Job Market Paper

• Affirmative Action, Caste and the Marriage Market  Abstract

  This study investigates the role of a strong social norm - caste - on the marriage market in India and how it responds to economic changes. A jobs-based affirmative action policy, the implementation of the Mandal Commission report in December 1993, differentially affects incomes across cohorts for treated castes. This is used to separately identify the effects of caste and income on marital partner choice and the distribution of the match surplus using a difference-in-differences strategy. The affirmative action policy is found to have an asymmetric effect across genders - male members of the treated group are found to attract more desirable spouses and get a higher share of the marital match surplus while there is no similar effect for women. A structural model of the marriage market based on Choo & Siow(2006) is used to investigate the marital welfare effects of the policy while controlling for selection effects. Similar results are found. These findings suggest that the marriage market and intra household decision making plays a significant role in determining the distribution of welfare changes from economic shocks.  Close

Working Papers

• Management, Firms and Labor Regulations (with Ritam Chaurey)  Abstract

  This paper investigates the impact of labor market regulations in India. These regulations vary by state and provide different protections depending on the type of the worker. Among industrial workers, permanent employees have considerable stronger protections than contractual employees. These are substitutes for each other. Managerial employees have no protections. This paper finds that (i) in response to short run demand shocks, there is no significant change in the total management input, suggesting that the institutional factors of the market for managers has larger search/firing costs than that for industrial workers. Contrary to the literature, we also find that (ii) there is no productivity change when there is an influx of contract workers. We also find that the nature of management activity changes depending on the mix of employees - (iii) when more contract workers are hired, managers spend more time in manufacturing activities. This suggests that there are complementarities between management time and contract labor input in manufacturing and that the manner of deployment of management capital within a firm is endogenous even if the overall level is fixed. This could account for one of the features that is widely observed in empirical studies - firms in regions with strong employee protections have lower steady state productivities. Close

• Representation and Opportunism: RD Evidence from Indian Village Councils (with Ashna Arora, Rakesh Banerjee and Siddharth Hari)  Abstract

  Local governments in developing countries play a crucial role in the provision of local public goods and the functioning of social welfare programs. This paper investigates the relationship between the size of elected local government councils and public service delivery. We use a natural experiment from India, where the number of politicians at the village level is an increasing, discontinuous function of village population. We set up a regression discontinuity design to study the impact of a larger elected council on the targeting of welfare schemes, as well as the allocation of private benefits by politicians to themselves. We find that increasing the number of council members increases the appropriation of private benefits by the council head but not by ordinary members. In addition, we also find some evidence of improved targeting of a large scale public workfare program. We explore possible channels through which council size may affect these outcomes. Close