Dr. Ali Cheema (LUMS) and Cory Smith (University of Maryland) are looking to hire a research assistant for help with their work on Pakistan's economic history. The work will encompass two overlapping projects. The first focuses on the “canal colony” villages of Punjab and 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. The second explores the functioning of union councils and other local governments in the “Basic Democracies” system of the 1960s. Both projects are thus an excellent fit for those with an interest in development, political economy, Pakistan’s economic history, or applied economics in general.

Any RA on this project will be able to oversee the development of these projects from early stages to completion. The initial phase of work will involve field visits to collect archival, i.e. physical, data which will then be sent for digitization. Subsequent phases will involve cleaning and analyzing the data to verify the existence of the threshold rule and the effects on public goods provision and development.