When and why do countries redistribute land to the landless? What political purposes does land reform serve, and what place does it have in today's world? A long-standing literature dating back to Aristotle and echoed in important recent works holds that redistribution should be both higher and...

Many scholars point to landholding inequality as a root cause of the “Great Divergence” between rich and poor countries over the last few centuries. Large landowners who fear being eclipsed by the masses or rival industrial elites and seek to preserve social and economic rents under-invest...

How does land reform impact civil conflict? This paper examines this question in the prominent case of Peru by leveraging original data on all land expropriations under military rule from 1969-1980 and event-level data from the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission on rural killings...

Most scholarship concludes that major redistributive programs garner support for incumbents. But redistribution can backfire when incumbents lose office and have issue ownership without control and when local program saturation is low, generating grievances. This becomes apparent when analyzing...

Patchiness in rural development remains a salient feature of many developed and developing countries that have struggled historically to overcome enormous national disparities in economic structure and well-being. This paper examines how one major, explicit rural policy ostensibly aimed at rural...

Can targeted land reform reduce levels of civil war conflict by mitigating the factors that contribute to rural rebellion? This paper uses new micro-level data on land reform and insurgency at the municipal level from Colombia from 1988-2000, a country with high rates of land inequality and...

This paper examines why governments in underdeveloped countries systematically pursue policies that prevent long-term economic growth. Focusing on the design and implementation of Mexico's massive land redistribution program, we argue that governments do so to improve their chances of political...

This paper examines how the partisanship of empowered subnational politicians can impact within-district benefit distribution. I present a theory of the role of subnational politicians in distributive politics, and then test this theory on a distributive Venezuelan land reform initiative by...