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, documented by historians and ethnographers across ancient and tribal economies, are economic arrangements in which goods circulate freely within distinct spheres but face restrictions on cross-sphere exchanges within a closed economy. Most commonly, this division separates subsistence goods from luxury goods. In this paper, we examine the economic rationale for such systems. Using a general equilibrium framework, we show that spheres of exchange can enhance economic redistribution. We demonstrate that these systems reduce trade distortions compared to high commodity taxation, and thus when subsistence goods are consumed inelastically and the proportion of low-income individuals is large, spheres of exchange outperform direct cash transfers and subsidies. Moreover, they provide greater flexibility than quantity rationing when preferences over subsistence goods is heterogeneous.

Understanding how to distribute scarce but essential resources remains perpetually pertinent. We contribute to the problem by introducing a distinction between essential and non-essential goods; only essential goods are distributionally relevant. This distinction enables comparison of three policies for a utilitarian policymaker: quantity rationing, Mirleesian non-linear labour taxation and a novel instrument called “Market Segmentation (MS).” MS works by imposing a ceiling for total expenditure essential goods, lowering prices, and creating equitable allocations. We show MS weakly dominates quantity rationing and find sufficient conditions for it to outperform non-linear taxation. Moreover, in economies with existing labour taxation, introducing MS yields Pareto improvements.

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.