Research

How do ties with elite peers affect the social mobility of non-elites who have historically faced social exclusion? Using novel data on high school and university graduates in five colonial Indian provinces between 1894 and 1921, I examine the effects of elite peers, defined as upper-caste students, on non-elites in high schools and colleges. Exploiting the plausibly random variation in the share of elite peers across all graduating cohorts within the same schools, I find that exposure to more elite peers reduces the probability that non-elite graduates, particularly those from merchant castes, complete university or become lawyers. These effects are driven by social rank rather than economic differences between elites and non-elites. The negative effect is strongest in private schools run by local Indian elites and among college students graduating with the highest grades in their high school examinations. Overall, the results suggest that exposure to elite peers in settings with significant social distance between elites and non-elites may hinder rather than foster upward mobility among non-elites.

This paper studies the effect of trade protection and women labour on the Japanese cotton spinning industry in the early twentieth century. A decline in British exports of cotton textiles to Asian markets provided a temporary protection, creating an opportunity to export for the Japanese cotton weaving industry and resulting in increased demand for domestically produced cotton yarn. In the first part of the paper, I use WWI as a quasi-natural experiment, and using a differences-in-difference design, I study the effect of the trade shock, using distances to the nearest port as a measure for exposure to international trade, on factory size and labour productivity. At the extensive margin, the number of factories increased in prefectures closer to ports. However, at the intensive margin, factories located further away from ports increased in size and made more efficient use of their spinning capacity. In the second part of the paper, I provide suggestive evidence as to whether factories with a higher proportion of women workers increased labour productivity during and after the war. I find that factories that had a higher proportion of women workers in 1913, increased their labour productivity during the war. These effects were a result of factories being able to increase the number of spindles that each worker operated, rather than due to an increase in the intensity of work. On the other hand, there was a negative effect on the total number of workers employed in these factories during and after the war. These results suggest that factories were able to undertake more productivity-enhancing measures by increasing the number of machines they operated, without increasing the number of workers to increase production.

We analyze the long-run political economy effects of temporary trade protection from British imports during WWI in Colonial India. In the first part of our paper, we study the effects of the WWI trade shock on firm-level profits and the formation of political connections with the pro-independence party, the Indian National Congress (INC), which increasingly advocated for the boycott of British goods under the leadership of Gandhi. We measure political connections as the share of directors of the firm that corresponded with Gandhi. For this purpose, we make use of a novel data source: the complete collection of letters sent by Gandhi. We construct the firm-level WWI trade shock by leveraging both the district-level variation in trade costs and the industry-wide variation in the drop of British imports. Using firm-level panel data constructed from the Investors India Yearbook, we find that more protected firms (i.e., experienced greater trade shock) during WWI generated more profits during and just after the war, and became more politically connected with the INC. In the second part of the paper, we find that more politically connected firms generated more profits, but only after independence. Using a two-stage least squares approach, we show that firms that became more politically connected after WWI also generated more profits after independence. Furthermore, they saw no significant increase in profits during the WWII. Overall, our results suggest that firms that benefited from temporary protections  turned into lobbyists, demanding more protection in the long run.