Working Papers:
Entrenched Political Dynasties and Development under Competitive Clientelism: Evidence from Pakistan (with Jean-Philippe Platteau and Adeel Malik) (Economic Development and Institutions (EDI) Working Paper Series 2021)
Description: We analyze the impact of entrenched political dynasts on local economic growth in Pakistan. Using a close elections regression discontinuity design specification, we show that areas that narrowly elect an entrenched dynast perform worse in terms of their local economic growth relative to areas that narrowly miss electing an entrenched dynast. We argue that entrenched dynasts practice a different kind of clientelism based on providing ‘life-protecting’, as opposed to ‘life-enhancing’, goods and services that restrain local economic growth. A major contribution of this project is the systematic collection of data on political dynasties in Pakistan stretching back one hundred years. Using this data, we create detailed political genealogies of over 700 families that have representatives in the various elected parliaments of the country. We also collect highly fine-grained data on nighttime luminosity that we use as our main measure of local economic growth. The project came out of a substantial grant worth £112,000 awarded via the “Economic Development and Institutions” (EDI) research programme of the UK Government’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO).
Frontier Rule and Conflict (with Adeel Malik and Faiz Ur Rehman) (CSAE University of Oxford Working Paper WPS/2025-01)
Description: We examine an exceptional institutional arrangement devised by colonial authorities to rule their frontier territories in North-West Pakistan and how this affects contemporary conflict in Pakistan. Described as “frontier governmentality”, such an arrangement excluded frontier dwellers from recourse to formal institutions of conflict management and disproportionately empowered local elites. We argue that this elite-negotiated frontier rule provided a more fragile basis for maintaining social order and was more susceptible to violent conflict in the face of external shocks. To corroborate our argument, we show that the frontier areas experienced a discontinuous rise in conflict against the state in the immediate aftermath of the geopolitical shock of 9/11. A novel contribution of this project is to test, using a rigorous empirical strategy, a widely held hypothesis in the political science (Naseemullah 2022) and history (Hopkins 2020) literatures that frontier rule increased the propensity for ‘sovereignty contesting’ forms of violence across ex-colonies in the developing world. For this project we received a grant worth $6,000 from the UNU-WIDER University as part of its “Institutional legacies of violent conflict” research programme.
The Long-Term Effect of Refugee Resettlement: Evidence from Pakistan through Partition (unpublished working paper since 2022)
Description: I use a difference-in-differences regression specification to document the impact of the large-scale refugee migration induced by the Partition on the other major South Asian nation—Pakistan. I show that areas that received more Partition-affected refugees experienced significant improvements in their literacy in the long run. I attribute these long-term literacy improvements to the short-term impact the refugees had on the economic structure and religious composition of the areas in which they resettled. Essentially, by accelerating the twin processes of structural transformation and religious homogenization the refugees were able to raise the long-term literacy prospects of the areas in which they resettled.
Published Research:
Enfranchisement, Political Participation and Political Competition: Evidence from Colonial and Independent India (with Lakshmi Iyer and Guilhem Cassan) January 2025, Journal of Economic History
Description: We examine how two class-based extensions of the franchise in 20th-century India shape political participation and political competition. The two franchise extensions we consider are the 1935 Government of India Act and the 1951 Constitution of India that increased the proportion enfranchised from 3% to 12% and 12% to 48%, respectively. Creating a novel dataset of district level electoral variables between 1919 and 1957, we find that both these franchise extensions increased the share of voters in the population, reduced voter turnout, increased citizen participation as candidates, and lowered incumbency advantage. This paper contributes to the scholarship on the political impacts of enfranchisement in three ways. First, there are few studies on this topic in developing countries, partly because few poor countries underwent progressive democratization. Second, to our knowledge, this is the first study of the democratization process of a non-democratic non-independent (i.e. colonized) country. Third, because we exploit two enfranchisement reforms spanning the late colonial and early independence periods, we can compare enfranchisement in a non-democratic context to enfranchisement towards democracy.
