We examine the impact of political reservation for disadvantaged minority groups on poverty. To address the concern that political reservation is endogenous in the relationship between poverty and reservation, we take advantage of the state-time variation in reservation in state legislative...

This paper presents the results of an attitude survey administered to university students in India that attempts to delineate the social-psychological mechanisms of 'externalization' and 'internalization' to understand the possible consequences of stigma associated with caste-based affirmative...

We estimate the impacts of mandated political reservation for minorities on household credit access and borrowing behavior. To identify causal effects, we exploit the exogenous state-time variation in the allocation of constituencies (electoral districts) to the two reserved minority groups in...

This paper frames the state of mental health policy in India in terms of seven sets of questions, and seeks to provide at least partial answers to these questions, based on a meta-analysis of existing research. Given the complexity of the subject, this paper is meant to serve more as a framing...

We investigate the impact of community power on the practice of untouchability in rural India. We model two-dimensional simultaneous group conflict over social norms, wherein an upper and backward (OBC) caste Hindu bloc contests the 'scheduled' castes (SCs) over the extent to which behavioural...

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...

We examine the impact of political reservation for disadvantaged minority groups on poverty. To address the concern that political reservation is endogenous in the relationship between poverty and reservation, we take advantage of the state-time variation in reservation in state legislative...

This paper examines the impact of state level political reservation for two minority groups - Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes - on child labor in India. We estimate the effect of political reservation on child labor by exploiting the state variation in the share of seats reserved for the...

Caste-based quotas in hiring have existed in the public sector in India for decades. Recently there has been debate about introducing similar quotas in private sector jobs. This paper uses an audit study to determine the extent of caste-based discrimination in the Indian private sector. On...