Job Market Paper

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

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

I study Gujarat’s Disturbed Areas Act (DAA), a rare setting in which urban segregation is shaped directly through formal law regulating inter-religious property transactions. I assemble a new spatial panel linking DAA notifications to polling-booth religious composition from electoral rolls, housing-market activity, school inputs and outcomes, and measures of communal violence. Using staggered event-study designs, I show that the DAA operates less like a narrow riot-response tool and more like an ongoing regime of spatial regulation: it increases residential segregation, reorganizes housing markets differently in high- and low-intensity areas, weakens school environments over time, and affects adjustment not only inside treated areas but also in nearby untreated space. 

Other 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. 

Segregation and Unequal Access to School Resources: Evidence from Caste-based School Composition Thresholds in India (with Moumita Das, Gagandeep Sachdeva, and Kartik Srivastava)

We study whether local schooling markets in India respond nonlinearly to changes in caste composition. Using a near-universal administrative census of Indian schools, we estimate locally relevant tipping points and show that crossing these thresholds is associated with discrete changes in enrollment composition, within-village segregation, school resources, and public funding. The results differ sharply across caste contrasts (General vs SC, ST, OBC or OBC vs SC, ST) and by school ownership, suggesting that household sorting and ownership-specific school responses are central to how caste composition reshapes access to educational opportunity. 

The Impact of the US-China Trade War on Indian Firms (with Pulak Ghosh,  Aakash Kalyani, and Manpreet Singh)

This project studies how Indian firms responded to the US-China trade war by exploiting firm-level panel data on exports, imports, and investments from the CMIE Prowess database. We construct industry-year level measures of exposure to US tariffs on Chinese products and estimate the differential investment response among Indian firms across trade categories. Using firm, year, and industry fixed effects in panel regressions, we find preliminary evidence that Indian exporters to the US, particularly those not heavily reliant on Chinese inputs, increased investment significantly post-tariffs, consistent with a substitution effect in global value chains. This investment response was heterogeneous by firm size and age, with younger and more productive firms driving the gains.