Colonial Village Institutions and Long-Run Development
(with Ali Cheema, Ali Asjad Naqvi and Farooq Naseer)
This study uses a regression discontinuity (RD) design to estimate the long-run impacts of historical institutions that govern land rights. We study 528 Pakistani villages settled by the British colonial state under two distinct policy schemes in neighboring areas of one district. One scheme created proprietary landed estates that concentrated control of land rights in the hands of local elites. The other created peasant smallholder (chak) villages with a more egalitarian arrangement of land rights. Using the RD design, we compare development outcomes on both sides of the common boundary between the schemes, and find that being in a proprietary landed estate lowered literacy by 10 percent and public goods provision by 0.51 standard deviations over a hundred-year period. Thus in contrast to recent empirical findings in this area (Acemoglu, Bautista, Querubin, and Robinson, 2007; Nunn, 2008a; Dell, 2010), we fi nd robust evidence that initial concentration of land rights hinders long-run development.
Forum Shopping and Legal Pluralism
(with Justin Sandefur)
Most poor people in the developing world are governed by overlapping systems of customary and formal law. The core hypothesis of this paper is that the poor make rational, albeit severely constrained, choices in navigating this dual legal system, weighing the repressive aspects of the custom against popular dissatisfaction with the formal sector’s focus on punishing perpetrators rather than providing restitution to victims/plaintiffs. We present a simple formal model of forum choice and test it using new survey data on over 4,500 legal disputes taken to a range of customary and formal institutions in rural Liberia. Consistent with the theoretical model, survey evidence shows that (i) plaintiffs facing a disadvantageous pairing under customary law (e.g., women suing men) are more likely to choose formal law, and (ii) customary remedies appear to be Pareto superior to formal verdicts, in the sense of providing greater utility to plaintiffs at lower utility cost to defendants. We highlight implications of our results for the design of initiatives promoting legal empowerment of the poor.
Law Without Lawyers? Experimental Evidence from a Community Paralegal Program in Liberia
(with Justin Sandefur)
This paper presents results from a randomized controlled trial of a unique paralegal program in Liberia. Paralegals provide advice, mediation and advocacy services to the rural poor, and assist them in negotiating the formal system. They also intermediate between the community and outside agents, be it state officials, mining companies or development agencies. The intervention is randomized at two levels (i) at the community level, across 164 communities, and (ii) at the individual level, across 450 disputants. This allows us to unbundle impact into (i) the paralegals’ direct impact on individual cases and (ii) community-level spillovers (e.g. through community level externalities or changes in the behavior of justice providers), allowing some insight into the causal mechanisms of impact. The chapter presents impacts on conflict incidence, forum choice, case outcomes, legal knowledge and household welfare. The final data for this paper is currently under analysis.
‘White Man’s Burden?’ Experimental Evidence on Foreigner Presence and Generosity
(with Jacobus Cilliers and Oeindrila Dube)
Can the presence of foreigners affect measured generosity by shaping expectations about foreign assistance? We experimentally vary foreigner presence in behavioral games conducted in 60 communities in Sierra Leone, and assess its effect on player contributions. We find that foreigner presence substantially increases player generosity, by over 20 percent. The treatment effect is larger in communities that have previously received little foreign assistance, and for players who believe that the game’s purpose is to distribute resources – either as payoffs to game participants or as aid to the community. Together, the results suggest that players are more generous in the presence of foreigners because they expect generosity to be rewarded. However, prior experience of foreign assistance lowers this expectation. This has implications for how we measure generosity, and aids our understanding of how incentives to secure foreign assistance affect behavior.
