Dr. Shabana Mitra, Assistant Professor at the Indian Institute of Management in Banglore, India, is going to deliver a talk on

“Cash for votes: Evidence from India.”

Dr. Shabana Mitra is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy at Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore. Her main research interests are measurement, causes and consequences of poverty and inequality with special focus on the Latin American and South Asian regions. She also works on political economy implications of affirmative action policies on gender and caste based inequalities in the Indian context. Prior to joining IIMB, she has worked at the World Bank, Washington DC and the Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO), Norway. She completed her PhD in Economics from Vanderbilt University in 2011. She has publications in reputed journals like Social Indicators Research and Economic Journal among others.

The abstract of the research talk is shared below.

The prevalence of vote-buying in democratic elections where stringent restrictions on corporate donations to political parties exist. We combine data from state assembly elections in India with household-level consumer expenditure surveys (conducted by NSSO) over the period 2004-11. Exploiting a difference-in-differences methodology, we estimate the effects elections have on the consumption of various household items: food, clothes, education-related, etc. Moreover, there is heterogeneity in such consumption adjustments across households. Our estimates suggest that legal sources of funds are not sufficient for generating such “spikes” in consumption and indicate the role of the hidden economy in politics.