The Navarra Center for International Development (NCID) started receiving job market candidates yesterday, January 15, with the visit of Jonathan Lehne, who is finishing his Ph.D. at the Paris School of Economics. Lehne presented the paper 'Irrigation vs education: The long-run effects of opium cultivation in British India,' where he studies the long-term implications of British colonial policies regarding opium.

He starts by assuming that colonial policies still have consequences and manifestations in developing countries, and the paper tries to establish why. In his own words, what differentiates his paper for the existing literature is not only that he looks at the "relative persistence of different policies in the same context," but also to "some of the mechanisms that could explain this pattern of persistence."