Most analyses of the impact of community management of common property resources are based on cross-sectional comparisons in case studies or small samples, perception-based measurement of resource conditions, and absence of controls for unobserved community characteristics and non-random...

This paper provides evidence concerning political participation (turnout, awareness, attendance at meetings, campaign involvement, voting) and its relation to local governance (targeting of public services) in a developing country, based on a rural household survey in West Bengal, India. With...

This paper assesses the relation between living standards and forest degradation in the Indian mid-Himalayas, and related policy questions. It is based on detailed household, village and ecology surveys in a sample of 165 villages in Uttaranchal and Himachal Pradesh. Our prior fieldwork in this...

In May 2004 a conference was held at Cornell University entitled “75 Years of Development Research.”. Apart from the usual array of theoretical and empirical papers on development, a number of panels took stock of the state of development economics and discussed a range of methodological...

We revisit the classical question of productivity implications of sharecropping tenancy, in the context of tenancy reforms (Operation Barga) in West Bengal, India studied previously by Banerjee, Gertler and Ghatak (JPE 2002). We utilize a disaggregated farm panel, controlling for other land...

The impact of government decentralization on economic performance and growth is a hotly contested issue. Waves of decentralization occurred in many developing countries over the past few decades, following the demise of a development paradigm in which centralized states played a leading role...

This paper estimates respective roles of private investments in irrigation and local government programs (land reforms, extension services, and infrastructure investments) in the growth of farm productivity in West Bengal, India between 1981-95. Using a farm panel from a stratified random sample...