A Keough School faculty member, Kellogg Faculty Fellow Lakshmi Iyer’s co-authored seminal work on colonial land revenue system and economic performance in India was cited in this year's Economic Nobel Prize winning research.
Daron Acemoglu (MIT), Simon Johnson (MIT), and James Robinson (Chicago) won the Nobel Prize for their work on highlighting the role of institutions and history in explaining current poverty and inequality. The Nobel Prize Press Release cited this as a way to “help us understand differences in prosperity between nations.”
Iyer’s work shows that differences in historical property rights institutions lead to sustained differences in economic outcomes. This is done through the analysis of the colonial land revenue institutions set up by the British in India. Through the co-authored research, it was found that areas in which proprietary rights were historically given to landlords had significantly lower agricultural, health, and education investments post-independence period. The reasoning for this is afforded to these historical institutions leading to varying policy choices.
Iyer is a professor of economics and global affairs at the University of Notre Dame whose research primarily focuses on political economy and development economics.