Social scientist, real estate operator and software developer. I have studied development, governance, and conflict in South Asia, with a focus on India, Sri Lanka, and Nepal. My research uses causal inference and original datasets to understand how political institutions affect conservation, public goods, and social cohesion.
How does political representation affect conservation? We argue that the mixed evidence in the literature may be driven by institutional arrangements that provide authority to marginalized communities, but do not make adequate arrangements to truly boost their voice in resource management. We study a 1996 law that created local government councils with mandated representation for India’s Scheduled Tribes, a community of one hundred million. Using difference-in-differences designs, we find that the dramatic increase in ST representation led to a substantial increase in tree cover and a reduction in deforestation. We present suggestive evidence that representation enabled marginalized communities to better pursue their interests, which, unlike commercial operations such as mining, are compatible with forest conservation.
Does political affirmative action undermine or promote development? We present the first systematic analysis of Scheduled Areas in India, home to 100 million citizens, where local political office is reserved for the historically disadvantaged Scheduled Tribes. A newly constructed dataset of 217,000 villages allows us to probe conflicting hypotheses on the implementation of the world’s largest workfare program, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. Our findings indicate that reservations deliver no worse overall outcomes, that there are large gains for targeted minorities, and that these gains come at the cost of the relatively privileged, not other minorities.
When do politicians prompt bureaucrats to provide effective services? Leveraging the uneven overlap of jurisdictions in India, we compare bureaucrats supervised by a single political principal with those supervised by multiple politicians. With an original dataset of nearly half a million villages, we find that implementation of India’s National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, the largest employment program in the world, is substantially better where bureaucrats answer to a single politician. Regression discontinuity estimates help increase confidence that this result is causal. Our findings suggest that politicians face strong incentives to motivate bureaucrats as long as they internalize the benefits from doing so.
We study effects of wartime violence on social cohesion in the context of Nepal’s 10-year civil war. We begin with the observation that violence increased levels of collective action like voting and community organization—a finding consistent with other recent studies of postconflict societies. We use lab-in-the-field techniques to tease apart such effects. Our causal-identification strategy exploits communities’ exogenous isolation from the unpredictable path of insurgency combined with matching. We find that violence-affected communities exhibit higher levels of prosocial motivation, measured by altruistic giving, public good contributions, investment in trust-based transactions, and willingness to reciprocate trust-based investments. We find evidence to support two social transformation mechanisms: (1) a purging mechanism by which less social persons disproportionately flee communities plagued by war and (2) a collective coping mechanism by which individuals who have few options to flee band together to cope with threats.
How does political repression influence civilian attitudes toward the state? We study Zimbabwe, a context with government repression, physical and economic insecurity, but regular electoral competition. Using a novel identification strategy exploiting the timing and location of state-led violent events relative to nationally representative household surveys, we find that individuals indirectly exposed to repression self-report substantially higher trust in the president and ruling party. Evidence suggests preference falsification—respondents report higher trust in the state due to fear of the regime. The effects of repression increase approaching elections, supporting the idea that autocrats employ violence to win elections.