Akhila Kovvuri

Moving Opportunity Closer: How Public Transit Transforms Firm Composition and Employment

with Karmini Sharma

Transportation infrastructure can improve workers' access to existing economic opportunities, but it can also reshape economic opportunity itself by influencing where and what kinds of firms locate. This paper studies how public transit infrastructure influences firm location, composition, and employment at the neighborhood level. We construct novel data tracking over one million establishment entries and employ both difference-in-differences and market access specifications, exploiting the phased expansion of the Delhi Metro Rail in India. Transit access increases firm entry near stations, with larger, established retail and service firms locating first and inducing subsequent entry of other firms. These patterns create new economic hubs in peripheral areas, increasing employment per capita, especially for women in a context of low baseline female labor force participation. Counterfactual decompositions using a quantitative spatial model with estimated gender-specific commute elasticities reveal that compositional shifts toward larger establishments and consumer-facing industries that ex-ante employ more women account for the majority of this differential employment effect. Understanding how infrastructure reshapes the demand side of the labor market is thus critical for predicting and enhancing its distributional impacts.

Ancient Epics in the Television Age: Religious Identity and the Rise of Hindu Nationalism in India

with Dean Yang, Alessandro Saia, Resuf Ahmed, and Paul Brimble

How does strengthened religious identity affect society and politics? We study the impact of ``Ramayan,'' the massively popular televised version of the Hindu epic. We conduct difference-in-differences analyses, measuring Ramayan exposure with TV signal strength in Indian localities at the time of airing in 1987. Localities with higher Ramayan exposure saw persistently strengthened Hindu religious identity, measured by the names given to newborns; increases in Hindu-Muslim communal violence during the Hindu-nationalist mobilization of the early 1990s; and longer-run increases in electoral success for the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party. A battery of tests indicates these effects reflect exposure to Ramayan specifically, rather than television generally. Areas with greater exposure also saw increased presence of Hindu religious schools, a potential channel behind the long-run persistence of effects.

A Ladder Through the Glass Ceiling: Experimental Evidence from a Career Accelerator on Corporate Trajectories and Professional Signaling for Indian Muslim Women

I evaluate an RCT of a synchronous, virtual six-month career accelerator program involving career planning, professional self-presentation, and mentorship. Targeted at Indian Muslim female college students and young professionals, the program is implemented over four cohorts of 576 total participants between 2023 and 2025. I construct a longitudinal panel from participants' LinkedIn profiles to capture employment trajectories, job quality, and professional self-presentation over the medium term and to leverage the high-dimensional nature of profile text to uncover mechanisms that elude conventional survey measurement.

Gendered Job Search and Labor Market Outcomes: Evidence from Brazil

with Sally Zhang, Willian Adamczyk, Verónica Escudero

We use a novel linked dataset matching individual job applications from an online platform to longitudinal administrative employer-employee records to study whether similarly skilled men and women search for different jobs, and which differences matter for subsequent pay. We document four facets of gendered job search: women are more likely to apply to vacancies that disclose salaries, target different amenity bundles, are less likely to apply to managerial positions, and target jobs with different skill requirements. These gaps persist after accounting for pre-application differences in education, labor market history, productivity, and self-representation. Application behavior explains 40-48 percent of the conditional gender pay gap, almost entirely through skill targeting, consistent with a narrower search strategy in which women apply to fewer vacancies that more closely match their existing skills.

Real Solutions for Fake News? Measuring the Effectiveness of General Warnings and Fact-Check Banners in Reducing Belief in False Stories on Social Media

with Katherine Clayton, Brendan Nyhan et al.

Political Behavior, 42, 1073-1095 (2020)