Title: Educated Leaders through Legislation but at What Cost?

Abstract: Many societies have tried to design incentives and restrictions to improve the quality of their political leaders. In this paper, we use a legislation introduced in 2014 that mandated minimum education requirements– a correlate of quality, in the context of local village council elections in Rajasthan to look at the impact of such restrictions on the selection of elected leaders. We show that there was a higher probability of under-representation of disadvantaged groups where such legislation hit the hardest in terms of the incumbent not meeting the education criteria. These results are robust to accounting for differential trends by education and population characteristics. Furthermore, we find that this legislation did not lead to demonstrable improvement in performance of public program (NREGS), economic development as measured by night time luminosity or investment in education as measured by new school openings.