Research

Religious groups sometimes resist welfare-enhancing interventions, impacting human capital. Can resistance to secular education arise when rulers sharing religious identity with a group are deposed by foreign powers? Focusing on colonial India, we analyze the impact of shared religious identity between deposed local rulers and religious groups on literacy. Muslim literacy is lower where British authorities replaced a Muslim ruler, and Hindu literacy is lower when the ousted ruler was Hindu. Addressing OVB, we use literacy differences, complemented by an IV approach. Our results show that the effect of shared religious identity on literacy rates depended on the historical ties between deposed rulers and their subjects: in districts where ousted rulers had historical connections to their co-religionists, there was greater resistance to education introduced by the colonizers.

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.

Urban infrastructure is typically viewed through the lens of development, with public amenities such as parks associated with improvements in health and well-being. Yet the political consequences of urban design remain underexplored. This paper examines whether the presence of public parks influences political outcomes in the context of Delhi, India. Combining novel data on local urban infrastructure with field-collected measures of the organizational activity of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)—the largest Hindu nationalist organization in the country—we show that a higher per capita allocation of land to public parks significantly increases the frequency of RSS assemblies in a locality. We further document a robust relationship between local RSS presence and higher vote shares for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). These findings reveal how ostensibly neutral urban planning decisions can have politically consequential effects by shaping the capacity for grassroots mobilization.