Research

Articles

Drivers of Agricultural Growth in Colonial India (with Maanik Nath), 2025, under review. SSRN Working paper

This paper investigates the impact of public investments on agricultural incomes across colonial India. Growth amidst pervasive aridity and monsoon volatility required government interventions and the imperial government prioritised the construction of railroads over canal irrigation. Districts with access to canal irrigation saw crop upgrading, declining output sensitivity to climate volatility and income growth. The paper shows that arid areas benefitted most from access to a canal. Small irrigation investments explain why India remained poor during British rule. We find that while initial railroad expansion had a positive effect on incomes in select districts though railway access did not affect cropping patterns, the sensitivity of agricultural output to rainfall volatility, nor incomes between 1890 and 1930.

Persistent effects of Colonial Land Tenure Systems: Village-level evidence from India, Journal of Development Economics, 2024. Link

This paper estimates the causal impact of land revenue institutions on long run rural development using a Geographical Regression Discontinuity framework on a new village level data set from colonial India. An early 19th century historical quirk meant that villages in close geographical proximity were assigned to different property rights systems - some falling under landlords and others under the government. Villages that were assigned to landlords in the colonial era are shown to have lower developmental outcomes into the 21st century, including lower per capita consumption and mean light intensity. This paper provides evidence that a part of this divergence occurred in the colonial period. However, historical differences during the colonial period laid the foundation for greater divergence in the post-independence period, driven primarily by the differing potential to benefit from the Green Revolution.

Risk, uncertainty and development in India and Taiwan, 1900-1939 (with Chung-Tang Cheng & Maanik Nath), Asia Pacific Economic History Review, 2024. Link

Environmental conditions significantly affected development in the Asian tropics. This paper investigates the relationship between weather risk and agriculture in four regions with distinct climatological features in colonial India and colonial Taiwan. Using new data, we estimate the scale of crop output sensitivity to rainfall shocks across these regions.

The political economy of housing in England (with Miguel Coelho & Sebastian Dellepiane-Avellaneda), New Political Economy, 2017. Link

Problems of housing affordability have been afflicting parts of the UK, especially the South East of England, for a number of years. The problem is closely related to shortages in housing supply, which are, in turn, largely associated with constraints imposed by the English land planning system.We find that there is a tendency for owner-occupiers to express greater opposition to local house building and that, in the decade to 2011, the housing stock grew significantly less in local authorities with higher proportions of owner-occupiers among local households. The results suggest the risk that planning decisions might have been distorted in favour of current homeowners is real and economically significant. We discuss a range of historical, socio-economic and policy trends that help explain why successive governments of various stripes have been reluctant to address head-on problems in housing supply and put a curb on house prices.