Satyendra Kumar Gupta

This paper studies the effect of legal origins (common law vs. civil law) on contemporary slum formation in developing countries. First, we provide a cross‐country correlation analysis. Second, we provide a regression discontinuity analysis using household data from Cameroon. The results suggest that a common law heritage is associated with a lower probability of slum conditions. The legal philosophies transplanted through colonization appear to be associated with the pattern of contemporary urban housing stocks in developing countries.

This paper hypothesizes that inherent agricultural land productivity explains contemporary levels of autocracy and democracy. In particular, intermediate levels of productivity are associated with democracy, whereas a legacy of either low or high agricultural productivity is associated with autocracy. Our cross-country empirical results using data from up to 148 countries support this notion. The finding of an inverted U-shaped relationship holds up to a battery of robustness tests, and are supported by sub- national data from the US and India. Moreover, the persistence of the association is documented by utilizing data from pre-colonial societies.