Our Seminars & Workshops

Two 30 minutes presentations.

i) Shruti will present Public Access, Feasible Choice, and Social Sorting

Exposure to out-group peers in childhood can shape trust, cooperation, and shared norms. Schools are a primary venue for such contact, but sorting across schools within local markets determines who meets whom. This paper estimates the causal effect of increased nearby public-school access on caste segregation across public primary schools. Using geocoded administrative data from rural India over 13 years, I construct distance-based local education markets and measure within-market segregation and peer exposure. I exploit a national reform that tightened proximity standards, using baseline eligibility for the reform as an instrument for realised local access. IV estimates indicate that expanding nearby public-school access increases segregation across public schools. Mechanism evidence is consistent with re-sorting across incumbent public schools: enrolment shifts away from mixed-composition schools, the cross-school distribution of composition becomes more dispersed, and students’ exposure to out-group peers declines, widening exposure gaps. The results suggest that supply-side expansions in public provision can raise segregation by creating new margins for same-group sorting within the public sector.

ii)  Chris will present Failure to launch political campaigns: The impact of candidate dropout on electoral campaigns and voter preferences.