Centre for the Study of Social Systems
School of Social Sciences
CSSS Colloquium
Sumit Mishra
(Assistant Prof., Economics, IFMR)
Will be presenting a paper on
Public Goods, and Nested Subnational Units: Diversity, Segregation, or Hierarchy?
Date & Time: March 07, 2019 (Thursday), 11am
Venue: CSSS Committee Room (No: 13), SSS-II
Abstract: We develop a formal framework to account for spatial segregation of hierarchically-ordered ethnic groups residing in politically nested subnational aggregations. We explicate how ethnic diversity, ethnic segregation, and historical ethnic hierarchies are three analytically distinct channels underlying the ethnic politics of public goods provisioning. We not only show how the celebrated “diversity debit” relationship is incomplete at best, but also call into question the more recent literature that posits a positive association between ethnic segregation and public goods. We test our framework using the Indian national census dataset containing ethnicity information for approximately 830 million residents in nearly 600,000 villages, and for twenty-five different public goods.
Bio: Sumit Mishra is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the Institute for Financial Management and Research, Sri City (currently on leave). Starting December 2018 until May 2019, he is Postdoctoral Fellow at M.S. Merian - R.Tagore International Center of Advanced Studies, New Delhi. Mishra’s PhD dissertation looked into the issue of regional imbalances in Maharashtra. His current research focuses on examining how geography and state capacity affect the relationship between social divisions and economic development in India.