This paper proposes that Colonialism is a major explanation behind today’s differences in Income Inequality among countries. We argue that colonies that received an important number of European settlers were characterized by a concentration of economic and political power in the hands of these last ones. Moreover, European settlers later achieved independence from the metropolis and were able t...

Environmental conditional cash transfers are popular but their impacts are not well understood. We evaluate land cover and wealth impacts of a federal program that pays landowners for protecting forest. Panel data for program beneficiaries and rejected applicants allows us to control for fixed differences and time trends affecting both groups. We find the program reduces the expected land cover...

In many developing countries property rights over rural land are maintained through continuous personal use instead of by land titles. We show that removing the link between land use and land rights through the issuance of ownership certificates can result in large-scale adjustments to labor and land allocations. Using the rollout of the Mexican land certification program from 1993 to 2006, we ...

The role of agriculture as an instrument for industrialization had been rigorously conceptualized in the 1960s and 1970s under the classical paradigm of development economics. After many implementation failures under import substitution industrialization policies and protracted neglect of agriculture under the policies of the Washington Consensus that followed the debt crisis, agriculture has g...

We show empirically using panel data at the plot and farm level and based on a model incorporating supervision costs, risk, credit-market imperfections and scale-economies associated with mechanization that small-scale farming is inefficient in India. Larger farms are more profitable per acre, more mechanized, less constrained in input use after bad shocks, and employ less per-acre labor than s...

We use a randomized control trial to measure how the free distribution of modern inputs for maize production affects their adoption in the subsequent season. Information collected through sales workshops where modern inputs were sold revealed that the average purchase quantity of free-input recipients was much higher than that of non-recipients; that of the neighbors of recipients fell in-betwe...

This paper presents a synthesis of the main theoretical and empirical contributions that analyse production choices of farm households living and operating in developing countries. The review is particularly concerned with recent micro-economic contributions that highlight the trade-off farm households typically face, between full-income risk and expected return, while making production decisio...

This paper explores how wealth and inequality can affect self-governed solutions to commons dilemmas by constraining group cooperation. It reports a series of experiments in the field where subjects are actual commons users. Household data about the participants’ context explain statistically the usually observed wide variation found within and across groups in similar experiments. Participants...

We examine the effect of rainfall shocks on crimes against women using data from 583 Indian districts for 2002-2007. We find that a one standard deviation decline in annual rainfall from the local mean increases reported domestic violence by 4.4 percent and dowry deaths by 7.8 percent. Wet shocks have no apparent effect. These patterns are consistent with consumption smoothing by households rel...

We examine the introduction of automatic air pollution monitoring to counter suspected tampering at local level, a central feature China’s “war on pollution.” Exploiting 654 regression discontinuity designs based city-level variation in day that was automated, we find an immediate and lasting increase 35 percent reported PM 10 concentrations post-automation. Moreover, automation’s increased onl...