Research

We study how peers affect in-group bias. Exploiting several umpiring reforms in international cricket matches—where two umpires make independent decisions in each other’s presence—we show that home-team umpires are less biased when working with a neutral colleague, that is, one who is neither a national of the home nor the foreign team. This temporary debiasing is driven by the social pressure umpires feel to be impartial in the presence of neutral peers. Performance evaluation by visually non-salient monitors does not reduce bias, suggesting that physical presence is an important component of debiasing and peer influence.

Policies that broaden political representation empower new leaders who may lack knowledge of how government works. We study whether peer networks among local politicians facilitate knowledge transfer and improve the quality of governance. We run an experiment in partnership with the Government of Bihar, India, where we organised peer groups for randomly selected village leaders. We examine whether these peer networks increase politicians’ knowledge of how to manage the development programs under their charge and improve the delivery of public services. We also test whether politicians from marginalised groups benefit more from peer networks. To understand mechanisms, we test if peer groups diffuse information about governance best practices and help politicians organise collective action. 

We seek to understand how poor mental health, through its effects on cognition and perception, affects behavior with political implications. We will implement a randomized controlled trial around the 2024 general elections in India in which the treatment group will be offered one-month of subsidized mental health care through an online app. We will use this intervention to study how improvements in mental health change the news that people want to consume and affect their political attitudes and behaviors. 

I study how political dynasties affect economic development, by compiling biographical data on all Indian legislators since 1952 and analysing three distinct natural experiments. I present three results. First, descendants of political dynasties worsen local economic development (descendant effects), since inheriting political support weakens performance incentives. Second, founders of political dynasties improve economic development, partly because the opportunity to establish a dynasty encourages politicians to perform well in office (founder effects). Third, dynastic politics has negative long-run impacts, as descendant effects outweigh founder effects. A political agency model where descendants inherit ability and political capital can explain these patterns.

We compare how politicians and bureaucrats govern.  We analyse a natural experiment in Karnataka, India, which generated quasi-random variation in whether a village was governed by politicians or bureaucrats during 2020-21.  Politicians are better at translating citizens' preferences into policy outcomes: public spending in politician-run villages is more aligned with citizen preferences, reflecting politicians' greater engagement with citizens.  Politicians are also more responsive to citizens: they deliver more social assistance during periods of economic distress and get front-line officials to exert greater effort.  On the other hand, bureaucrats are less susceptible to elite capture and perform better at specialised governance tasks that utilise their expertise.  Politicians and bureaucrats perform similarly in terms of controlling corruption, internalising externalities, managing crises, and promoting local economic growth.  Nevertheless, most citizens prefer to be governed by an elected leader.

In 1992, the 73rd Amendment to the Indian Constitution created 250,000 village democracies (called Gram Panchayats) covering 800 million citizens. It mandated regular elections, deliberative spaces, and political reservations for women and disadvantaged castes. The unprecedented variation in democratic experience that emerged from this has resulted in a large body of research that provides insights into the intersection between democracy, governance, and development. This paper reviews this literature, showing that India’s democratic trajectory has been shaped by four broad forces: a 3,000 year tradition of debate and deliberation, colonial policies, the contrasting ideologies of central players in the formation of modern India—Gandhi and Ambedkar—and the 73rd Amendment. The paper distills key findings from the empirical literature on the effectiveness of local politicians and bureaucrats, political reservations, public finance, deliberative democracy, and service delivery. It concludes with a set of policy recommendations for improving the functioning of the Panchayats in India, emphasizing the need for greater devolution and improved local fiscal capacity. It also argues that urban governments in India would benefit from learning from the experience of Gram Panchayats.

Adverse selection to political office has become a concern in some mature democracies, but it is commonplace in the developing world.  In India, 9% of legislators face charges for murder, kidnapping, rape, extortion or armed robbery.  Using a field experiment around the  Uttar Pradesh legislative elections, we test the theory that criminal politicians get elected because voters lack information to screen candidates and coordinate on good candidates.  We partnered with 3 telecom providers and ran a voter information campaign involving over 600,000 voters.  Voters in treated villages received a voice call and text message informing them about the criminal charges of all candidates in their constituency.  Our campaign caused clean candidates to receive 1pp more votes and violent criminal candidates to receive 3pp fewer votes.  Information alone did not affect vote shares; instead, results were driven by the coordination treatment arm, in which individuals were told that many other voters had also received the message.  This suggests that reducing voters' information frictions may not be sufficient to break bad political equilibria, but common knowledge can help voters coordinate on better candidates.