Long-term Agricultural Productivity and Religious Conflict:Evidence from India

ABSTRACT

This paper studies the association between agricultural productivity and religious riots in a setting of an abrupt productivity increase in India. I find heterogeneity in the impacts of the gains across different crop regions. Crop cultivation methods determine the differential allocation of labour to the conflict and agricultural sectors. I show that in the labour-intensive rice growing regions there was a decline in conflict while in the capital-intensive wheat growing regions there was not.

KEYWORDS:

• Agriculture
• conflict
• cultivation
• crops

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• Q10
• O11
• D74

Acknowledgments

The author graciously acknowledges feedback from Daniel Hicks, Kevin Kuruc and three anonymous referees. This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Disclosure statement

I, the author, declare that I do not have any relevant material or financial interests that relate to the research described in this paper.

Notes

¹ A detailed description on classification is provided in Appendix A.

² For survey see Burke, Hsiang, and Miguel (2015).

³ Others such as Banerjee and Iyer (2005) and Carranza (2014) have also commented on the merits of using coarser geographic controls like state fixed effects in district level empirical estimations within the context of India.