Research
Working papers
Economic Ideas and Policy Implementation: Evidence from Malthusian Training in British Indian Bureaucracy (Job Market Paper)
Public officials often fail to implement government policy as directed, yet the role of economic ideas in shaping these implementation choices is poorly understood. This paper provides causal evidence that exposure to economic ideas can durably influence bureaucrat behavior. I study British colonial bureaucrats in India, exploiting a natural experiment created by the abrupt death of Thomas Malthus in 1834, replacing his economics instruction at a bureaucrat training college for that of a contemporary critic, Richard Jones. Whereas Malthus regarded economic distress as a natural mechanism for restoring equilibrium by reducing population growth, Jones disagreed with this view. Linking rainfall shocks to district-level fiscal responses, I show that officials trained by Malthus delivered less relief during droughts, providing 0.10-0.25 SD less aid across all major measures compared with officials taught by Jones. The results reveal that exposure to abstract economic ideas can shape real-world policy implementation for decades.
The Salt Shock: Scarcity, Substitution, and Surprising Health Spillovers (Working Paper with Ramiro Burga, Sisir Debnath, and Sheetal Sekhri)
Revise and resubmit at American Economic Journal: Applied Economics
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)
Revise and resubmit at the Journal of Development Economics
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.
Competitive Selection and Bureaucrat Performance: Evidence from the end of Patronage in British India (Working Paper)
Modern bureaucrats are often selected on the basis of competitive exams, but the effectiveness of this strategy is disputed and its adoption has been repeatedly repealed or undermined in modern practice. I show that the selection of bureaucrats on the basis of competitive exams, rather than a common alternative of selection by patronage, results in the recruitment of higher-performing civil servants. Using newly digitized data from British India over the period 1846 to 1885, during which the Indian Civil Service abolished recruitment by patronage in favor of competitive exams, I show that district officers selected by these exams are eighty percent more likely to be highly rated on annual performance evaluations and that their districts are up to one-third less likely to experience a famine. I show that these differences are driven by officers who registered the highest scores on their entrance exams, and that low-scoring officers are indistinguishable from patronage appointees. The results indicate that civil service exams promote modern public sector performance by selecting high-ability bureaucrats, and that successfully identifying and recruiting the highest-ability candidates can increase state capacity.