Sudhir K. Singh
Welcome!
I am an economist and a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Rochester. My research is in development and labor economics, with a focus on agriculture, environment, health, and gender. I am also a Fellow of the Global Labor Organization (GLO).
Previously, I was an economist and consultant at the World Bank Group, and also consulted for the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington, D.C.
To learn more about my work, please see my research or download my CV.
Contact Information
University of Rochester
Harkness Hall,
Rochester, NY
Working Papers
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College Access and Domestic ViolenceHow does college access affect domestic violence? We study this question in the context of a large-scale investment in higher education expansion in India. The program incentivized the establishment of new colleges in areas with relatively low college enrollment. Using multiple sources of data and a regression discontinuity design, we find that college expansion significantly decreased the incidence of domestic violence for all women. The decline was more pronounced for younger women than for older women, suggesting that the impact was driven by cohorts that were more likely to be exposed to the colleges and benefit from them. Additionally, we find that these results can be explained by improved educational outcomes for women, changes in social norms and husbands' attitudes, and occupational choices. Better access to college led women to reject any justification for domestic violence, increased women's participation in household decision-making, and increased ownership of assets, along with improvements in husbands' gender attitudes. We find heterogeneous effects for employment. Husbands were more likely to work than wives; however, both husbands and wives were more likely to work in high-skilled occupations and move away from low-skilled occupations.Updated Sep. 2026
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Female Leaders and Welfare in a Water-Scarce EconomyAre 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.submitted
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Misallocation and Product ChoiceWe 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. Equalizing cross-farm input-market frictions raises aggregate productivity by 137% in the multi-product model and 167% in a conventional single-product model: the single-product model overstates the aggregate productivity cost of misallocation between Indian farms by 22%.Updated September 2026
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Input-Driven Production Technology Heterogeneity and the Allocation of InputsWe 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.
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Political Exit: The Unintended Effects of Electoral Rules in IndiaWhat are the unintended consequences of electoral rules on candidate re-entry into politics? We examine how rules that punish candidates for poor performance affect re-entry. In India, candidates must submit a monetary deposit to electoral authorities, forfeiting it if they receive less than one-sixth of total votes cast in their race. We use the discontinuity created by this deposit rule to estimate the causal effect of costly procedural rules on re-contest rates. Deposit forfeiture disproportionately deters women from re-running compared to men. This effect is most pronounced among women from local niche parties, which are weakly institutionalized parties with a limited geographic footprint, suggesting party-level gatekeeping against women candidates.submitted
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Can Workfare Increase Agricultural Productivity? Evidence from IndiaDeparting from a large literature that documented wage increases triggered by India’s National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS), this paper explores initial size-differentiated implications of such wage growth for agricultural productivity. We show that, before 2008, exposure to the program allowed marginal farmers to greatly increase use of family labor on their own parcels, cultivate riskier crops, and rent somewhat more machinery and irrigation services. These changes in input use, presumably attributable to the wage income and implicit safety net provided by NREGS, translated into modest productivity gains. Large farmers, in turn, sharply reduced labor use and shifted towards cultivation of higher value crops as well as more intensive use of other purchased inputs, especially fertilizer, in a type of induced innovation. Though less rigorous analytically, 2007-15 data point towards a positive link between intensity of program implementation and productivity gains in favor of all farm size classes that could be indicative of a positive, but less targeted, impact of the public goods constructed under the program.submitted
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Identity, Political Connections, and Public EmploymentWe study the effects of political connections, where the political leader is of the same caste, on public employment in India. Using an instrumental variables approach that exploits caste-based reservations, we examine whether local leaders favor individuals from their own caste when allocating jobs. Specifically, we find that political connections increased participation as well as the number of days worked in NREGS. The results are robust to the inclusion and exclusion of controls and fixed effects. Finally, we find that village council leaders affect participation in NREGS more than the council members. Our research emphasizes the dynamics of identity-based political networks and their implications for the distribution of public sector opportunities in India.new draft coming soon
Published Papers
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Addressing Declining Female Labor Force Participation in India: Does Political Empowerment Make a Difference?Journal of Development Studies, 2022, 58 (9)
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Women's Political Leadership and Economic Empowerment: Evidence from Public Works in IndiaJournal of Comparative Economics, 2020, 48 (2), 277-291
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Wages, Prices, and Agriculture: How Can Indian Agriculture Cope with Rising WagesJournal of Agricultural Economics, 2017, 32 (2)
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Can Labor Market Imperfections Explain Changes in Farm Size Productivity Relationship? Longitudinal Evidence from IndiaLand Economics, 2018, 94 (2), 239-258
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Determinants of Productivity and Structural Change in a Large Commercial Farm Environment: Evidence from UkraineThe World Bank Economic Review, 2018, 32 (2), 287-306
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Does Land Fragmentation Increase the Cost of Cultivation? Evidence from IndiaJournal of Development Studies, 2017, 53 (1), 82-98
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Consumption Smoothing and Insurance against the Income Risks: A Case of IndiaIndian Economic Review, 2012, Vol. 47, No. 2 265-283
Selected Work in Progress
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Human Capital and Children’s Time Usedraft coming soon
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Housing, Network, and Migrationfieldwork in progress
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Farm, Trade, and Misallocationanalysis in progress
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Longterm Effects of Conditional Cash Transfers on Mental Healthanalyisis in progress
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Access to Support Centers and Gender-Based Violencedraft in progress