Research

Published articles

• Female labour, Status, and Decision Power, Economica, with Catherine Bros & François Maniquet, 2023, 90(358), 453-473. [link]

• Experimental evidence on Affirmative Action, Handbook on Economics of Discrimination and Affirmative Action, forthcoming. [link]

• Education spillovers in farm productivity: Revisiting the evidence, World Bank Economic Review, 2020, 34(2), 312–331. [link]

• Applying for social programs in India: Roles of local politics and caste networks in affirmative action, Journal of Comparative Economics, 2018, 46(2), 436-456 . [link]

• Distribution of human capital and income: an empirical study on Indian States, Journal of Macroeconomics, 2015, 43, 239-256.  [link]

• Education spillovers: empirical evidence in rural India, Indian Growth and Development Review, 2012, 5(1), 4-24.

Working papers

• Does the identity of leaders matter for education? Evidence from the first black governor in the US, with Mery Ferrando [last version]

• Measuring sex-selective abortion: How many women abort?, with Aditi Dimri & Philipp Ketz [last version]

Oldies

• Stigma in affirmative action application: empirical evidence from quotas in education in India

I study the determinants of households application to affirmative action in education in India, with a focus on the role of social stigma. I look at the Other Backward Classes (OBC) and I analyze the impact of the status of households' subcaste on their probability to apply to reservation. The identification strategy is based on the fact that the OBC group is composed of subcastes which are very different in terms of social status. The status of a subcaste group in rural India is locally determined and it strongly related to the proportion of land owned by this subcaste in the village. I use this exogenous and historical variation of status to identify the stigma effect. I find that stigma plays a significant role in preventing households from locally high ranked groups to apply for reservations.