Peer-Reviewed PublicationS
"Property Righting: the Politics of Rights over Land and Labor,” (with Margaret Levi).
Annual Review of Political Science (2025).
Abstract. This essay focuses on property rights in land and labor, the ways in which they have been entangled since the development of early capitalism in the 16th and 17th centuries, and the extent to which they have realized--or failed to realize--desiderata in addition to economic productivity and growth. The definition and enforcement of property rights may reflect the power relations within a society, but their realization depends on state laws and capacities. Transformations of property rights tend to follow changes in the balance of power among elites and in state capacity or as a response to effective resistance by those who are harmed or excluded.
WorkING PAPERS
“From Indenture to Incarceration: The Economic Origins of State Coercion in Assam.”
Abstract. How do coercive labor relations help to create the carceral state? Scholarship on global enslavement demonstrates how bonded labor shaped state-building, yet we know little about how these systems generated the earliest coercive institutions. This article examines the emergence of carceral institutions in colonial Assam alongside the indentured labor system--a form of unfree labor that moved millions of Adivasi workers to Assam's tea plantations across the 19th and 20th centuries. Leveraging variation in the magnitude of indenture, I demonstrate that as districts increased their dependence on indentured labor, incarceration rates rose in parallel. Evidence from archival crime records reveal that this effect further suppressed labor desertion, which predicted imprisonment far more strongly than general crime, demonstrating that jails functioned primarily as tools of labor discipline rather than crime control. This effect intensified where labor was most economically valuable, measured by wages, scarcity, and desertion rates. The criminalization of labor shows that jails emerged as tools of labor discipline before becoming general instruments of state control. The case of Assam reveals how states developed carceral capacity in response to internal labor coercion, offering new insights into the origins of the carceral state at its formative moment.
“Policing the Plantation: Repressive Institutions and Labor Control in Assam, India.”
Abstract. Policing is a mainstay of modern states, yet police abuses persist even in democracies. This article advances a new explanation for repression, arguing that police impose not only social order, but also economic order in developing economies. This model, called labor repressive policing, theorizes that landowners mobilize police when they have incentives to control workers but the costs of private coercion are high. I study this process through a mixed-methods examination of the tea plantation economy of Assam, India, where over one million workers descend from British indentured laborers. Using nearly four decades of media reports and the complete record of legal cases documenting police abuses, I employ a spatial regression discontinuity design across plantation boundaries and their catchments. Policing sharply increases in catchment areas surrounding plantations, the residential zones where laborers live beyond employers’ direct control. Catchment areas experience a 13% increase in policing events compared to both remote rural areas and plantations. A novel surname-based measure of the labor population from 24 million geocoded voter records shows that increased policing responds specifically to labor concentration, not to marginality more broadly. Qualitative evidence from over 60 interviews reveals how landowners use private coercion on plantations while relying on police beyond their reach. This project demonstrates how police repression is shaped by landowner incentives, revealing how state coercion enforces economic hierarchies in developing democracies.
"Making Space for Mines: Mining Investment and State Infrastructure in India,” (with Aliz Tóth).
Abstract. When do extractive projects deliver infrastructure development? Prior theories emphasize local governance quality and conflict over extracted resources as key moderators. We argue that where states are major stakeholders in mining, they invest in public infrastructure to make extraction viable, independent of institutional quality or community demands. Drawing on a novel panel of subdistrict‐level mining announcements in India (1995–2020), we use a difference‐in‐differences design to show that mining leads to substantive increases in large‐scale public infrastructure and similar gains in local public goods. India's mining sector is dominated by state-owned enterprises requiring coordinated infrastructure investment to make extraction profitable. We rule out alternative explanations based on windfall revenue spending or community bargaining dynamics. Our findings reveal that when the state has a role in extraction, public goods provision becomes endogenous to the extraction process itself. These results have broad implications for understanding development outcomes in the understudied mining contexts worldwide where domestic state-owned firms dominate.
"What Predicts Human Rights Violations in India? Evidence from 2 Million Public Sector Violation Cases at the National Human Rights Commission."
Abstract. I study human rights violations in India using a newly collected dataset of nearly 2 million reported incidents from 1993-2025. This is the universe of cases filed with the National Human Rights Commission, established under the Protection of Human Rights Act passed in 1993. After utilizing the textual corpus of each incident to detect what type of abuse it entails, I identify the major temporal and geographic trends across India. I use machine learning techniques to assess what conditions best predict human rights abuses with attention to intersections between abuse and marginality.
WORKS IN PROGRESS
“Paying Not to Kill: How Monetary Incentives Shape Police Violence in Rio de Janeiro,” (with Beatriz Magaloni-Kerpel and Carlos Schmidt-Padilla).
"Data Centers and the Emerging Contentious Politics of AI,'' (with Simone Paci).
"Bricks and Bondage: State Capacity, Patronage, and Labor Rights in Pakistan’s Brick Kiln Industry,” (with Sarah Thompson and Jamie Hintson).
"Policing the Peripheries: State Presence as State Violence in India’s National Parks."
