I am a PhD student in Economics at Stockholm University.
My research interests are in political economy, economic development, and labor.
I will be on the 2026–27 economics job market.
Job market paper
Political Influence, Bureaucratic Priorities, and Capital Accumulation in India
Does political influence improve bureaucratic performance, or does it merely capture bureaucratic priorities for politically salient tasks? Using data from the Indian bureaucracy, and using alignment between the local politician and the state’s ruling party as a measure of political influence, I show that alignment causes improvement in two flagship program outcomes, the rural employment guarantee program and rural roads construction program. If aligned politicians achieve this by capturing bureaucratic priority, the gains should have costs elsewhere. Using regulatory processing data on about 97,000 investment projects, I find that alignment of the local politician worsens the regulatory environment for private investment. When a close election brings an aligned politician into office, processing of government projects improves and processing of private investment projects slows. When turnover in the state government changes alignment status of a mid-term politician, the same pattern can be observed. If the local politician loses alignment mid-term, bureaucrats respond by shifting priorities away from government projects, and private projects benefit. Gaining alignment and losing alignment give effects of similar size and opposite sign, about 30-50 percent of baseline private-project processing. These results suggest that only measuring politically salient programs may overstate gains in bureaucratic performance where capacity is constrained, as any observed gains come at a cost elsewhere. The results also suggest one plausible explanation for why similar regulatory reforms produce different results: the capacity available to process regulations is politically mediated, and in low-capacity states politicians compete with private investors for the same scarce bureaucratic attention.
Work in progress
Political Allocation of State Capacity
Abstract: Political Allocation of State Capacity
This paper studies how shifts in local political influence reshape the subnational allocation of the bureaucratic state, even when aggregate bureaucratic strength and formal institutions remain fixed. I develop a framework in which heterogeneity in politicians’ influence within state-level posting markets, combined with bureaucrats’ career incentives, endogenously reallocates bureaucratic capacity across space. Using India’s 2008 electoral delimitation, which quasi-randomly altered districts’ exposure to reserved caste politicians, I show that districts newly exposed to reserved constituencies experience a sharp and persistent decline in the flow of incoming bureaucrats, leading to a contraction in local state capacity (size effect) and systematic changes in officer type (composition effect). These effects are driven by the caste identity of the elected politicians rather than political turnover per se. I formalize two distinct channels that generate these effects: assortative matching and career concerns of bureaucrats and find evidence for both. More broadly, the paper documents an unintended effect of a political reform: policy aimed at increasing political representation also caused a decrease in the local state capacity.
Police funding inequality and police performance in US
with Mitch Downey
Abstract: Police funding inequality and police performance in US
Police departments in the USA draw the majority of their funding from revenues generated by local governments. This means that funding for local police can be unequal within a metropolitan area among neighbouring cities. What are the consequences of this arrangement for the allocation of police officers, the quality of police representation in majority-minority communities, and aggregate crime and officer-involved violence? Using a shift-share instrument, we estimate the effects of increasing income inequality in MSAs with high levels of fiscal fragmentation (i.e., instances where the population is divided across many different legally and fiscally independent cities), both relative to increasing inequality when fragmentation is low, and relative to highly fragmented MSAs that do not see increasing inequality.
Publications
with Hemant K. Pullabhotla, Mustafa Zahid, Sam Heft-Neal, and Marshall Burke
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2023, 120 (23): e2218210120.
