positive discrimination in India on targeted groups' educational attainment. We take advantage of the harmonization of the Scheduled Castes lists within the Indian states taking place in 1976 to measure the increase of the...

I study identity marker based policies in the context of identity manipulation: I measure the extent of identity manipulation caused by such a policy and describe the misallocation of public resource this can lead to in the context of colonial Punjab. In particular, I analyze the impact on caste...

This paper investigates whether the religious identity of state legislators in India influences development outcomes, both for citizens of their religious group and for the population as a whole. To control for politician identity to be correlated with constituency level voter preferences or...

The privatization of a natural resource is often proposed as a solution to the degradation of natural resources under open access, known as the Tragedy of the Commons. However, this efficiency improvement may come at a distributional cost (Weitzman, 1974) as traditional users of the resource...

This paper provides an overview of a decade-long project on forest degradation in the Indian and Nepalese Himalayas. It is based on LSMS data for Nepal and field work in Indian states of Uttaranchal and Himachal Pradesh comprising sample surveys of forests, households and village communities,...

In this paper we discuss whether or not `governance' is an important source of variation in development experiences. We draw four main conclusions. First, governance is best thought of a sub-set of `institutions' and as such emphasis on governance is consistent with much recent academic work....

In this paper we provide an empirical analysis of the performance of microfinance groups, known as Self-Help groups, based on an original census we carried out in a poor area of Northern India. We examine whether traditionally disadvantaged villagers, such as members of lower castes or landless...

This paper summarizes findings from a decade-long project on forest degradation in the mid-Himalayan region of India and Nepal. The analysis is based on LSMS data for Nepal and field work in Indian states of Uttaranchal and Himachal Pradesh comprising sample surveys of forests, households and...

A household panel data set is used to investigate the effects of economic growth on firewood collection in Nepal between 1995 and 2010. Results from preceding crosssectional analyses are found to be robust: (a) rising consumptions for all but the top decile were associated with increased...