Do educated leaders affect economic growth? evidence from India

Jain, Chandan and Lahoti, Rahul and Sahoo, Soham (2019) Do educated leaders affect economic growth? evidence from India. Technical Report. UNSPECIFIED.

Preview

Text - Draft Version Download (907kB) | Preview

Abstract

We study the impact of electing an educated politician to state legislative assemblies on economic growth in the politician’s constituency. Intensity of night lights is used to proxy for constituency-level economic activity and data on all politicians contesting state elections between 2008 and 2013 is used. Our identification strategy is based on a re gression discontinuity design that exploits quasi-experimental election outcomes of close elections between educated and less-educated politicians. We find that having a gradu ate state representative increases the growth rate of night lights by about 2 percentage points in the constituency. Though statistically significant, the impact on economic ac tivity of having an educated leader is substantially lower than that of having a woman or non-criminally accused leader. Further, the effect of educated leaders is heterogeneous depending on the initial level of development of the state. Our findings have implications for recent policy changes mandating minimum education requirements of leaders in some states of India.

Item Type:	Monograph (Technical Report)
Authors:	Jain, Chandan and Lahoti, Rahul and Sahoo, Soham
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Educated leaders, Night-lights, Close Elections, India
Subjects:	Social sciences > Economics
Divisions:	Azim Premji University - Bengaluru > School of Arts and Sciences
Full Text Status:	Public
Related URLs:	Google Scholar
URI:	http://publications.azimpremjiuniversity.edu.in/id/eprint/2370
Publisher URL:	https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/cab2/1f872d022692...

Actions (login required)

View Item