Working Papers

Legal Segregation, Ethno-Religious Boundaries, and Urban Inequality in India’s Disturbed Areas Act

Draft coming soon!

Funded by The Weiss Fund for Research in Development Economics and the Institute for Humane Studies. 

This paper studies how legal restrictions on property transactions shape residential segregation and urban inequality in a contemporary developing-country context. I study Gujarat’s Disturbed Areas Act (DAA), a law originally justified as a response to riot-affected areas, distress sales, and coerced property transfers, but which requires administrative approval for property sales in designated localities and introduces delay and uncertainty into housing transactions. I assemble a new spatial panel of DAA notifications from official records and newspapers, map them to fine neighborhood units and broader postal areas, and link them to religious composition, housing-market activity, school records, and violence data. Using staggered-adoption event studies with treatment-intensity heterogeneity and spillover designs, I examine how this legal friction changes neighborhood composition, local development, and public goods. DAA designation is more likely in mixed neighborhoods and in Muslim-majority local pockets embedded in broader Hindu surroundings, but not in places with strong pre-treatment increases in communal violence, weakening the law’s stated preventive rationale. After designation, treated neighborhoods become less mixed: Hindu presence falls by 5–6 percent relative to the baseline mean, the Muslim-to-Hindu ratio more than doubles, and treated localities’ contribution to Muslim isolation rises by roughly three-quarters. Housing responses diverge by baseline exposure, measured by the number of localities marked as disturbed: heavily exposed areas see prices rise by Rs. 10,000 to 20,000 per square feet, while lightly exposed areas see weaker market activity. Schooling outcomes also deteriorate in more exposed places, with infrastructure falling by 0.04–0.06 standard deviations and failure rates rising by 1–2 percentage points within five to seven years. Violence does not rise after designation which seems to be more consistent with hardened spatial separation than successful conflict prevention. The results show that laws framed as protective property-market regulation can function as neighborhood-entry controls, reallocating housing demand while entrenching segregation and weakening access to local public goods.

Nonlinear Segregation Dynamics in Schooling Markets: the Case of Caste in India (with Moumita Das, Gagandeep Sachdeva, and Kartik Srivastava)

Draft here.

We study whether local schooling markets in India exhibit tipping-point dynamics in student caste composition. Using near-universal administrative panel data on schools, we define villages as local schooling markets and estimate village-level composition thresholds from the relationship between baseline caste shares and subsequent enrollment flows, adapting the Card et al. (2008) fixed-point procedure to multi-school markets. We study two caste contrasts: upper-caste versus all disadvantaged groups combined, and intermediate-caste versus the most marginalized. Estimated thresholds differ sharply across contrasts and concentrate at very different baseline shares, indicating that tipping is boundary-specific rather than a generic feature of composition change. Around these thresholds, within-village school segregation rises discontinuously by 12% for the upper-caste comparison and 42% for the within-disadvantaged caste comparison. These are driven by resorting across schools within the local market rather than shifts in village composition. School inputs and public grant flows exhibit parallel discrete changes at the same thresholds, with per-student grants jumping by about 30%. Threshold locations are lower where caste identity is more salient and higher where schooling markets are thicker, though both gradients largely reflect state-level heterogeneity. Together, these findings show that institutional responses to composition amplify household sorting, generating a supply-side response that affects school quality. 

Works in Progress

The Intergenerational Impacts of Residential Segregation and Discrimination on Muslims in Urban India

I study how segregation and discrimination shape intergenerational mobility for Muslims in urban India. Combining new descriptive evidence on neighborhood quality, segregation, and mobility with a structural model of neighborhood choice and skill formation, I show that unequal access to better neighborhoods is a key source of persistent Hindu-Muslim inequality. The model highlights how mobility barriers today translate into lower human-capital accumulation and weaker economic outcomes across generations, particularly in contexts where exclusion is reinforced by formal spatial regulation. Counterfactuals imply that reducing discrimination in neighborhood access generates substantial gains in upward mobility, welfare, and income for Muslim households.