How can governments encourage agricultural mechanization, and what are the effects? I present experimental evidence on the labor market impacts of a village-level government agricultural mechanization intervention in India that led to an increase in farmer profits and a decrease in wages. Combining state government agricultural extension with a village government rental scheme successfully overcame barriers to technology adoption. The mechanization led to a 7% decrease in transplanting labor demand which translated to a 5% decrease in transplanting wages. In addition to the distributional implications, the wage effects have consequences for the further adoption of mechanization as they reduce the potential profit gains from mechanizing.  My results suggest that shifting agricultural labor supply and demand is important for the equity and efficiency of governments’ agricultural mechanization efforts. 

Website: https://www.povertyactionlab.org/evaluation/leveraging-local-governments-support-rice-mechanization-india

Local TV (Telugu): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTocisG-XSM

How do large landowning families dominate rural areas across generations despite revolutions and reforms? One potential channel is that these elites subvert government efforts to empower the landless in their communities. We hope to study how differences in village land concentration stemming from the granting of feudal titles hundreds of years ago affects the delivery of welfare schemes in the present day. A fertile literature evaluates the effects of land tenure systems on agricultural productivity and downstream economic outcomes. However, most of this literature focuses on colonial and post-colonial land tenure policies, and evaluates a narrow set of agricultural and policy outcomes. We exploit variation in pre-colonial land tenure systems at a vastly more granular level than is seen in the literature to evaluate the impacts on a comprehensive set of arterial welfare programs including food security and workfare. We implement a regression discontinuity along feudal borders that no longer correspond with modern administrative boundaries. Large discontinuities in land concentration persist across these boundaries. These differences are associated with both greater farm mechanization and yields as well as worse implementation of workfare schemes. These areas spend 70% less per-capita on workfare while being less well-off on average. While laborers overall in these areas are worse served by the state, they do respond politically. Voters in formerly feudal areas are 12 to 18 percentage points more likely to elect leftist politicians from a base likelihood of 3 percent.   Identifying where economic empowerment has been possible despite land inequality and where land inequality has hindered it will help guide future efforts to address India's long standing inequities.

A key issue in the literature around discrimination is whether female supervisors can reduce gender discrimination. We utilize a unique dataset that follows Indian bureaucrats in the elite Indian Administrative Service (IAS) throughout their entire service to examine whether having female chief of secretaries at key promotion windows leads to better career outcomes for their female subordinates. Chief secretaries are the most senior civil servants in a state and serve on the promotion committees for all IAS officers in the state. We find evidence that having a female chief secretary during a female bureaucrat’s first promotion window has a negative impact on her later career success and evidence of a positive effect at a later promotion window. The negative result is contradictory to most of the concordance literature which finds either null or positive effects. Some combination of dynamic statistical discrimination, male resentment against powerful women, and institutional differences in chief secretaries’ power at different promotion windows may explain the results.  

Analysis of the impact of performance scores on the actual and reported performance village level beurecrats. [Draft available on request, additional treatments ongoing]

Labor mobility is essential to the process of economic growth. I study how the riskiness of migrants' destination earnings effects migrants' destination choice and how these choices effect economic growth. First, I provide evidence for the mechanism using two labor demand shocks: the introduction of genetically modified soy and China's entrance to the WTO. I find migration flows are increase when mean wages increase but decrease when the variance of wages increase. The risk term reduces the residuals in the standard gravity model by 80\%.  I then develop a quantitative general equilibrium model with frictional labor markets. I show that increasing unemployment insurance has an important additional effect of encouraging migration to higher productivity locations and thus encourages growth when risk is considered in the migration decision.  

The sudden implementation of electronic tolling, fasttag, at toll plazas across India substantially shortened certain commute paths as measured by Google Maps. I will test whether these shortened commutes reduced demand for workfare schemes in villages on the far side of these formerly congested toll plazas. I also plan on using RDs around toll plaza locations to measure the impact of urban commuting access on a wide variety of outcomes.