Research

This paper examines how shared religious identity between deposed indigenous rulers and local populations shaped literacy in Colonial India. Using within-district differences across religious groups, we show that Hindu literacy is lower where Hindu rulers were displaced, while Muslim literacy is lower where Muslim rulers were displaced. These patterns do not appear in Princely States, where indigenous rulers retained authority, and are reinforced by instrumental variable strategies. The effects are stronger where rulers had historical ties with local populations, suggesting that removing co-religionist rulers reduced demand for British-led education, highlighting how identity and political displacement shaped the adoption of colonial institutions.

Spheres of exchange (SOEs) are institutional arrangements in which goods trade freely within distinct spheres but face formal restrictions on cross-sphere exchange. Most commonly, this restricted convertibility separates subsistence goods from luxury goods. While SOEs are extensively documented by historians and ethnographers, their welfare properties have received limited attention in formal economic models. This paper develops a general-equilibrium framework showing that SOEs can be understood as a form of inequality-aware market design. By restricting the convertibility of luxury wealth into essential goods, SOEs improve access to subsistence goods for poorer agents. We characterize conditions under which SOEs dominate commodity taxation and quantity rationing on utilitarian grounds, and show that combining SOEs with commodity taxation can yield higher welfare than either instrument alone.

Can civic infrastructure shape political competition? We study public parks in Delhi, combining electoral returns with novel data on the RSS, a Hindu nationalist organization closely associated with the BJP. Using predetermined recreational land allocations from the 1962 Master Plan as an instrument for park access, we find that a one-standard-deviation increase raises the BJP-led alliances (BJP+) vote share by 1.92 percentage points and increases RSS presence. Yet this advantage is not fixed: across four Delhi elections from 2008 to 2020, the relationship between park access and BJP+ vote share is positive in three but weakens sharply in 2013, when the park-related advantage shifts toward the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), which emerged from an anti-corruption movement that mobilized through public spaces. The findings suggest that civic infrastructure lowers the spatial costs of political organization, benefiting actors able to mobilize through it.