This paper studies how contemporary legal control over ordinary property transfers can generate residential segregation and reshape urban opportunity in developing country contexts. I examine Gujarat’s Disturbed Areas Act, an active law that requires local administrative approval for property transactions in riot-affected police-station jurisdictions with the stated purpose of preventing minority distress sales. The law gives the state discretion over who can buy from whom at a neighborhood level. I construct a novel panel of legal designations across Gujarat and link it to spatially granular measures of residential composition, housing-market activity, school environments, and public safety to provide, to my knowledge, the first causal evidence on how an ongoing legal regime reshapes religious segregation and urban amenities in India. Exploiting the staggered expansion of the Act, I show that designation disproportionately targets Muslim-majority pockets embedded within Hindu-majority surroundings and hardens Hindu--Muslim residential boundaries upon designation. The Muslim-to-Hindu ratio rises substantially, and treated areas contribute significantly to the Muslim isolation index at higher levels of spatial aggregation. The law also reorganizes local housing markets and amenities: in more intensively exposed areas, housing prices and construction rise while school infrastructure deteriorates and exam failure rates increase. Communal violence does not decline in a statistically robust way in treated areas. More broadly, the findings show how a law meant to protect minority groups can dynamically produce segregation: by introducing local administrative discretion over cross-community housing transactions, the law redirects minorities into a narrower set of accessible neighborhoods thereby, segmenting housing markets, and allowing property values to rise even as local public goods such as schools deteriorate.

Abstract

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. 

Abstract

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. 

Abstract coming soon!