This paper studies how land reform and population growth affect land inequality and landlessness, focusing particularly on indirect effects owing to their influence on household divisions and land market transactions. Theoretical predictions of a model of household division and land transactions...

We provide a competitive theory of middlemen or entrepreneurs who develop brand-name reputations necessary to overcome product quality moral hazard problems, embedded in a Heckscher-Ohlin model of North-South trade. Agents with heterogeneous entrepreneurial abil- ities sort into different...

We examine the role of delivery of subsidized seeds and fertilizers in the form of agricultural minikits by local governments in three successive farm panels in West Bengal spanning 1982–1995. These programs significantly raised farm value added per acre, accounting for almost two-thirds of...

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...