Research
Working papers
Economic Ideas and Policy Implementation: Evidence from Malthusian Training in British Indian Bureaucracy (Job Market Paper)
Public servants frequently fail to implement government policy as intended by principals. I investigate how exposure to economic ideas can alter implementation by government agents, focusing on the influence of Malthusian ideas on British bureaucrats in colonial India. In the Malthusian view, economic distress reduces population growth, raising incomes and ultimately resolving distress without any need for government intervention. Leveraging the death of Malthus in 1834 as a natural experiment, I find that colonial officials who studied under Malthus at a bureaucratic training college implemented less generous fiscal policies in response to rainfall shortages, a proxy for local distress. Across every common relief measure, Malthus-trained officials provided between 0.10 and 0.25 SD less relief than peers trained by Richard Jones, a critic of Malthus. The results offer new evidence concerning how economic ideas shape government policy through their influence on bureaucrats.
The Salt Shock: Scarcity, Substitution, and Surprising Health Spillovers (with Ramiro Burga, Sisir Debnath, and Sheetal Sekhri)
We study the long-run health impacts of a 19th-century colonial tax that sharply altered salt prices across a fiscal border in British India. To enforce the salt tax, the British built a 2,500-mile customs line, the salt hedge, which raised salt prices and limited access in eastern regions for several decades. Using a spatial regression discontinuity design around the historical hedge, we show that individuals east of the hedge, who faced prolonged exposure to salt scarcity, exhibit lower rates of hypertension and heart disease today. Historical archival records confirm sustained salt price gaps during the hedge’s operation (1836–1879), and contemporary consumption data reveal persistent differences in salt use across regions. Our results uncover a surprising health spillover from an extractive institution, driven by persistent behavioral adaptation in consumption. We highlight a novel pathway through which fiscal policies can leave a long-lasting imprint on health, even after the policy itself has abolished.
Consequences of Elevated Fluoride Exposure for Cognitive Development (with Ryan Brown, Emily Gonzalez, Rajiv Gupta, Amzad Hossain, Thomas Kishore, and Sheetal Sekhri)
We establish causal links between elevated fluoride exposure in drinking water and the cognition and health of children by leveraging local geogenic factors that generate fluoride variation in household-level drinking water. We consistently find that elevated exposure generates an 8-10% deficit in the general intelligence of children. In addition, the children exposed to high levels of fluoride in their drinking water also have less human capital accumulation, as measured by math and language proficiency tests, worse dental health, and suffer from important physical limitations. We conclude that environmental exposure to elevated fluoride leads to a self-reinforcing cycle of poverty: exposure affects children’s cognition and health, leading to adverse inter-generational consequences, depressing economic mobility, and perpetuating inequality.