Abstract: We test whether a pro-tenant to pro-landlord change in rent control laws reduces rural-urban wage gaps. We exploit pro-landlord changes in Indian rent revision and eviction laws in a difference-in-difference framework to estimate the effects. The pro-landlord rent revision change has no effect on wage gaps and the pro-landlord eviction law change increases the rural-urban wage gap. We explore channels to better understand these unexpected results. The rent revision reform increases rents and per capita floor space utilization but in an inelastic housing market leads to no change in housing supply. This results in a decline in rural-urban migration, slower urban growth, and lower urban employment. The pro-landlord change in eviction law eased housing congestion and increased marriage rates, household growth, and female migration.  This drove up the demand for services in cities resulting in increased labor demand and urban wages.  Our findings confirm that removing one distortion from a market riddled with many can have surprising outcomes.

Abstract: This paper argues that two distinctive features of India’s development pathway—its agriculture-to-services “leap” and its high levels of temporary, circular migration—are interlinked and mutually reinforcing. First, we mobilize multiple literatures to show that economic growth led by export services produces a polarized labor market in India’s prosperous cities, drawing rural-urban migrants but failing to provide them permanent footholds; these dynamics promote the widespread practice of “translocal householding,” in which individuals and families straddle multiple locations and labor markets. We then employ a novel empirical strategy to show that translocal householding also facilitates an agriculture-to-services transition in migrant origins. Our methods involve a spatial instrumental variable constructed with the most detailed publicly available migration dataset and sectoral employment data from the decennial census. Taken together, these findings show that translocal householding is not only a livelihood strategy developed in response to services-led structural transformation but also an agent in facilitating it. The paper contributes new theoretical insights to economic geography, development studies, and migration studies, while also raising new policy questions for governments in Global South countries witnessing similar forms of internal migration and structural transformation.

Abstract: This paper estimates the impact of rising temperatures on the prevalence of informal housing in India. Previously, studies have shown that higher temperatures reduce worker productivity. Lower productivity, in turn, makes households choose informal housing. I provide reduced-form evidence that housing becomes more informal in rural areas of India experiencing temperature growth, whereas urban areas remain unaffected. The findings indicate that climate change may exacerbate rural-urban housing inequality.

Abstract: This paper examines whether land use deregulation increases housing supply when there are additional institutional frictions, such as slow updation of ownership records and unclear titles. India's urban land ceiling (ULC) laws, which put ceiling limits on privately owned vacant land in the largest urban centers, were repealed during the 2000s. Using a difference-in-difference approach, with a panel of over 200 cities, we find that the reform did not lead to an expected formal residential housing supply growth. This is partly because of disputes in ownership rights over vacant parcels. The disputes led to legal battles between governments and individual owners, thereby, freezing formal construction on vacant land. We find that, after the repeal, the number of land-related legal proceedings in ULC-enacting cities was almost six times as high compared to the other cities where ULC was never enacted. The empirical findings are consistent with the analytical implications of a monocentric model. More broadly, the findings underscore the role of institutional frictions in impeding or delaying the benefits of deregulation.

Abstract: This paper estimates the impact of mobile phone service expansion on migration to and between cities of India during 2001-2011. We show that the number of cross-state migrants living in urban areas of India increased significantly due to telecommunications service growth. The increased migration reflects better labor and marriage market information transmission across regions as well as agglomeration benefits resulting from telecom expansion. Our findings indicate that telecommunications technologies act as forces of urban concentration, disproving the "death of distance" hypothesis. Furthermore, the findings imply that technological growth can reduce the barriers to internal migration in developing countries.

Abstract: We study housing supply in the world's largest country. We show that droughts and highway infrastructure investments in one region of India affect housing demand in its other regions through migration. Using these migration-inducing shocks as demand-shifters, we estimate urban India's formal and informal housing (slum) supply elasticities. Our informal elasticity estimate provides empirical evidence of gentrification, that is, informal-to-formal conversions with rising rents. Our formal supply elasticity estimates indicate that Indian cities are supply inelastic. 

Abstract: This paper examines whether tighter land use regulations increase informal land use in urban areas. In a global sample of 151 cities, we show that more stringent regulations coupled with their stricter enforcement led to a significant growth in informal land cover between 1990 and 2015. We use a spatial instrument to address potential endogeneity concerns.