We study the impact of the Deccan Agriculturists' Relief Act (DARA), a key legislation to protect debtors that was enacted in western colonial India. Using a panel dataset and a difference-in-difference estimation, we find a substantial decline in mortgage-backed credit after the passage of...

It is widely recognized that railways were one of the most important drivers of economic growth in the 19th and 20th century, but it is less recognized that railways had a different impact across countries. In this paper, we first estimate the growth impact of Indian railways, one of the largest...