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