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 speeds in India and satellite-based proxies, we find that riots reduce economic activity by 19.61%, and better connectivity amplifies the effect by 1.2-5.1 percentage points. The proposed mechanism is enhanced coordination and information, which amplify spiteful communal narratives and thus facilitate economic disruption.

Insurance in the Time of Strife: Evidence from Hindu-Muslim Riots in India (with Tamoghna Bose and Anirban Mitra)

This work incorporates a game that captures the strategic trade-off between victims and insurance firms: riots increase demand for insurance; however, firms are strategic and may increase prices to reduce expected payouts. We generate testable predictions from the underlying theory and, using novel insurance data, find that premiums rise by 4.66% in the year following a riot, mechanically reducing the demand for insurance by 16.81%.

Insurgency and Spatial Reorganisation of Activities: Evidence from India’s Red Corridor [Link] (with Malavika T. Ananthakrishnan)

This work studies how the Maoist–Naxalite insurgency affects the spatial organisation of economic activity in India during 2016–2020. We find that a 0.1-unit increase in exposure to violent armed clashes between rebels and state forces reduces non-farm activity by 18.04% and (weakly) increases land-based subsistence activity by 0.36%. We provide suggestive evidence that this is driven by labour reallocating from the former towards the latter sector. Our findings do not detract from whether the incentives faced by the insurgents are political or economic.