The authors examine how domestic violence may be used as a bargaining instrument, to extract larger dowries from a spouse's family. The phrase "dowry violence" refers not to the paid at the time of the wedding, but to additional payments demanded by the groom's family after the marriage. The...

Qualitative work has found limited use in economics largely because it is difficult to analyze at scale due to the careful reading of text and human coding it requires. This paper presents a framework with which to extend a small set of hand-coding to a much larger set of documents using natural...

Despite growing awareness of the various limitations of electoral democracy, there is a relative lack of evidence on effective policy interventions to improve the performance of elected officials and motivate them to act more equitably. This paper reports the results from an experiment in which...

Governments across the world have increasingly devolved powers to locally elected leaders. This paper studies the consequences of local democracy, exploiting a natural experiment in Karnataka, India. Local elections were postponed in 2020, resulting in appointed administrators taking over...

Large Language Models (LLMs) are quickly becoming ubiquitous, but the implications for social science research are not yet well understood. This paper asks whether LLMs can help us analyse large-N qualitative data from open-ended interviews, with an application to transcripts of interviews with...