Pre-colonial Religious Institutions and Development: Evidence through a Military Coup (with Adeel Malik) April 2022, Journal of European Economic Association
Description: We examine the effect of historically embedded religious power on long-run literacy in Pakistan. We show that areas with greater historic religious power, as proxied by the concentration of holy Muslim shrines, lag behind in terms of literacy rates over the long run. Importantly, the adverse educational impact of shrines constituted centuries ago is only “activated” once the 1979 military coup brings an autocrat to power. We argue the main mechanism behind such a finding is rooted in political economy. Essentially, the coup devolved control over public schools to local politicians; and shrine elites, being more averse to education since it undermines their power, suppressed its expansion in shrine-dense areas. The paper originated from a competitive grant worth $50,000 we were awarded in June 2012 via the International Food & Policy Research Institute’s “Pakistan Strategy Support Program”.
The Green Revolution and Child Mortality in India (with James Fenske, Prashant Bharadwaj and Namrata Kala) May 2020, Journal of Health Economics
Description: We show that the adoption of HYVs during the Green Revolution substantially reduced infant mortality in India. We find no obvious evidence for household investments in neo-natal health or for selective childbearing by mothers in response to HYV adoption. However, we do provide evidence that children of mothers whose characteristics predict higher child mortality, rural children, boys, and low-caste children benefit more from HYV adoption. The findings of this paper complement a growing number of studies documenting the impact of the Green Revolution on a range of development outcomes. Most closely related is the paper by Barnwal et al. (2020) showing a reduction in infant mortality from the Green Revolution using a sample of 600,000 children from 37 developing countries, including India, over a period stretching from 1961-2000. Other studies find that the adoption of HYVs during the Green Revolution triggered broader economic development and structural transformation in a variety of contexts (McArthur and Sachs, 2019, Dall Schmidt et al., 2018, McArthur and McCord, 2017, Bustos et al., 2016).
Displacement and Development: Long Term Impacts of Population Transfer in India (with Prashant Bharadwaj) July 2019, Explorations in Economic History
Description: We use a difference-in-differences specification to show that the large-scale refugee resettlement induced by the Partition led to long-term improvements in agricultural productivity in India. Importantly, we find that the effect of refugee resettlement only kicks in after the onset of the Green Revolution, which introduced high yielding varieties (HYVs) of crop seeds to farmers in the late 1960s. We identify land redistribution as a key mechanism behind this result. Specifically, we find that refugee resettlement provided the impetus for substantive land reforms that were crucial to the adoption of HYVs of crop seeds during the Green Revolution, ultimately increasing crop yields in the long run.
Other Publications:
Partition and the Reorganization of Commercial Networks (solo-authored) January 2024, The Oxford Encyclopedia of Asian Commercial History. Oxford University Press.
Devolution under autocracy: evidence from Pakistan (with Adeel Malik and Jean-Philippe Platteau) 2023, Decentralised Governance: Crafting Effective Democracies Around the World. LSE Press.
Religious Elites and the Political Economy of Development (with Adeel Malik) 2021, Broadstreet Blog on Historical Political Economy.
Islam and the Politics of Development: Shrines and Literacy in Pakistan (with Adeel Malik) 2021, The Oxford Handbook of Politics in Muslim Societies. Oxford University Press.
Does the right to vote affect political behaviour? Historical evidence from India (with Lakshmi Iyer and Guilhem Cassan) 2020, Ideas for India Blog for more evidence-based policy
Ongoing Projects:
Irrigation and Inequality (with Adeel Malik & Zahra Jafari) (Slides)
Description: In August 2022, my co-investigator Adeel Malik and I were awarded a small grant totaling £24,386 through the “Structural Transformation and Economic Growth” (STEG) research programme of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) for a major research study on Pakistan. The project examines the impact of the world’s largest irrigation infrastructure built during the colonial era on contemporary development in the country. Between 1880-1940 the British colonial administration laid down an extensive network of perennial canals across the plains of Pakistani Punjab. Besides bringing huge tracts of land under cultivation these canals also created a new “agrarian frontier” where ownership and control of agricultural land became a prized economic and political asset and left a deep and enduring impact on the region’s subsequent political economy. Leveraging a highly fine-grained household-level dataset on land inequality, education and assets and combining it with a village-level measure of exposure to canals, we will investigate the causal impact of colonial era canal irrigation on long-run development. We will then probe political entrenchment as a possible mechanism through which historic canals might impact long-run development. Our project speaks directly to the growing body of evidence documenting significant developmental impacts of large-scale infrastructure like roads (Asher and Novosad 2020), railroads (Donaldson and Hornbeck 2015; Donaldson 2018), dams (Duflo and Pande 2007) and canals (Asher, Novosad, and Gollin 2021). Where we make a novel contribution is in bringing a political economy dimension to this literature by probing the political entrenchment of elites as a channel through which the impact of large-scale infrastructure is transmitted over time.
