We analyze the relationship between pre-colonial warfare and long-run development patterns in India. We construct a new geocoded database of historical interstate conflicts on the Indian subcontinent, from which we compute measures of local exposure to pre-colonial warfare. We document a...

This paper compares economic outcomes across areas in India which were under direct British colonial rule with areas which were under indirect colonial rule. Controlling for selective annexation using a specific policy rule, I find that areas which experienced direct rule have significantly...

We test the reproducibility and replicability of Dincecco et al. (2022), which reports a positive relationship between pre-colonial interstate warfare and long-run development patterns across India. Overall, we confirm that all of the study's estimates are computationally reproducible by using...

India has traditionally been perceived, both domestically and globally, as an important aid receiver. But it has also had a foreign aid programme of its own which can be traced to the 1950s and 1960s. India's aid programme was small, focused on building local capacities and viewed as benign. In...

This paper examines the relationship between statutory monopoly and collective action as a multi-person assurance game culminating in an end to British Empire in India. In a simple theoretical model, it is demonstrated whether or not a collective good enjoys (or is perceived to enjoy) pure...

The current paper connects anxiety about disease contamination to that about cultural contamination and the exclusionary behavior toward ethnic outgroups that it incites. We suggest that when individuals are exposed to disease fears, an epistemic groundwork is laid for construing outgroups as...

Innovation and entrepreneurship is the source of hope for the future. The future generations of entrepreneurs have to understand the principles of entrepreneurship. This is a paper, where the author looks at the creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship in India. The problems and the possible...

Identifying the effect of a ruler's religious identity on policy is challenging because religious identity rarely varies over time and place. We address this problem by exploiting quasi-random variation in the religion of rulers in the Indian Princely States. Using data from the 1911 census, we...

We examine how political participation and political competition are shaped by two class-based extensions of the franchise in 20th-century India. Creating a new dataset of district level political outcomes between 1921 and 1957, we find that the partial franchise extension of 1935 resulted in...