Download or read book Three Essays in Institutional Reforms and Indian Economic Development written by Neha Kumar and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Abstract: his dissertation consists of three chapters that examine effects of some recent institutional reforms in India on economic development. The first two chapters examine spillovers of a community-based poverty alleviation program (DPIP) on village governance in Madhya Pradesh, the second largest state in India. The DPIP program is targeted at poor communities, and designed to encourage participation of the poor in collective activities. Chapter 1 examines the spillover effects of this program on information, participation in village meetings, and targeting of other poverty alleviation programs administered by village governments. Using a difference-of-difference method with neighboring villages in the adjacent state of Uttar Pradesh serving as controls for possible endogeneity of program placement, we find significant effects on information, political participation and targeting. Chapter 2 compares the impact of DPIP with an affirmative action policy which reserved the position of village government head for women in a randomly chosen fraction of villages. The results indicate that DPIP had a stronger impact on information, political participation and upkeep of public goods. Chapter 3 studies the effect of a land reform combined with delivery of agricultural inputs by local governments in the state of West Bengal during the period 1982-96. This chapter represents joint work with Pranab Bardhan and Dilip Mookherjee, and builds on their earlier work studying the effects of these reforms on farm productivity. The main focus of the chapter is to understand better why tenancy reforms had strong spillover effects on productivity in non-tenant farms, in particular those operating through irrigation investments. The empirical analysis finds that the tenancy reform led to a downward pressure on prices of farm water inputs. Moreover, after netting out the effect of tenancy reforms on irrigation there was no additional effect on farm yields.