Novel data: All the crime reports (FIRs) for Delhi from 2016 to 2019. (Please e-mail me if you wish to know more about the data.)
Received Best Paper Award in the field of Development/Applied Economics at the DSE Winter School 2024.
Listed on SSRN's Top Downloads list for: ERN: Urban Development & Developing Countries between December 2, 2024 - January 31, 2025; December 4, 2024 - February 2, 2025.
Listed on SSRN's Top Downloads list for: ERN: Women & Gender Issues between December 4, 2024 - February 2, 2025.
Presented at:
2025: 182nd CPR-CSH Urban Workshop (Invited Talk, Online), The LEO Economics Conference 2025 (Plaksha University), 2nd Meeting of Young Minds in Frontier Economics (IIT-B, INET and YSI), STEG's 5th Annual Conference and Theme Workshops (CEPR and Oxford)
2024: 19th Annual Conference on Economic Growth and Development (ISI), Winter School 2024 (DSE), Violence Against Women Workshop (Warwick), CAGE WIP (Warwick)
Beyond fostering inclusion and connectivity, does investing in mass transit impact crimes against women? I study the impact of the expansion of the metro rail system in Delhi, India, on reported crimes against women. Preparing a new and novel data set of the universe of crime reports at the police station-day level, and leveraging the staggered opening of metro stations across these police jurisdictions between 2016 and 2019, I find a 29 percent decrease in reported incidents of sexual harassment against women in public spaces following the opening of the first metro station in the police jurisdiction. This reduction in reported sexual harassment is neither linked to an overall decrease in reported non-gender-specific crimes in public spaces, nor substituted by an increase in such crimes in metro stations or trains. Further analysis of crime reports from alterna- tive public transport networks, combined with area safety data from a crowd-sourced mobile application, suggests that this reduction is driven by the enhanced safety pro- vided by the metro network.
Novel data:
Granular data on RSS activity between 2016 and 2019 in Delhi.
Polling booth locations for Delhi - State Elections 2015 and 2020, National Elections 2014, 2019 and 2024.