In developing-country labor markets, search frictions and network-based hiring sustain high churn and exclude poorly-connected workers, suggesting a misallocation. I test whether redirecting referrals toward underrepresented minority workers in such segmented labor markets can raise both equity and productivity. In an Indian manufacturing firm, I experimentally increased the share of referral invitations allocated to minority lower caste incumbents. The policy raised their employment share by 15 pp (62%) and raised team output by 0.09 s.d. (5%). This improvement in production wa sdriven by reduced monthly turnover which was lower by 4 pp (41%). Importantly, treatment did not induce declines in worker cohesion, contrary to common concerns about diverse and heterogeneous teams. A supplementary lab-in-field experiment pins down the mechanism: when lower caste workers enter as outsiders rather than via referrals, cohesion falls by 9% and output 22%, implying that recruitment mode -- not entrant identity -- drives short-run costs. At the firm, supervisors exposed to the policy continued to allocate referrals to lower caste workers after the intervention concluded, consistent with Bayesian learning which I rationalize with a dynamic model. Lower caste referral candidates saw large gains in job offers and employment, with no detectable displacement of upper-caste candidates. Redirecting referrals can thus reassign jobs toward workers with low outside options, improving their labor market prospects as well as firm performance.

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 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.