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Abstract
This dissertation is comprised of three chapters on the political economy and micro development of land redistribution, minimum wage laws and immigration. The first chapter looks at the relationship between land redistribution and violence in West Bengal, India. Using a novel district level dataset from 1994 to 2008 and quantile regressions, I show that gains in land redistributed have a significant non linear impact on violence depending upon the organizational type and the intensity of violence. The direction of impact shifts from negative to positive as we move from changes in level to growth in land redistributed on individual violence. However we find that gains in land redistribution have no systematic impact on group violence except when such violence is very high. The second chapter conducts an impact evaluation of minimum wage laws for domestic workers in four Indian states between 2004 and 2012 using household data. The results show a positive impact of the legislation on real wages only in the short-run while having no impact on the extensive margin in terms of employment opportunities in both the short and the long run. The third chapter looks at the relationship from immigration to crime using a novel neighborhood level dataset from 2000 to 2012 for the Canton of Geneva, Switzerland. Using an instrument variable approach, I find no significant causal impact of an increase in immigration on crime levels in Geneva.