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 extractive labor relations help to create the carceral state? This article examines the carceral consequences of the indentured labor system in British India--an institution spanning the 19th and 20th centuries through which Adivasi migrants were sent to distant tea plantations to labor for Assamese landowners. As districts increased their dependence on indentured labor, incarceration rates rose in parallel. Evidence from archival crime records reveal that this effect was driven by threats to plantation profitability from laborers' desertions, not from incidents of violent crime. These findings complement the existing body of work which finds a relationship between emancipation and policing in the Americas, further clarifying the role jails play in protecting capitalist interests in emerging states.
“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 capitalists 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, within the world's largest democracy. The evidence draws on nearly four decades of media reports and the complete record of legal cases tracking police abuses. A spatial regression discontinuity reveals policing events sharply increase in plantation catchment areas where laborers live beyond employers’ direct control. Here, it is strategically advantageous for landowners to rely on state coercion to suppress labor organizing and constrain exit options. A novel surname-based measure of the labor population from 24 million geocoded voter records combined with qualitative evidence shows that increased policing is a result of a greater share of laborers in the local population, and is not explained by common alternatives: marginalization, crime, political dissent, or ethnic diversity. This project demonstrates how police repression is shaped by capitalist incentives, revealing how state coercion enforces economic hierarchies in developing democracies.
"Land, Labor, Leverage: The Dynamics of Bargaining for Development around Mining Investment,” (with Aliz Tóth).
Abstract. When do extractive projects deliver local development? Prior theories focus on local governance and the intensity of conflict spurred because of the availability of extracted resources. We argue that mining announcements trigger a distributive bargaining process between governments and rural landowners over land for mining, shaping the allocation of public goods. 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 amenities. Crucially, these effects are concentrated where land is most valuable---measured via historical tenure regimes, mechanization rates, and caste‐based tenure insecurity. We find that these are also the areas where protests by landowners rise sharply after announcements, suggesting that resistance to land acquisition by landowners shapes the allocation of public goods. We rule out alternative explanations based on windfall revenues or local governance. Our findings reveal that landowners are strategic actors whose resistance compels states to deliver both headline infrastructure and everyday public goods, underscoring bargaining around land acquisition as a key mechanism of extractive development.
WORKS IN PROGRESS
"Introducing the HRC-I Dataset: Measuring Public Sector Human Rights Violations in India."
“Paying Not to Kill: How Monetary Incentives Shape Police Violence in Rio de Janeiro,” (with Beatriz Magaloni-Kerpel and Carlos Schmidt-Padilla).
"Policing the Peripheries: State Presence as State Violence in India’s National Parks."
