WORKING PAPERS
Revealed Employment Preferences From Agricultural Debt Waiver (Job market paper) [draft]
Abstract: While welfare schemes can serve as a valuable safety net, they may also give rise to unintended consequences which may not be fully captured during implementation. We study the 2008 debt waiver program implemented in India to study its impact on the employment outcomes of its beneficiaries. Using programmatic design of eligibility rules as identification, we find waiver beneficiaries tend to work less in agriculture and shift towards casual and wage employment. This effect is enhanced during dry seasons, for marginalized populations and in districts where more casual employment options are available. We show that this effect is propagated by credit constraints faced by waiver beneficiaries due to moral hazard. By performing a battery of falsification tests, we rule out alternative explanations and establish that this employment shift acts as a coping mechanism to maintain basic consumption.
Electoral Returns from a Large Loan Waiver: Evidence from India [draft]
Abstract: Welfare programs are often scrutinized for resource redistribution for political gains. We investigate the Agricultural Debt Waiver and Debt Relief Scheme of 2008 in India which is one of the largest debt waiver programs in the world. Using a novel dataset created to compare constituencies before and after the 2008 redistricting exercise, we find that the 2008 waiver led to higher number of seats for the incumbent in subsequent general elections though its effect on vote share remained muted. We find that the incumbent party performed better in large states ruled by neutral parties. Along with the announcement effect that was present in initial elections, an analysis of subsequent state elections shows that implementation quality also fetched more seats. Our findings provide more evidence on the political capture of public resources for electoral gains through programmatic design of the scheme and insights into temporal nature of voter preferences.
Role of Landownership Under Guaranteed Employment [draft]
Abstract: Employment guarantee programs intend to provide employment to the unskilled rural population to tide over consumption shocks encountered during agricultural cycles. Using National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), the largest workfare program in the world as background, we show that the program led to significant reduction of consumption for landowning agricultural households. Due to increased cost of agriculture induced by crowding out of agricultural labor, we show that this effect is more pronounced during non-dry seasons and in districts where the program intensity is higher. We find that this decrease in consumption is a function of land size where small farmers are affected more compared to the large farmers.
PUBLICATIONS
Analysis of public policy affecting dual eligibles requires accurate identification of survey respondents eligible for both Medicare and Medicaid. Doing so for Medicaid is particularly challenging given the complex eligibility rules tied to income and assets. In this paper we provide guidance on how to best identify eligible respondents in household surveys that have limited income or asset information, such as the National Health Interview Survey, American Community Survey, Current Population Survey, and Medical Expenditure Panel Survey. We show how two types of errors—false negative and false positive errors—are impacted by incorporating limited income or asset information, relative to the commonly-used approach of solely comparing total income to the income threshold. With the 2018 Health and Retirement Study, which has detailed income and asset information, we mimic the income and asset information available in those other household surveys and quantify how errors change when imposing income or asset tests with limited information. We show that incorporating all available income and asset data results in the lowest number of errors and the lowest overall error rates. We recommend that researchers adjust income and impose the asset test to the fullest extent possible when imputing Medicaid eligibility for Medicare enrollees.