Research

Abstract: Developing countries have increasingly decentralized power to local governments. This paper studies a central element of decentralization -- polity size --  using population-based discontinuities that determine local government boundaries for over 100,000 Indian villages. Over the short and long-run, individuals allocated into local governments with smaller populations have better access to public goods. However, this relationship is non-linear, with benefits only observed below certain population thresholds. We provide evidence that these results are explained by greater civic engagement and improved leader selection in those jurisdictions. We find no evidence for other theorized mechanisms such as elite capture.  

We study the effect of incarceration on wages, self-employment, and taxes and transfers in North Carolina and Ohio using two quasi-experimental research designs: discontinuities in sentencing guidelines and random assignment to judges. Across both states, incarceration generates short-term drops in economic activity while individuals remain in prison. As a result, a year-long sentence decreases cumulative earnings over five years by 13%. Beyond five years, however, there is no evidence of lower employment, wage earnings, or self-employment in either state, as well as among defendants with no prior incarceration history. These results suggest that upstream factors, such as other types of criminal justice interactions or pre-existing labor market detachment, are more likely to be the cause of low earnings among the previously incarcerated, who we estimate would earn $5,000 per year on average if spared a prison sentence.

Despite significant economic growth, child development outcomes in India remain poor. Using a large-scale experiment in which randomly-selected mothers receive cash transfers for the first two years of their child's life, we examine the relationship between income and child development in the Indian state of Jharkhand. Treated mothers and children experienced large increases in nutritional intake, and an index of motor and cognitive skills improved by 0.12SD. However, child anthropometric indicators improved only in areas with low rates of open defecation. These results suggest that poor sanitation is a key explanatory factor for the poor translation of increases in income into child growth in India.

Preliminary -- please email for a draft

Abstract: Dowry payments are common in many marriage markets. This paper uses data on over 74,000 marriages in India over the last century to explain why the institution of dowry emerges and how it evolves over time. We find that the proportion of Indian marriages including dowry payments doubled between 1930 and 1975, and the average real value of payments tripled. We empirically test whether four prominent theories of dowry can explain this rise, and find support for only one: dowry emerges due to increased differentiation in groom quality as a result of modernization. We also show that the average real value of dowry payments declines after 1975 and demonstrate this can be rationalized within a search model of marriage markets. 

Coverage: Live Mint , Ideas For India

Abstract: Corrupt government hiring is common in developing countries. This paper uses original data to document the operation and consequences of corrupt hiring in a health bureaucracy. Hires pay bribes averaging 17 months of salary, but contrary to conventional wisdom, their observable quality is comparable to counterfactual merit-based hires. Exploiting variation across jobs, I show that the consequences of corrupt allocations depend on the correlation between wealth and quality among applicants: service delivery outcomes are good for jobs where this was positive and poor when negative. In this setting, the parameter was typically positive, leading to relatively good performance of hires. 

Coverage: VoxDev

Abstract: Improving "last mile" public-service delivery is a recurring challenge in developing countries. Could the rapid adoption of mobile phones provide a simple, cost-effective means to do so? We evaluate the impact of a phone-based monitoring system on improving the delivery of a program that transferred nearly a billion dollars to farmers in the Indian state of Telangana, using an at-scale experiment randomized across 5.7 million farmers. A randomly selected sample of officials were told that a representative sample of beneficiaries in their jurisdiction would be called to measure the quality of program implementation. This simple announcement led to a 1.5% increase in the number of farmers receiving their benefits, with a 3.3% increase among farmers in the bottom quartile of landholdings. The program was highly cost-effective, with a cost of 3.6 cents for each additional dollar delivered.

Coverage: Hindustan Times Op-ed, Financial Express 

Abstract: Every year, millions of Americans experience the incarceration of a family member. Using 30 years of administrative data from Ohio and exploiting differing incarceration propensities of randomly assigned judges, this paper provides the first quasi-experimental estimates of the effects of parental and sibling incarceration in the US. Parental incarceration reduces the likelihood of their child's future incarceration by 4.9 percentage points and improves their adult neighborhood socioeconomic status.  While estimates on academic performance and teen parenthood are imprecise, we reject large positive or negative effects. Sibling incarceration leads to similar reductions in criminal activity. [Non-technical 2-page summary]

Abstract: This paper analyzes the effect of incarceration on mortality using administrative data from Ohio between 1992 and 2017. Using event study and difference-in-differences approaches, we compare mortality risk across incarcerated and non-incarcerated individuals before and after pre-scheduled releases from prison. Mortality risk halves during the period of incarceration, with large declines in murders, overdoses, and natural causes of death. However, there is no detectable effect on post-release mortality risk, meaning that incarceration increases longevity. These estimates reflect the high-risk environment faced by criminal justice-involved individuals when not incarcerated and suggest non-carceral policies that could reduce these risks.