Professors Ali Cheema (IDEAS, LUMS Economics, MHRC), Michael Best (Columbia, MHRC), Michael Callen (LSE, MHRC), Adnan Qadir Khan (LSE, MHRC), and Shandana Khan Mohmand (IDS Sussex, IDEAS, MHRC) are seeking to hire up to two full-time Pre-Doctoral Fellows to join the “Political Economy of Progressive Property Tax Reform: Evidence from Pakistan” project.

The project aims to test whether and how political centralization affects long-run economic development, using a policy-based natural experiment in colonial Punjab. When creating new “canal colony” villages in the late 1800s, the number of headmen (lambardar/numberdar) was set according to thresholds based on village area, allowing for quasi-random variation via the regression discontinuity technique.