We are interested in how public goods get allocated by a centralized state. We use data on public goods and social structure from parliamentary constituencies in rural India to understand the allocation of these goods over the 1970s and 1980s. National policies and political agendas during this period emphasized universal access to basic amenities and financed a rapid expansion in rural infrastructure. We find evidence of considerable equalization in many of these facilities, reflecting perhaps the importance of these commitments. Among the historically disadvantaged social groups, those that mobilized themselves politically gained relative to the others. Measures of social heterogeneity that have been emphasized in the recent empirical literature on public goods are relevant but not overwhelming in their importance.

Crosscountry studies have found that hotter years are associated with lower output in poor countries. Using high-frequency micro-data from manufacturing firms in India, we show that worker heat stress can substantially explain this correlation. Ambient temperatures have non-linear effects on worker productivity, with declines on hot days of 4 to 9 percent per degree rise in temperature. Sustained heat also increases absenteeism. Similar temperature induced productivity declines are replicated in annual plant output from a national panel. Our estimates imply that warming between 1971 and 2009 may have decreased manufacturing output in India by at least 3 percent relative to a no-warming counterfactual.

We examine the influence of three historically important sources of social divisions on the availability of public goods in rural India: colonial power, landowner‐peasant relations as determined by the land tenure system and social fragmentation based on the Hindu caste system and the presence of sizable religious minorities. Using data on public goods from 1991, we find that regions that were under British colonial power in the pre‐independence period and those where agrarian power was concentrated in the hands of landlords have lower access to these goods as do areas with high levels of social fragmentation. (JEL: H41, P16)

Farmer profit can be increased and air quality improved

Despite the decline in group inequality and the rapid expansion of the black middle class in the United States, major urban centers with significant black populations continue to exhibit extreme levels of racial separation. Using a theoretical framework in which individuals care both about the level of affluence and the racial composition of their communities, we show that no monotonic relationship exists between narrowing racial income disparities and segregation even when all households prefer somewhat integrated communities to segregated ones. Low racial inequality is consistent with extreme and even rising levels of segregation in cities where the minority population is large. Our results can help explain why racial segregration continues to characterize the urban landscape in the United States even though survey evidence suggests that all groups favor more integration than they did in the past.