Kaustabh Adhya

Working Papers

Conflict, Economic Activities and the Internet: Disentangling the (World Wide) Web (Job Market Paper)

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)

This work incorporates a game that captures the strategic incentives of an attacker, victim, and insurance firm: 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, we find that premiums rise by about 4.93% in the year after a conflict and insurance demand falls by about 10.75% as a second-order effect.