Bank Presence, Agricultural Production, and Climate Resilience: Evidence from India (with Liang Bai, Camille Boudot-Reddy, and Johannes Eigner). Journal of Banking and Finance, 2026
Presented at: Scottish Economic Society Conference -- Best Paper Award -- (Perth, 2019), 5th DIAL Development Conference (Paris, 2019)
We study the production effects of one of the largest bank branch expansion programs in history, implemented by the government of India during the 1980s. Combining policy-driven variation in branch expansion with newly-digitized data on bank lending and crop prices at the district-year level, we do not find evidence for a significant shift in agricultural output and inputs on average. Greater bank presence does promote resilience, however, by attenuating the effect of lagged rainfall shocks on output. This effect operates via changes in the incidence of cropping during the dry winter season, which makes use of costly irrigation resources.
Paving the Road to Re-election (with Camille Boudot-Reddy), Journal of Public Economics, 2024
Presented at: King's College Business School - Development Economics Workshop (London, 2024), Royal Economics Society Annual Conference (Belfast, 2024).
The prevailing view in the economic literature is that voters are particularly myopic, encouraging governments to leverage short-term re-election strategies. Under such conditions, public capital investment with long-term rewards – despite its central role in the process of sustained economic development – may be neglected. In the context of India’s rural road construction programme, we evaluate the role which large-scale public infrastructure initiatives have on the electoral accountability mechanism. Using a fuzzy regression discontinuity design with newly-digitised village-level voting outcomes from the 2014 general election, we find evidence of electoral support attributed to the political alliance which spearheaded the programme. This support is sustained over two electoral cycles, with significant spillover effects in villages within 2 km of a newly built road. These political gains however, appear to be confined to incumbent candidates.
Blog: VoxDev
Watering the Seeds of the Rural Economy: Evidence from Groundwater Irrigation in India (with Camille Boudot-Reddy), World Bank Economic Review, 2024
Presented at: 18th Annual Conference on Economic Growth and Development (Delhi, 2023) European Economic Association Congress (Milan, 2022), Royal Economic Society (2022), Econometrics Society Winter Meeting (Delhi, 2021), North East Universities Development Consortium (Boston, 2021)
We study the impact of private investment in groundwater irrigation on the spatial and sectoral distribution of rural economic activity in India. Exploiting a kink in access to groundwater irrigation, generated from an absolute technological constraint on the operational capacity of irrigation pumps with depth of the water table, we find evidence of a significant improvement in agricultural production accompanied with modest consumption gains. Irrigation causes a substantial increase in population density, but has no effect on the employment rate or labour reallocation between sectors of the economy. Furthermore, irrigated agriculture appears to provide additional employment opportunities for waged labour from surrounding non-irrigated villages. Investigating the dynamic effects from adoption indicate important in-migration of labour in the short-run, as well as changes to fertility/mortality in the long to medium-run.
Blog: Ideas for India
Revise & Resubmit, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, 2026.
The United Kingdom’s transition from area-based farm subsidies to outcome-contingent environmental contracting represents a fundamental shift in agricultural policy. While these schemes aim to improve environmental outcomes, their effects on the agricultural production frontier remain poorly understood. This paper provides causal, spatially explicit evidence on whether outcome-based agri-environmental payments operate as a land reallocation mechanism that contracts cropland devoted to food production. Using high-resolution land-cover data and quasi-experimental variation in participation in the Countryside Stewardship Scheme, we estimate the magnitude, persistence, and spatial incidence of land-use change induced by environmental contracts in England. We find that participation leads to a statistically and economically significant reduction in arable cereal area, including on highly productive soils, with persistent conversion into grassland and semi-natural cover. These results demonstrate that environmental contracting reshapes national production frontiers rather than merely altering on-farm practices, and they highlight a potential channel for carbon leakage and food-security externalities. The findings provide new empirical parameters for evaluating and designing outcome-based agri-environmental policies.
Land taxation and agricultural land use: evidence from the English Fenlands
This paper examines how recurring land taxation affects agricultural land use and ownership by leveraging a natural experiment in the English Fenlands. The region’s hydrological landscape is divided into Internal Drainage Districts (IDDs), each charging different drainage rates determined by natural geographic features unrelated to agricultural productivity. Exploiting this quasi-random variation, we implement a geographic regression discontinuity design to identify the causal effects of higher land charges on land ownership and production decisions. We find that higher drainage rates lead to significant changes in ownership structure, with land shifting away from private owners and toward local authorities. Higher-tax areas also exhibit greater use of high-input, high-return crops such as potatoes, alongside higher vegetation intensity measured using remote sensing indicators. These findings suggest that recurring land charges can influence both the organization of agricultural land and production incentives, highlighting the broader role of land taxation in shaping rural land use.
Can Soils Keep Up: Evidence from Irrigated Agriculture in India (with Camille Boudot-Reddy ).
Accounting for Agriculture in Development: Impact of a Digital Platform for Farm Finance (with Camille Boudot-Reddy and Pushkar Maitra).
Carats or Carrots: Labour Supply Shocks in Agriculture from Exposure to Gold Mining in Mali (with Camille Boudot-Reddy).
Conservation Agriculture: Documenting Adoption Across the Indo-Gangetic Plains (with Anil Bhargava, Camille Boudot-Reddy, Guillaume Chome, Khushboo Gupta, Urs Schulthess, and Rupika Singh) CGIAR - Standing Panel for Impact Assessment, 2017.
Alleviating Constraints to Adoption of Improved Soil Fertility Management (with Aprajit Mahajan) Agriculture Technology Adoption Initiative, 2017.