Lakshmi Iyer
Biographic Data
| ID | 3605723 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Lakshmi Iyer |
| GIVEN NAMES | Lakshmi |
| FAMILY NAME | Iyer |
| SIGNATURE | IYER L |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Notre Dame |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4765-8622 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 17 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 118 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 17 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
The Colonial Legacy in India
The Importance of Being Local? Administrative Decentralisation and Human Development
We examine the human development consequences of transferring responsibility for public service provision from state to local governments in India using state-level variation in the timing of administrative decentralisation reforms. We find that devolving responsibility for health and education functions does not improve child mortality or school completion. Further, partial devolution of service responsibility, without concomitant authority over…
A Field of Her Own
Can financial incentives lead households to register land in women's names, thereby providing them with formal property rights? Can formal property ownership improve women's economic outcomes and change decision-making dynamics within the household? To investigate these questions, we take advantage of a bank lending policy in Myanmar that motivated households with land holdings above ten acres to title the surplus land in their wives' names. We s…
Leader Identity and Coordination
This paper examines policy effectiveness as a function of leader identity. We experimentally vary leader religious identity in a coordination game implemented in India and focus on citizen reactions to leader identity, controlling for leader actions. We find that minority leaders improve coordination, and majority leaders do not. Alternative treatment arms reveal that affirmative action for minorities reverses this result, while intergroup contac…
Religion and abortion
The road not taken
Pathbreakers? Women's Electoral Success and Future Political Participation
We investigate whether the event of a woman being competitively elected as a state legislator encourages the subsequent political participation of women, using a regression discontinuity design on constituency level data from India. We find that female incumbents are more likely than male incumbents to re-contest and that there is a decline in the entry of new women candidates. This decline is most pronounced in states with entrenched gender bias…
Response to ‘A Re-Examination of Banerjee and Iyer’ by Iversen, Palmer-Jones and Sen
Iversen, Palmer-Jones and Sen (2013, henceforth IPS) re-examine our paper (Banerjee & Iyer, 2005, henceforth BI) on the effects of historical land tenure systems on long-run economic development ac
The Power of Political Voice
Using state-level variation in the timing of political reforms, we find that an increase in female representation in local government induces a large and significant rise in documented crimes against women in India. Our evidence suggests that this increase is good news, driven primarily by greater reporting rather than greater incidence of such crimes. In contrast, we find no increase in crimes against men or in gender-neutral crimes. We also exa…
Traveling Agents
We develop a framework to empirically examine how politicians with electoral pressures control bureaucrats with career concerns and the consequent implications for bureaucrats' career investments. Unique microlevel data on Indian bureaucrats support our key predictions. Politicians use frequent reassignments (transfers) across posts of varying importance to control bureaucrats. High-skilled bureaucrats face less frequent political transfers and l…
Direct versus Indirect Colonial Rule in India
This paper compares economic outcomes across areas in India that were under direct British colonial rule with areas that were under indirect colonial rule. Controlling for selective annexation using a specific policy rule, I find that areas that experienced direct rule have significantly lower levels of access to schools, health centers, and roads in the postcolonial period. I find evidence that the quality of governance in the colonial period ha…
Geography, poverty and conflict in Nepal
We conduct an empirical analysis of the geographic, economic, and social factors that contributed to the spread of civil war in Nepal over the period 1996-2006. This within-country analysis complements existing cross-country studies on the same subject. Using a detailed dataset to track civil war casualties across space and over time, several patterns are documented. Conflict-related deaths are significantly higher in poorer districts and in geog…
Land Titling and Rural Transition in Vietnam
We examine the impact of the 1993 Land Law of Vietnam, which gave households the power to exchange, transfer, lease, inherit, and mortgage their land‐use rights. We use household surveys before and after the law was passed, together with the considerable variation across provinces in the speed of implementation of the reform, to identify the impact of the law. We find that the additional land rights led to statistically significant increases in t…
Poverty, Social Divisions, And Conflict In Nepal
The authors conduct an econometric analysis of the economic and social factors which contributed to the spread of violent conflict in Nepal. They find that conflict intensity is significantly higher in places with greater poverty and lower levels of economic development. Violence is higher in locations that favor insurgents, such as mountains and forests. The authors find weaker evidence that caste divisions in society are correlated with the int…
History, Social Divisions, and Public Goods in Rural India
We examine the influence of three historically important sources of social divisions on the availability of public goods in rural India: colonial power, landowner-peasant relations as determined by the land tenure system and social fragmentation based on the Hindu caste system and the presence of sizable religious minorities. Using data on public goods from 1991, we find that regions that were under British colonial power in the pre-independence …
History, Institutions, and Economic Performance
We analyze the colonial land revenue institutions set up by the British in India, and show that differences in historical property rights institutions lead to sustained differences in economic outcomes. Areas in which proprietary rights in land were historically given to landlords have significantly lower agricultural investments and productivity in the post-independence period than areas in which these rights were given to the cultivators. These…
History, Social Divisions, and Public Goods in Rural India
Pathbreakers? Women's Electoral Success and Future Political Participation
We investigate whether the event of a woman being competitively elected as a state legislator encourages the subsequent political participation of women, using a regression discontinuity design on constituency level data from India. We find that female incumbents are more likely than male incumbents to re-contest and that there is a decline in the entry of new women candidates. This decline is most pronounced in states with entrenched gender bias…
Land Titling and Rural Transition in Vietnam
