Data
Included below are links to potentially useful data from various projects. If you find the data useful, please cite the relevant project. If you notice errors or have updates, please email me at: adasgupta3 [at] ucmerced.edu.
Merging Indian Districts Over Time:
Indian District Equivalence Table
From India's independence in 1947 to the present, the number of Indian districts has increased greatly, mainly due to the subdivision of districts into smaller ones over time. For historical work on India, time-series data analysis often requires linking new districts to the "parent" districts from which they were split. This file provides an "equivalence table" linking districts to their parent districts from the census years of 1951, 1961, 1971, 1981, 1991, and 2001 based on the Administrative Atlas of India (raw scanned files here).
Citation: Dasgupta, Aditya. "Technological Change and Political Turnover: The Democratizing Effects of the Green Revolution in India." American Political Science Review 112.4 (2018): 918-938.
India Historical Aquifer Maps:
In 1977, the National Atlas of India published detailed maps of the known extent of aquifers across India, based on the Geological Survey of India. Copies are stored at the maps collection of the University of California, Berkeley. The link above contains high-resolution scans of these maps (warning: very large files in .tif format). These can be geo-coded to GIS shapefiles to construct estimates of aquifer coverage at different administrative levels.
Citation: Dasgupta, Aditya. "Technological Change and Political Turnover: The Democratizing Effects of the Green Revolution in India." American Political Science Review 112.4 (2018): 918-938.
Local Language Maoist Conflict Dataset:
One of the major issues affecting datasets on the intensity of the Maoist conflict in India is that they are almost all based on English-language news sources, which are characterized by a severe urban bias, in the context of a predominantly rural insurgency. Devesh Kapur and research assistants painstakingly collected a district-level database of deaths and violent incidents associated with the conflict based on multiple local language (Hindi, Bengali, Oriya, etc.) newspapers, based on hand-coding of their print archives. This provides much better coverage of violence in rural areas and a more accurate picture of the conflict, especially in early years when the conflict had yet to capture the attention of the urban news media in India.
Citation: Dasgupta, Aditya, Kishore Gawande, and Devesh Kapur. "(When) do antipoverty programs reduce violence? India's rural employment guarantee and Maoist conflict." International organization 71.3 (2017): 605-632.
British Sovereign Bond Yields:
One of the most heavily traded government debt instruments of the nineteenth century was the British consol, a perpetual bond paying a fixed interest rate annually (3% up to 1889, 2.75% up to 1903, and 2.5% after 1903). The yields on the British consol are often taken to approximate the "risk-free" rate of return in capital markets in the nineteenth century. This file contains monthly data on consol yields, 1800-1920, based largely on the data collection of Larry Neal. Daily data (see here) based on the work of Robert Brown and Stephen Easton are also available for some periods.
Citation: Dasgupta, Aditya, and Daniel Ziblatt. "How did Britain democratize? Views from the sovereign bond market." The Journal of Economic History 75.1 (2015): 1-29.