Land is power. Governments and revolutionaries have understood this for centuries, but the causal impacts of land concentration are notoriously difficult to study. We study how differences in village land concentration stemming from the granting of feudal titles hundreds of years ago affect service delivery and labor markets in the present day. A fertile literature evaluates the effects of land tenure systems on agricultural productivity and downstream economic outcomes. However, most of this literature focuses on colonial and post-colonial land tenure policies, and evaluates a narrow set of agricultural and policy outcomes. We exploit variation in pre-colonial land tenure systems at a vastly more granular level than is seen in the literature to evaluate the impacts not only on service delivery but also labor markets. We implement a regression discontinuity along feudal borders that no longer correspond with modern administrative boundaries. Large discontinuities in land concentration persist across these boundaries. These differences are associated with 7% lower agricultural wages for women, but not men who are more able to travel and seek outside options. The main government scheme meant to provide an outside employment option is less well implemented in these areas with 71% fewer person-days offered during peak agricultural months and no difference the rest of the year. This work stresses the long lasting effects of land inequality and suggests that ensuring workers have more outside options can help reduce persistent rural inequities. 

Draft soon [AEARCTR-0012890]

Given the lack of consumer credit in developing countries and the need for consumption smoothing, store credit requests, or informal buy now pay later requests, are ubiquitous. In this project, we collect transaction-by-customer-level data from a sample of Indian street shops and document stylized facts on the scale, cycles and concentration of this phenomena. Additionally, we design survey and field experiments to understand business owners' incentives in selling on credit and the implications of this practice on businesses and consumers. On the one hand, store credit requests may constitute a `'kin tax' on business owners facing social pressure to lend to their social network, even at the expense of business liquidity. On the other hand, store credit might increase businesses' market access and customer loyalty in otherwise homogeneous and spatially dense markets. Shedding light on these opposing forces, we aim to unpack the cultural and market considerations and implications of store credit requests, and its downstream implications in terms of consumer welfare and firm survival and growth.

Implementation ongoing [AEARCTR-0013091]

Most manufacturing firms in the developing world rely on informally sourced referrals to recruit workers for entry-level jobs. Given homophilous networks, this practice may undermine diversity, and may contribute to occupational segregation. Does seeding more referrals amongst under-represented workers improve diversity, firm productivity, social cohesion within teams and worker retention? I study this in the context of India, where job search networks are concentrated by caste. I partner with a large manufacturing firm to experimentally vary their referral allocation process, disproportionally seeding referring opportunities among lower caste incumbent workers in a random set of teams. I study the effects of this hiring policy on productivity, labor turnover, and social cohesion. 

We use admissions lotteries to estimate the long-run effects of a residential middle school system targeted at historically disadvantaged communities in India. Residential middle school enrollment boosts years of schooling, test scores, college attendance, senior secondary school graduation, and labor force participation. We also find that treated students have substantially smaller and more caste-homogenous networks. While treated students have better observable employability, their labor market outcomes are weakly worse, likely due to slower job arrival rates and homogenous networks. Our findings illustrate the potential impacts of delivering high-quality educational infrastructure at historically disadvantaged groups, while also highlighting the importance of measuring long-term and non–test score outcomes in evaluating the effectiveness of education programs.

Dispersed settlement of village populations can generate competition between groups for scarce resources. Such competition may enhance state capacity to provide public goods like schools, banks and mobile phone towers. However, it may also lead to the under-provision of highly targeted public goods, like drinking water taps and farm ponds, if competing settlements prevent investments in other parts of the village, or incomplete road networks prevent agglomeration economies. We test which of the effects persist using data on the number and locations of hamlets in villages across India, and public goods delivery outcomes on both broad and highly targeted amenities. We plan to use exogenous variation from a country-wide road building program (PMGSY) that connects hamlets to test whether incomplete road networks exacerbate competition between hamlets.