Watering down climate change mitigation: Evidence from irrigated agricultural soils in India.
Presented at: Econometric Society Interdisciplinary Frontiers - Economics+Climate Science (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona), Royal Economics Society Annual Conference (Birmingham, 2025).
Soils represent one of the largest terrestrial carbon reservoirs, yet their capacity to store organic carbon is increasingly threatened by agricultural intensification. This paper investigates the long-term effects of groundwater irrigation on soil organic carbon (SOC) across India—a country that has seen rapid expansion in irrigation infrastructure over recent decades. Leveraging a natural physical constraint on centrifugal pump efficiency relative to groundwater depth, I employ a fuzzy regression kink design to identify the causal impact of irrigation on soil health. Using newly assembled village-level data on soil nutrients, irrigation technologies, and agricultural outcomes, I find that groundwater irrigation significantly boosts dry-season crop production by enabling a second harvest. However, in villages where tube wells have been in use for over a decade, this intensification is associated with significant declines in SOC, nitrogen, and phosphorus levels—pointing to cumulative soil degradation over time. Crucially, the results imply a substantial carbon cost: a 50% increase in irrigated area is estimated to reduce SOC by 0.25%, translating to an annual loss of approximately 0.98 Gt of soil carbon across India, or 3.6 GtCO2—nearly 10% of global anthropogenic emissions. These findings highlight a critical trade-off between productivity gains and long-term soil carbon depletion, with profound implications for both agricultural sustainability and climate change mitigation.
Paving the Road to Re-election (with Camille Boudot-Reddy), Journal of Public Economics 239 (2024) 105228.
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; https://doi.org/10.1093/wber/lhae041.
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
Bank Presence, Agricultural Production, and Climate Resilience: Evidence from India (with Liang Bai, Camille Boudot-Reddy, and Johannes Eigner). Revise & Resubmit, Journal of Banking and Finance, 2024.
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.
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.