Electoral Accountability, Local Government Spending and Development in South Asia (with Lakshmi Iyer and Latika Chaudhary)
Description: In March 2023 I managed to secure the British Academy-Leverhulme Small Research Grant worth £9,964 for a project investigating the impact of local electoral accountability on public goods provision in India, using the colonial era Montagu-Chelmsford decentralization reforms as a quasi-natural experiment of history. The grant will be used to digitize annual district-level data on the composition and spending of local governments before and after the reforms from 1901 to 1931. To our knowledge this represents the first systematic digitization of the extensive archival records pertaining to local governments in British India. Using the annual district-level data, we plan to conduct a difference-in-difference analysis, to study the causal effect of increasing the elected element in local government boards on public spending associated with development outcomes like literacy mortality, agricultural growth, and occupational change. Importantly, many of these outcomes can be measured separately for women and some disadvantaged sections of society (e.g., lower castes), enabling us to assess whether electoral accountability results in inclusive growth. At present we have engaged the services of a data entry operator in India to digitize the extensive volumes of local government reports I scanned from the colonial India archives at the University of Oxford.
Presentations:
2025: Development Seminar Series. NYU Abu Dhabi.
2025: Political Economy Seminar Series. University of Oxford.
2024: Northeast Universities Development Consortium. Northeastern University. Boston
2024: The India-China Workshop. University of Namur, Belgium
2024: Second City History and Economics Meeting (SCHEMe). Birmingham Business School
2024: Nottingham Interdisciplinary Centre for Economic and Political Research (NICEP) conference
2024: AALIMS-Harvard Conference on the Political Economy of the Muslim World. Harvard University
2023: Pathways to Development Conference (Inequalities and Social Justice). LUMS University
2023: AALIMS-Stanford Conference on the Political Economy of the Muslim World. Stanford University
2023: CAGE Economic History Workshop. Department of Economics. University of Warwick
2022: Economic History Seminar. Department of Economic History. London School of Economics (LSE)
2022: Microeconomic Approaches to Development Economics Workshop. DeReCK. University of Kent
2022: United Nations WIDER Development Conference. Marina Congress Center in Helsinki, Finland
2022: Association for the Study of Religion, Economics, and Culture Conference. Chapman University
2022: Workshop in Economic History and Development Economics. University of Oxford
2021: Economic Development and Institutions (EDI) Annual Conference. Online via Zoom
2021: Centre for Study of African Economies (CSAE) Seminar. University of Oxford
2021: Centre of Research in Economics of Development (CRED) Workshop. University of Namur
2021: Department of Economics Internal Seminar. University of Kent
2019: Department of Economics Internal Seminar. University of Kent
2019: LSE Economic History of South Asia Workshop
2019: Department of Economics. Colorado State University
2019: The Allied Social Science Associations (ASSA) meeting. Atlanta
2018: Economic History Seminar. University of Warwick
2018: Lunch Seminar Series of the Section Economics. University of Wageningen
2018: The Sixth Asian Historical Economics Conference (AHEC). Hong Kong
2018: World Economic History Congress. Boston
2018: Annual Economic History Society Conference. Keele University
2018: Centre of Research in Economics of Development (CRED) Workshop. University of Namur
2017: Northeast Universities Development Consortium. Fletcher School. Tufts University. Boston
2017: Department of Economics. University of Notre Dame
2017: Economic History Seminar. Department of Social Sciences. Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
2017: Centre of Research in Economics of Development (CRED) Workshop. University of Namur
2016: Economic Development Session. Hitotsubashi Summer Institute (HSI). Hitotsubashi University. Tokyo
2016: Annual Economic History Society Conference (2016). University of Cambridge
2016: Centre for Study of African Economies (CSAE) Conference. University of Oxford
2015: World Economic History Congress. Kyoto
2013: Centre for Study of African Economies (CSAE) Conference. University of Oxford
2013: Economic and Social History Graduate Workshop. Department of History. University of Oxford
2013: Graduate Colloquium. Institute of Economic History. Humboldt University. Berlin
Professional Activities:
Referee: Economic Journal, Journal of Economic History, Economic History Review, Economic History of Developing Regions, Journal of Comparative Economics, Journal of Economic Growth, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, World Development, American Journal of Political Science, Nature Human Behaviour and Journal of Human Resources