Agricultural mechanization plays an important role in countries’ productivity growth. Through labor markets, mechanization’s impacts extend beyond mechanizing farmers themselves. This study presents results from a randomized experiment that studies the impact of reducing farmer barriers to mechanization at the village level. By combining government farmer training infrastructure with rentals, the intervention tripled the uptake of a technology that replaced manual rice transplanting. For farmers, labor costs decreased with no change in yields or other expenses, leading to a 6% increase in profits. At the labor market level, mechanization led to a 7% decrease in days of labor demanded for transplanting, which translated to a 6% decrease in piece-rate transplanting wages. Beyond the first-order distributional impacts, the wage effects reduce the relative profitability of further mechanization. This is illustrated in a quantitative model calibrated to the experimental results. The model shows how the same reduction in the fixed cost of adopting mechanization under a shallower labor supply curve results in larger increases in productivity with more income for workers. The study shows how labor market frictions shape how mechanization impacts workers, farmers, and economies. 

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Land is power. Governments and revolutionaries have understood this for centuries, but the causal impacts of land concentration are notoriously difficult to study. We study how differences in village land concentration stemming from the granting of feudal titles hundreds of years ago affect service delivery and labor markets 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 not only on service delivery but also on labor markets. 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 8% lower agricultural wages for women, but not men who are more able to travel and seek outside options. The main government scheme meant to provide an outside employment option is less well implemented in these areas with 90% fewer person-days offered during peak agricultural months and no difference the rest of the year. This work stresses the long-lasting effects of land inequality and suggests that ensuring workers have more outside options can help reduce persistent rural inequities.

A vital issue in the literature around discrimination in both labor and education is whether teachers, doctors, or bosses who are female are less likely to discriminate against women. We utilize a unique dataset that follows Indian bureaucrats in the elite Indian Administrative Service (IAS) throughout their entire service to examine whether having a female chief secretary leads to better career outcomes for junior female IAS officers who work under them. Chief secretaries serve on the formal promotion committees for all IAS officers in the state. We find strong evidence that having a female chief secretary during a female bureaucrat's first promotion window (year four) has a negative impact on her later career success and weaker evidence of a positive effect at the next promotion window (year nine). The negative result is contradictory to most of the concordance literature, which finds either a null or positive impact. Female chief secretaries are also more likely to assign early-career female bureaucrats to positions that are considered less prestigious. 

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.  

Bureaucrats implement most development programs and collect administrative data on the programs they manage.  Monitoring this data can facilitate learning and performance improvement but creates incentives to misreport.  We experimentally study the impacts of providing bureaucrats with performance scorecards based on their self-reported data.  Scorecards helped bureaucrats become better informed about their performance.  Nevertheless, scorecards had no impact on the quality of public services.  Instead, using audit-based measures of data integrity, we find evidence that scorecards caused bureaucrats to fudge admin data to inflate their scores.

Informing taxpayers of audit probabilities increases tax compliance. Can a similar strategy reduce cheating in undergraduate classes? We randomize students within classes to receive information about enforcement probability and other nudges. We find information on enforcement increases cheating for those who underestimate the true rate and decreases for those who overestimate leading to an overall null. This goes against a rational model of crime interpretation and suggests students’ perceptions of cheating prevalence and enforcement might be a proxy for broader behavioral types. 

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.