Research

Is exposure to events changing voting behavior, or those who switch their votes are endogenously more exposed to events? Moreover, what role do political messages play in translating events into votes? This paper examines these questions in the context of the 2019 national election in India. As events, we consider deadly attacks on Indian soldiers in armed conflicts. We exploit the exogeneity in the home constituency of the deceased soldiers to identify how exposure to soldier deaths affects voting behavior causally. Using a difference-in-differences identification strategy, we find that in the home constituency of the deceased soldiers, the incumbent party’s vote share increased by 4.2 pp. Text analysis of the incumbent PM Modi’s speeches reveals that only deaths referred by him affect public opinion. Our findings emphasize the role of politicians and media in amplifying events, indicating that event exposures translate into votes when emphasized by influential figures.

Religious groups sometimes resist modern welfare-enhancing interventions, adversely affecting the group's human capital levels. In this context, we study whether the two largest religious groups in India (Hindus and Muslims) resisted western education because they shared religious identity with the rulers deposed by British colonizers. We find that Muslim literacy in an Indian district under the British is lower where the deposed ruler was a Muslim, while Hindu literacy is lower where the deposed ruler was a Hindu. To deal with possible omitted variable bias, we instrument the religion of the deposed ruler with distance from the birthplace of Shivaji, a Hindu king who rebelled against the Muslim empire. We find other results consistent with the hypothesis espoused by some historians that when foreign occupiers dislodged Islamic rulers, Muslims showed resistance to the inventions/institutions introduced by the occupiers. Our paper is the first to document a similar effect among Hindus in India empirically.

Inequality and the skewed distribution of ‘essential’ goods remain pertinent problems today. Here we consider a general equilibrium framework with essential and non-essentials, where only essential goods are deemed relevant to distributional concerns. We then compare the efficacy of four policies for a utilitarian planner, namely taxation with direct transfers, taxation with subsidies, quantity rationing, and a fourth policy which we introduce and term market segmentation (MS). Under MS, the market for essentials is segmented from non-essentials (i.e., they cannot be freely traded for each other). We find that if the relative number of low-income individuals in the economy is large and “essentials” are consumed inelastically, then MS outperforms taxation with transfers and taxation with subsidies. MS also weakly dominates quantity rationing. We discuss how market segmentation can help policymakers deal with issues such as automation and the superstar phenomenon (Scheuer and Werning, 2017) 

Are multiple sources of news good or bad for political polarisation? At one level, one might expect more news sources to increase information about the candidates, making ideological affiliations less salient. On the other hand, more information sources can make voters more polarised because of ``correlation neglect'' in belief formation (Enke and Zimmerman, 2019). We test the effect of the closure of local newspapers at the county level on political polarisation in the US. Using an event-study approach, between 2006 and 2018, we find that the probability of splitting a voting ticket significantly decreases in counties that become a news desert (one or zero local newspapers). We also instrument the change in newspapers by the presence of Craigslist in a county since Craigslist costs advertisement revenue to newspapers without having any independent effect on voting behaviour. We find that split tickets increase when local newspapers close down in counties with more than two newspapers. Combining these results indicates a non-monotonic relation between the number of news sources and polarisation.

Huntington, 1996 claims, "In the modern world, religion is a central, perhaps the central, force that motivates and mobilises people." Organisations formed along religious lines have indeed played a significant role in mobilising people all over the world. Despite the growing importance of these religious-cultural organisations in different parts of the world, there is hardly any quantitative analysis on how these organisations affect socio-economic outcomes at the grass-root level. The lack of quantitative evidence on these organisations' impact partly stems from the fact that these organisations are either banned and operate underground, or often operate secretively, not sharing the details on their operations.

This project aims to contribute to this literature by studying the impact of the RSS's mobilisation on crimes against minorities in India. The RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) is an organisation spreading and consolidating Hindu  Nationalism in India. It has a  close ideological and organisational connection with the BJP (Bhartiya Janta Party), the political party in power since 2014. By spending weeks with the organisation on the field, we obtained a novel data set on the work and membership of the RSS for Delhi in India. RSS aims to organise Hindus and imprint on them their ideology, which is done first and foremost in their daily assembly of its members shakhas. RSS' brand of Hindu Nationalism is often alleged to be anti-Muslim and anti-Christian. However, RSS claims that it tries to unite Hindus and discourage practices like untouchability. We are combining the RSS data set with a highly detailed data set on crime in Delhi. In this data set on crime, we have first investigation reports containing detailed information about the nature of the crime, the identity of the lodger, the victim, and the accused perpetrator. To address possible endogeneity concerns, we instrument the number of shakhas and membership of the RSS in a ward with the number of public parks in a ward. RSS shakhas take place in open grounds. With Delhi being heavily urbanised and densely populated, these open spaces are not readily available. Moreover, parks in a ward do not independently affect crimes against minorities. We have found a strong positive correlation between the number of shakhas/RSS membership and the number of parks in a ward in Delhi. Going forward, we intend to use this IV strategy and test the impact of RSS membership and shakhas on crimes against minorities.