Lakshmi Iyer
There are 7 articles for this faculty member.
The Bloody Millennium: Internal Conflict in South Asia
| Author: | Lakshmi Iyer |
|---|---|
| Published: | March 26, 2009 |
| Paper Release Date: | January 2009 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
What accounts for the disturbing trend of increasing terrorism and associated fatalities in South Asia? In 2007, a quarter of all terrorist attacks worldwide were committed in South Asia, second only to Iraq. HBS professor Lakshmi Iyer presents the first comprehensive analysis of internal conflict in South Asia using multiple data sources and incorporating a long-run time frame. She finds that the intensity of internal conflict in the post-2001 period is strongly associated with poverty, both in a cross-country comparison and in a comparison of districts within India and Nepal. Measures implemented by regional and national governments to combat internal violence vary considerably across countries and over time. Typically, the use of military force or relying on unofficial militias has not proved to be a successful counterinsurgency tactic in South Asia; strengthening police activity and using a political accommodation approach has led to some successes in the past.
Published in 2008
The Cost of Property Rights: Establishing Institutions on the Philippine Frontier Under American Rule, 1898-1918
| Authors: | Lakshmi Iyer and Noel Maurer |
|---|---|
| Published: | September 25, 2008 |
| Paper Release Date: | August 2008, revised April 2009 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
Economists generally agree that a system of transparent and secure property rights is beneficial for growth and development. A large literature emphasizes the role of property rights in spurring long-term investments, improving productivity, changing labor allocations, and increasing access to formal sources of credit. This paper describes U.S. attempts to implement property rights reforms in the Philippines in the early twentieth century. Iyer and Maurer document that, two decades after the arrival of the Americans, property rights in the Philippines had become unambiguously less secure, and that political and budgetary constraints played a large role in inhibiting the progress of reforms.
Traveling Agents: Political Change and Bureaucratic Turnover in India
| Authors: | Lakshmi Iyer and Anandi Mani |
|---|---|
| Published: | August 21, 2008 |
| Paper Release Date: | July 2008, revised April 2009 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
Politicians and bureaucrats are two important pillars of governance, but while politicians are motivated by short-term electoral pressures, bureaucrats are driven by long-term career concerns. This difference in the nature of their incentives is, in most cases, deliberate and constitutionally provided for. Iyer and Mani address two key questions in this paper: How do politicians facing short-term electoral pressures control bureaucrats with low-powered incentives? In turn, how do bureaucrats respond to these incentives? The authors develop a simple framework and provide empirical evidence on both the politicians' and the bureaucrats' strategies, using a detailed data set on the entire career histories of officers in the Indian Administrative Service, the top layer of government bureaucracy in India.
Colonial Land Tenure, Electoral Competition and Public Goods in India
| Authors: | Abhijit Banerjee and Lakshmi Iyer |
|---|---|
| Published: | February 28, 2008 |
| Paper Release Date: | February 2008 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
How is the impact of historical institutions felt today? This comparative analysis by Banerjee and Iyer highlights the impact of a specific historical institution on long-term development, specifically the land tenure systems instituted during British colonial rule. The paper compares the long-term development outcomes between areas where controls rights in land were historically given to a few landlords and areas where such rights were more broadly distributed. The paper also documents the impact of these differing historical institutions on political participation and electoral competition in the post-colonial period.
Published in 2007
High Hills, Deep Poverty: Explaining Civil War in Nepal
| Q&A with: | Lakshmi Iyer |
|---|---|
| Published: | August 6, 2007 |
| Feature: | Research & Ideas |
Nepal, the home of Mount Everest, has been gripped in recent years by civil war. A new paper by Harvard Business School professor Lakshmi Iyer and Quy-Toan Do of the World Bank looked at the roots of Nepal's conflict from a variety of angles. For the future, investing in poverty reduction strategies is a key for peace, Iyer says.
Public Action for Public Goods
| Authors: | Abhijit Banerjee, Lakshmi Iyer and Rohini Somanathan |
|---|---|
| Published: | June 12, 2007 |
| Paper Release Date: | April 2007 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
In poor rural communities, public goods such as health and education services, clean water, electricity, and transport facilities are remarkably scarce. Within this picture of overall inadequacy there is considerable variation both across countries and inside national boundaries. How can these variations in public goods be explained? This paper surveys theoretical and empirical research on the characteristics of groups and the ability of members to act collectively to promote group interests. There remain many missing pieces in the public goods puzzle and there are important policy implications as a result.
Poverty, Social Divisions and Conflict in Nepal
| Authors: | Quy-Toan Do and Lakshmi Iyer |
|---|---|
| Published: | June 8, 2007 |
| Paper Release Date: | April 2007 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
More than 70 civil wars have occurred around the world since 1945. Understanding what causes such violent conflicts to begin and then fester is a topic of increasing research interest to economists. In Nepal the conflict known as "the People's War" began in 1996 and spread to all parts of the country, resulting in the deaths of more than 13,000 people. Do and Iyer considered a wide range of economic and social factors that they hypothesized could affect the likelihood of violent conflict, and econometrically examined their relationship with conflict intensity. These factors include geographic conditions (mountains and forests), economic development, social diversity including linguistic diversity, and government investment in infrastructure. Do and Iyer's nuanced approach allowed them to examine the spread of a single conflict across different parts of the country and over time.
