Sudhir K. Singh

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Working Papers

• 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.

  submitted
• College Access and Domestic Violence

  with Ha Luong

  ▶ Abstract | Paper | Slides

  How 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..
• 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%.
• 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.
• Political Exit: The Unintended Effects of Electoral Rules in India

  with Varun K.R. & Drew Stommes

  submitted
• How Productive are Workfare Programs? Evidence from India

  with K. Deininger & S. Jin

  submitted

Published Papers

• 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, 2022, 58 (9)
• Women's Political Leadership and Economic Empowerment: Evidence from Public Works in India

  with K. Deininger & H. K. Nagarajan

  Journal of Comparative Economics, 2020, 48 (2), 277-291
• Wages, Prices, and Agriculture: How Can Indian Agriculture Cope with Rising Wages

  with H. Binswanger

  Journal of Agricultural Economics, 2017, 32 (2)
• Can Labor Market Imperfections Explain Changes in Farm Size Productivity Relationship? Longitudinal Evidence from India

  with K. Deininger, S. Jin, & Y. Liu

  Land Economics, 2018, 94 (2), 239-258
• 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, 2018, 32 (2), 287-306
• Does Land Fragmentation Increase the Cost of Cultivation? Evidence from India

  with K. Deininger, D. Monchuck, & H. K. Nagarajan

  Journal of Development Studies, 2017, 53 (1), 82-98
• Consumption Smoothing and Insurance against the Income Risks: A Case of India

  with P. Kumar

  Indian Economic Review, 2012, Vol. 47, No. 2 265-283

Selected Work in Progress

• Housing, Network, and Migration

  with Travis Baseler and Alp Sungu

  fieldwork in progress
• Farm, Trade, and Misallocation

  with Stepan Gordeev