Persistent effects of colonial land tenure institutions: Village-level evidence from India

Abstract

This paper estimates the causal impact of land revenue institutions on long run rural development using a Spatial 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 have a higher poverty rate and lower consumption per capita in 2012. Village census data from 1961 to 2011 shows that historically rooted characteristics in landlord villages prevented them from accessing Green Revolution technologies. Analysis demonstrates that non-landlord, cultivator villages secured preferential access to public investment in the early decades. Despite some convergence in public goods availability, lower private wealth and investment in landlord villages causes continuing spatial inequalities.