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.

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. 

We test a door‐to‐door marketing intervention aimed to increase use of a targeted health product among poor households. Specifically, we examine three treatments in which this good–chlorine tablets for drinking water purification–is: (1) sold alone, (2) sold alongside a familiar and cheaper side good that is priced at its retail value, and (3) sold alongside the same side good that is priced on a promotional offer. The side good when sold at retail price is intended to be an “opt‐out” good to reduce the marketing pressure, which should in turn reduce the amount of products sold that go unused. When the side good is sold on promotion, however, we hypothesize that it reintroduces marketing pressure due to the “gift” aspect of the promotion. Consistent with this hypothesis, we find that chlorine use is nearly double in the second condition compared to the other two conditions. Our results suggest that household valuation of a new product is shaped by both the presence and the price of a side good due to marketing pressure. 

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 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 to climate risk, 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.