Workers' social identity affects their choice of occupation, and therefore the structure and prosperity of the aggregate economy. This paper studies this phenomenon in a setting where work and identity are particularly intertwined: the Indian caste system. Using a new dataset that combines...

We exploit the variation in admission cutoffs across colleges at a leading Indian university to estimate the causal effects of enrolling in a selective college on cognitive attainment, economic preferences, and Big Five personality traits. Using a regression discontinuity design, we find that...