This paper investigates whether the religious identity of state legislators in India influences development outcomes, both for citizens of their religious group and for the population as a whole. To control for politician identity to be correlated with constituency level voter preferences or...

This paper analyzes the effect of a woman's electoral victory on women's subsequent political participation. Using the regression discontinuity afforded by close elections between women and men in India's state elections, we find that a woman winning office leads to a large and significant...

We examine how political participation and political competition are shaped by two class-based extensions of the franchise in 20th-century India. Creating a new dataset of district level political outcomes between 1921 and 1957, we find that the partial franchise extension of 1935 resulted in...

This paper examines the effectiveness of leaders in addressing coordination failure in societies with ethnic or religious diversity. We experimentally vary leader identity in a coordination game and implement it in the field across 44 towns in India. We find that religious minority leaders...

Leveraging close elections to generate quasi-random variation in the religious identity of state legislators in India, we find lower rates of female foeticide in districts with Muslim legislators, which we argue reflects a greater (religious) aversion to abortion among Muslims. These districts...

Using updated data, we analyze the long-run effects of two British colonial institutions established in India. Iyer (2010) showed that areas under direct colonial rule had fewer schools, health centers, and roads than areas under indirect colonial rule. Two decades later, we find that these...

We examine the human development consequences of transferring responsibility for public service provision to local governments in India, using state-level variation in the timing of administrative decentralization reforms. We find that devolution of the responsibility for health functions from...