Abstract

Can making property rights more legible improve infrastructure investment? Many argue that strong property rights are crucial for economic development. If so, reforms that make property rights more legible and secure should improve investment. However, when it comes to infrastructure, strong property rights have often enabled landowners to veto infrastructure development. Here, I evaluate these competing predictions by collecting information from over 600,000 villages in India on a program that aims to digitise, update, and integrate all land records. I leverage the staggered rollout of the program and use a difference-in-differences design to demonstrate that digitising land records reduces investment in large-scale infrastructure by 25% while also dampening the likelihood that projects stall. I attribute these changes to landowners' increased willingness to use protest to secure better compensation when their land is acquired. The findings contribute to debates on the relevance of strong property rights for economic development and demonstrate that more legible property rights can enable landowners to hold the state accountable.

Speaker

Dr Aliz Toth

Dr Aliz Toth is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Government at the London School of Economics. Her research examines how state and society bargain over natural resources such as land, forests, minerals. In particular, her book project investigates the roots of conflict over the use of eminent domain for infrastructure projects in India. In her work, she combines natural, field, and survey experiments with qualitative data collection and analysis. Her work has been published in the American Political Science Review and the American Journal of Political Science.

Chair

Professor Louise Tillin

Louise Tillin is a Professor of Politics in the King’s India Institute. Her research interests span federalism, democracy and territorial politics in India, and the history and politics of social policy design and implementation. Her books include Remapping India: New States and their Political Origins (Hurst & Co/Oxford University Press, 2013), Politics of Welfare: Comparisons across Indian States, edited with Rajeshwari Deshpande and KK Kailash (New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2015), Indian Federalism (New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2019) and The Politics of Poverty Reduction in India: The UPA Government, 2004 to 2014 (with James Chiriyankandath, Diego Maiorano and James Manor) (New Delhi, Orient Blackswan, 2020).

Her new book Making India Work: The Development of Welfare in a Multi-Level Democracy (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming) is a history of the development of social policy in India over the last century.

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