We examine the impact of the 1993 Land Law of Vietnam, which gave households the power to exchange, transfer, lease, inherit, and mortgage their land‐use rights. We use household surveys before and after the law was passed, together with the considerable variation across provinces in the speed of implementation of the reform, to identify the impact of the law. We find that the additional land rights led to statistically significant increases in t…
Geography, poverty and conflict in Nepal
We conduct an empirical analysis of the geographic, economic, and social factors that contributed to the spread of civil war in Nepal over the period 1996-2006. This within-country analysis complements existing cross-country studies on the same subject. Using a detailed dataset to track civil war casualties across space and over time, several patterns are documented. Conflict-related deaths are significantly higher in poorer districts and in geog…
History, Social Divisions, and Public Goods in Rural India
The road not taken
Religion and abortion
History, Social Divisions, and Public Goods in Rural India
We examine the influence of three historically important sources of social divisions on the availability of public goods in rural India: colonial power, landowner-peasant relations as determined by the land tenure system and social fragmentation based on the Hindu caste system and the presence of sizable religious minorities. Using data on public goods from 1991, we find that regions that were under British colonial power in the pre-independence …
History, Institutions, and Economic Performance
We analyze the colonial land revenue institutions set up by the British in India, and show that differences in historical property rights institutions lead to sustained differences in economic outcomes. Areas in which proprietary rights in land were historically given to landlords have significantly lower agricultural investments and productivity in the post-independence period than areas in which these rights were given to the cultivators. These…
History, Social Divisions, and Public Goods in Rural India
Poverty, Social Divisions, And Conflict In Nepal
The authors conduct an econometric analysis of the economic and social factors which contributed to the spread of violent conflict in Nepal. They find that conflict intensity is significantly higher in places with greater poverty and lower levels of economic development. Violence is higher in locations that favor insurgents, such as mountains and forests. The authors find weaker evidence that caste divisions in society are correlated with the int…
Land Titling and Rural Transition in Vietnam
We examine the impact of the 1993 Land Law of Vietnam, which gave households the power to exchange, transfer, lease, inherit, and mortgage their land‐use rights. We use household surveys before and after the law was passed, together with the considerable variation across provinces in the speed of implementation of the reform, to identify the impact of the law. We find that the additional land rights led to statistically significant increases in t…
Direct versus Indirect Colonial Rule in India
This paper compares economic outcomes across areas in India that were under direct British colonial rule with areas that were under indirect colonial rule. Controlling for selective annexation using a specific policy rule, I find that areas that experienced direct rule have significantly lower levels of access to schools, health centers, and roads in the postcolonial period. I find evidence that the quality of governance in the colonial period ha…
Geography, poverty and conflict in Nepal
We conduct an empirical analysis of the geographic, economic, and social factors that contributed to the spread of civil war in Nepal over the period 1996-2006. This within-country analysis complements existing cross-country studies on the same subject. Using a detailed dataset to track civil war casualties across space and over time, several patterns are documented. Conflict-related deaths are significantly higher in poorer districts and in geog…
The Power of Political Voice
Using state-level variation in the timing of political reforms, we find that an increase in female representation in local government induces a large and significant rise in documented crimes against women in India. Our evidence suggests that this increase is good news, driven primarily by greater reporting rather than greater incidence of such crimes. In contrast, we find no increase in crimes against men or in gender-neutral crimes. We also exa…
Traveling Agents
We develop a framework to empirically examine how politicians with electoral pressures control bureaucrats with career concerns and the consequent implications for bureaucrats' career investments. Unique microlevel data on Indian bureaucrats support our key predictions. Politicians use frequent reassignments (transfers) across posts of varying importance to control bureaucrats. High-skilled bureaucrats face less frequent political transfers and l…
Response to ‘A Re-Examination of Banerjee and Iyer’ by Iversen, Palmer-Jones and Sen
Iversen, Palmer-Jones and Sen (2013, henceforth IPS) re-examine our paper (Banerjee & Iyer, 2005, henceforth BI) on the effects of historical land tenure systems on long-run economic development ac
Pathbreakers? Women's Electoral Success and Future Political Participation
We investigate whether the event of a woman being competitively elected as a state legislator encourages the subsequent political participation of women, using a regression discontinuity design on constituency level data from India. We find that female incumbents are more likely than male incumbents to re-contest and that there is a decline in the entry of new women candidates. This decline is most pronounced in states with entrenched gender bias…
The road not taken
Religion and abortion
Leader Identity and Coordination
This paper examines policy effectiveness as a function of leader identity. We experimentally vary leader religious identity in a coordination game implemented in India and focus on citizen reactions to leader identity, controlling for leader actions. We find that minority leaders improve coordination, and majority leaders do not. Alternative treatment arms reveal that affirmative action for minorities reverses this result, while intergroup contac…
A Field of Her Own
Can financial incentives lead households to register land in women's names, thereby providing them with formal property rights? Can formal property ownership improve women's economic outcomes and change decision-making dynamics within the household? To investigate these questions, we take advantage of a bank lending policy in Myanmar that motivated households with land holdings above ten acres to title the surplus land in their wives' names. We s…
The Colonial Legacy in India
The Importance of Being Local? Administrative Decentralisation and Human Development
We examine the human development consequences of transferring responsibility for public service provision from state to local governments in India using state-level variation in the timing of administrative decentralisation reforms. We find that devolving responsibility for health and education functions does not improve child mortality or school completion. Further, partial devolution of service responsibility, without concomitant authority over…
Economics (14 works) · Political science (14 works) · Law (12 works) · Politics (8 works) · Development economics (7 works) · Geography (6 works) · Sociology (6 works) · Culture, Economy, and Development Studies (5 works) · Economic growth (5 works) · Colonialism (4 works)