Kaustabh Adhya

Working Papers

Conflict, Economic Activities and the Internet: Disentangling the (World Wide) Web [Link]

This study examines how variation in Internet speed shapes the economic consequences of religious conflict. Using a novel dataset on Internet speed for India and satellite-based proxies, we find that riots reduce economic activities by 19.61%, and better connectivity amplifies the effect by 1.2-5.1 percentage points. The proposed mechanism is through enhanced coordination and information, which amplifies spiteful communal narratives and thus facilitates economic disruption. 

Insurance during Conflicts: Theory and Evidence from India (with Tamoghna Bose and Anirban Mitra)

This work incorporates a game that captures the strategic incentives of attackers, victims, and insurance firms: insurance lowers attackers’ incentives to attack; however, demand for insurance by the victim raises insurance premiums and may induce further attacks. We generate testable predictions from the underlying theory and, using novel insurance data, find that premiums rise by 4.93% in the year following a riot, mechanically reducing the demand for insurance by 10.75%. 

Violent Insurgencies and the Spatial Reorganisation of Economic Activities (with Malavika Thirumalai Ananthakrishnan)

This paper studies how the Maoist–Naxalite insurgency affects the spatial organisation of economic activity in India during 2016–2020. Using georeferenced conflict data and satellite-based measures of economic activity, we study the differential impacts of the insurgency on non-farm and farm activities within the insurgency stronghold. We find that a 0.1 unit increase in exposure to violent insurgencies reduces non-farm activity by 18.04% and (weakly) increases farm activity by 0.36%, consistent with the insurgency's political motivation for selective disruption.