This paper estimates the causal impact of electing criminally accused politicians and their nature of criminality on … crime in India. We exploit the quasi-random variation in the outcome of close elections between candidates with and without …

-ideological voters, who care about national and local policies, strongly prefer experts. We show that parties compete on good politicians … prediction. We find that politicians with higher ex-ante quality − as measured by years of schooling, previous market income, and …, the characteristics of politicians belonging to opposite parties converge to high-quality levels in close races …

politicians' quality is positively affected by their wage and apply a Fuzzy Regression Discontinuity Design relying on the fact …

How can we motivate good politicians those that will carry out policy that is responsive to citizens' preferences to …

Primary education in India is a development question of a unique magnitude, and the delivery of education by Indian … inspections. We also show that around election years, teachers spend more time on "non-teaching" activities. The political cycles …

franchise in 20th-century India. Creating a new dataset of district level political outcomes between 1921 and 1957, we find that …

We use a regression discontinuity design to estimate the causal effect of election to political office on natural … election appear in the mid-1800s, and grow notably larger when we restrict the sample to later years. We also analyze …

margin in India where a substantial number of incumbents do not contest re-election. There is no significant entry of new … regression discontinuity afforded by close elections between women and men in India's state elections, we find that a woman … subsequent election. This stems mainly from an increased probability that previous women candidates contest again, an important …

Leveraging close elections to generate quasi-random variation in the religious identity of state legislators in India …