Labor markets in developing countries are shaped by high turnover, search frictions, and persistent exclusion of minority groups. While firms often rely on referral-based hiring to reduce search costs, this can systematically exclude those with worse networks. This paper asks whether reallocating referrals toward underrepresented workers can improve both equity and efficiency. In a manufacturing firm in India, I experimentally increased the share of referrals allocated to lower caste incumbents. The intervention raised their representation by 15 percentage points (62%) and reduced turnover by 4 percentage points (41%), driven by the longer tenure of lower caste entrants with weaker outside options. Output rose by 0.09 standard deviations, with no evidence of declines in team cohesion, in contrast to the literature on the adverse effects of mixed teams on workers' ability to coordinate. A lab-in-field experiment helps identify the mechanism: when lower caste workers are hired as outsiders, cohesion falls by 9% and output drops by 22% compared to when the same workers are hired through referrals, indicating that the mode of recruitment drives cohesion instead of the identity of the workers. Treated supervisors persist in allocating referrals to lower caste incumbent workers post-intervention, and lower caste referral candidates see large gains in employment outcomes -- without diminishing the labor market prospects of their upper caste counterparts, who are able to find similar jobs elsewhere. These results highlight the untapped efficiency and equity gains from network-conscious hiring of underrepresented groups in frictional labor markets.

Land is power: both state and non-state actors 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 present-day labor markets in India. We exploit variation in land tenure systems at a more granular level than is seen in the literature on the long-run effects of land tenure systems, implementing a regression discontinuity along feudal borders that no longer correspond with modern administrative boundaries. Large discontinuities in land concentration persist across these boundaries, with the smallest land parcels in previously feudal areas 19% larger than their analogs in non-feudal areas. These differences are associated with 7% lower agricultural wages for women, but not men who are more able to travel and seek outside options. Importantly, these differences in wages persist despite no differences in yields, aggregate labor demand or supply, output prices, or other non-labor agricultural inputs. Village elected bodies in feudal areas scuttle the implementation of the key workfare program designed to provide agricultural labor with an outside employment option, with 71% fewer person-days offered during peak agricultural months when large landowners demand labor, and no difference the lean season when the program is most active. We show that the effect on the workfare program likely operates through caste-based links between large landowners and village elected representatives. This work emphasizes the effects of land inequality on local labor markets as a key mechanism through which inequities persist, and the value of outside options for workers where employers have market power.

We study store credit, a deferred payment system offered by small businesses to customers across the developing world. We collected data from local shops in an urban Indian settlement, randomly offering subsidies for stores to provide either store credit, a price discount, or a business-as-usual control. Store credit increased businesses’ market share by encouraging more visits and higher spending. Even after subsidies ended, stores continued to extend credit to treated customers. Customers who received credit during the experiment were equally likely to repay as stores’ standard credit customers and shifted some spending from non-credit stores to credit-offering ones. We find suggestive evidence that credit helps customers smooth consumption, and increase consumption expenditure overall. Our results underscore the role of small businesses as local lenders and explain the prevalence of store credit for consumption smoothing and market access in developing countries. We suggest that customers in these settings have an unmet demand for credit but struggle to demonstrate creditworthiness, leading stores to under-experiment with lending. These findings indicate potential for increased credit access by subsidizing business experiments and reducing lending default risks.

We use admissions lotteries to estimate the long-run effects of a residential middle school system targeted at historically disadvantaged communities in India. The school system boosts years of schooling, test scores, college attendance, senior secondary school graduation, and labor force participation. However, we also find that treated students have substantially smaller and mroe caste-homogenous networks. While treated students have better observable employability, their labor market outcomes are weakly worse, likely due to slower job arrival rates as a consequence of more homogenous networks. Our findings illustrate the 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.