The Klamath River, draining some 12,000 square miles in southern Oregon and northern California, was once the third largest salmon stream on the West Coast, the life force of Native Americans. The river runs 263 miles from headwaters in Oregon and flows through the Cascades to the Pacific Ocean...

In 2018, the Indian government produced a draft mineral policy for non-fuel minerals (DMP). By analysing some interesting features of the policy concerning the grant of mining rights, the use of mineral receipts and the participation of local communities in land use decision making, this piece...

As the name indicates the common land resources (CLR) have “common access” to all and are used for various economic gains. They include community land, community pastures, community forest, wildlife, wasteland, common dumping, threshing ground, the banks and beds of rivers regulated by...

Does poverty lead to crime? We shed light on this question using two independent and exogenous shocks to household income in rural India: the dramatic reduction in import tariffs in the early 1990s and rainfall variations. We find that trade shocks, previously shown to raise relative poverty,...

Does poverty lead to crime? We shed light on this question using two independent and exogenous shocks to household income in rural India: the dramatic reduction in import tariffs in the early 1990s and rainfall variations. We find that trade shocks, previously shown to raise relative poverty,...

In this paper, we study empirically how a policy targeting the cash-funding system of armed groups affects criminal activities, focusing on the 2016 Indian Banknote Demonetization as a natural experiment. We take advantage of a unique dataset on daily surrenders of the Maoist insurgents in India...

This paper relates the key findings of the optimal economic enforcement literature to practical issues of enforcing and managing forest and wildlife access restrictions in developing countries. Our experiences, particularly in Tanzania and southern India, detail the major pragmatic issues facing...

Is there a causal relationship between shocks to renewable natural resources, such as agricultural and forest lands, and the intensity of conflict? In this paper, we conduct a rigorous econometric analysis of a civil conflict that the Indian Prime Minister has called the single biggest internal...

Governments in conflict torn states scramble for effective policies to persistently reduce levels of violence. This paper provides evidence that a workfare program that functions as a social insurance, providing employment opportunities in times of need, may be an effective antidote to shut down...

This paper investigates the effects of an income guarantee on borrowing to smooth consumption and finance cultivation in a risky setting with marked seasonality. A three-season, infinite-horizon theoretical model is developed and analyzed. The insights yielded by the model are then used to...