Sudhir K. Singh

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Welcome!

I am an Economist and Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Economics at the University of Rochester. My primary research interests are in development and labor economics. I am also a Fellow of the Global Labor Organization (GLO). Previously, I was an Economist and Consultant at the World Bank Group and have consulted for the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in Washington, D.C.

To learn more about my work, please visit my Research page or download my CV.

Research

Working Papers

1. Female Leaders and Welfare in a Water-Scarce Economy
   with Caitlin Brown & Aruni Mitra
   ▶ Abstract | Paper | Slides Are female leaders better at mitigating the adverse economic consequences of environmental change than their male counterparts? Combining historical groundwater data with rural household survey data from India and exploiting village-level random variation in leadership quotas, we document that female leaders are more effective in mitigating the adverse employment impact of groundwater scarcity, increasing household incomes and non-food spending, particularly investment in child education. We identify a structural transformation mechanism: female leaders in water-scarce villages reallocate public works (NREGS) toward water-related infrastructure development, facilitating a shift from the water-constrained agricultural sector towards manufacturing and construction.

2. College Access and Domestic Violence
   with Ha Luong
   ▶ Abstract | Paper | Slides How does access to college affect domestic violence? We study this question in the context of a large-scale investment in higher education expansion in India. The expansion program incentivized the establishment of new colleges in areas with relatively low enrollment in higher education. Using multiple sources of data and a regression discontinuity design, we find that the college expansion program significantly reduced domestic violence for all women. The decline was more pronounced for younger women than for older women, which suggests that the impact of the expansion program was driven by cohorts that were more likely to be exposed to the colleges and benefit from them. Additionally, we find that the entry of new colleges increased women’s labor force participation and changed how women spent their time in the economy. More specifically, we find that women spent more time on paid activities including wage and self-employment, educational activities and less on domestic work. Finally, we tested how social norms changed, and we find that women were more likely to reject any justification for domestic violence, participate in household decision-making, and have ownership of assets, suggesting a change in existing social norms and increased empowerment of women.

3. Misallocation and Product Choice
   with Stepan Gordeev
   ▶ Abstract | Paper | STEG Working Paper We study the costs of misallocation of inputs between multi-product firms that endogenously choose among heterogeneous products. Misallocation of inputs between firms has been shown to be a significant drag on aggregate productivity: it is especially severe between farms in the agricultural sectors of low-income economies. Existing estimates of its costs have relied on models of single-product firms using a single aggregate production function. Using rich farm-crop-level data from India, we estimate product-level production functions and find that they are meaningfully different from one another and from the aggregate one. We build a general equilibrium model of firm-level misallocation in which multi-product firms (or farms) are able to choose the set and mix of heterogeneous products. Misinterpreting product heterogeneity as evidence of distortions and missing the endogenous product choice response to real distortions biases single-product models to overstate misallocation, while ignoring returns-to-scale heterogeneity and within-firm productivity dispersion biases them to understate it. On net, the single-product model understates the aggregate productivity cost of misallocation between Indian farms by 28%.

4. Input-Driven Production Technology Heterogeneity and the Allocation of Inputs
   with Stepan Gordeev
   ▶ Abstract | Paper We study whether heterogeneity in the intrinsic features of production inputs may generate heterogeneity in production technologies optimally chosen by firms, leading existing estimates of misallocation to overstate its costs. Existing estimates of the severity of the misallocation of inputs across firms rely on assuming homogeneous production technology and interpreting deviations from that technology as evidence of misallocative distortions. We use a state-of-the-art clustering algorithm for ordinal data to group Indian agricultural plots into land types by the intrinsic physical features of each plot. We find that production functions are significantly heterogeneous across land types, which we confirm with placebo-like randomization inference. Some types of land are better suited to land-intensive technology, others to labor-intensive technology, etc. We build a model in which heterogeneous farmers face distortions and choose the type of land to rent. We use the model to quantify the cost of misallocation for India’s aggregate agricultural productivity and compare it to conventional models that assume homogeneous production technology.

5. Political Exit: The Unintended Effects of Electoral Rules in India
   with Varun K.R. & Drew Stommes
   Paper

6. How Productive are Workfare Programs? Evidence from India
   with K. Deininger & S. Jin
   revise and resubmit

Publications

1. Addressing Declining Female Labor Force Participation in India: Does Political Empowerment Make a Difference?
   with K. Deininger, S. Jin, & H. K. Nagarajan
   Journal of Development Studies

2. Women’s Political Leadership and Economic Empowerment: Evidence from Public Works in India
   with K. Deininger & H. K. Nagarajan
   Journal of Comparative Economics

3. Wages, Prices, and Agriculture: How Can Indian Agriculture Cope with Rising Wages
   with H. Binswanger
   Journal of Agricultural Economics

4. Can Labor Market Imperfections Explain Changes in Farm Size Productivity Relationship? Longitudinal Evidence from India
   with K. Deininger, S. Jin, & Y. Liu
   Land Economics

5. Determinants of Productivity and Structural Change in a Large Commercial Farm Environment: Evidence from Ukraine
   with K. Deininger & D. Nizalov
   The World Bank Economic Review

6. Does Land Fragmentation Increase the Cost of Cultivation? Evidence from India
   with K. Deininger, D. Monchuck, & H. K. Nagarajan
   Journal of Development Studies

7. Consumption Smoothing and Insurance against the Income Risks: A Case of India
   with P. Kumar
   Indian Economic Review

Selected Work in Progress

1. Housing, Network, and Migration
   with Travis Baseler and Alp Sungu
   fieldwork in progress

2. Farm, Trade, and Misallocation
   with Stepan Gordeev

© 2026 Sudhir K. Singh | ssingh45@ur.rochester.edu