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 Resuf Ahmed, Paul Brimble, Alessandro Saia, and Dean Yang (NBER WP 33417)

This study examines the long-term social and political impacts of mass media exposure to religious content in India. We study the impact of "Ramayan," the massively popular adaptation of the Hindu epic televised in 1987-88. To identify causal effects, we conduct difference-in-difference analyses and exploit variation in TV signal strength driven by location of TV transmitters and topographical features inhibiting electromagnetic TV signal propagation. We find that areas with higher exposure to Ramayan (higher TV signal strength when the show aired) experienced significant cultural and political changes. First, we document a strengthening of religious identity among Hindus: parents in these areas became more likely to give their newborn sons traditionally Hindu names, and households showed increased adherence to orthodox Hindu dietary practices. In the short term, this cultural shift led to an increase in Hindu-Muslim communal violence through 1992. Over the longer term, through 2000, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) became more likely to win state assembly elections. Analyses of changes in local TV signal strength in India over decades indicate that these effects are not due to general access to TV but are due to exposure to the Ramayan TV show in 1987-1988. Our findings reveal that media portrayal of religious narratives can have lasting effects on cultural identity, intergroup violence, and electoral outcomes.

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

Despite rising educational attainment, Indian Muslim women face compounding barriers to labor market entry: weak professional networks, limited role models, and soft-skill gaps that formal education does not close. 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. The program increases full-time employment by 8.7 percentage points, with substantially larger effects among women who were out of the labor force at baseline. Among those already working, there are intensive margin improvements in employment toward larger firms and more senior roles. Drawing on third-party mock interviews, treated participants score 17% higher overall; textual analysis of evaluator feedback reveals that gains are concentrated in career clarity, adaptability, and structured self-reflection. The program's virtual delivery and low per-participant cost suggest strong potential for scale.

Gendered Job Search and Labor Market Outcomes: Evidence from Brazil

with Sally Zhang, Willian Adamczyk, Verónica Escudero

Despite women surpassing men in educational attainment in Brazil, large gender wage gaps persist. We use a unique linked dataset matching job applications from an online platform to administrative employer-employee records to examine whether gender disparities emerge at the application stage. We document significant gender gaps in application behavior: women are less likely to apply to managerial positions and apply to roles requiring fewer skills, and these gaps are pervasive across education levels, experience levels, seniority groups, and motherhood status. Despite these application gaps, outcome gaps are substantially more muted: women are no less likely than men to hold managerial positions after applying, a pattern consistent with conservative applications as an effective search strategy. The gender application gap remains largely unexplained after controlling for education, amenity preferences, and past labor market trajectories, pointing toward differences in beliefs or expectations about employer responses as a likely residual driver.

Unintended Consequences of Firm Agglomeration on Female Employment in India

Women across the globe face a higher disutility from commuting to work; this is exacerbated in the context of India where only 20% of the women participate in the labor force and majority of the working women commute less than 2 kilometers. This paper explores the effects of spatial concentration of firms on gender disparities in employment outcomes. Studying an industrial policy that indirectly increased firm concentration, I find that exposure to the policy increases the average distance of a work opportunity which disproportionately reduces female employment. This could also have implications for firm productivity: firms may hire less productive men in the place of more productive women who are outside of their labor catchment area. This study underscores the equity implications of policies designed for economic efficiency and motivate my exploration of interventions that could bridge these disparities by enhancing mobility and demand for female workers.

The Gendered Geography of Transit

with Karmini Sharma

For women, the decision to work involves more than access to a job: it depends on whether the commute is safe, whether suitable firms exist, and whether social norms or household constraints permit travel at all. We develop a quantitative spatial model that incorporates key gendered frictions shaping these decisions: (1) safety costs of commuting beyond travel time, (2) non-linearities in commute due to neighborhood preferences, (3) dependence on firm size, industry, and gender composition of firm clientele, and (4) co-location wedges arising from unequal bargaining power and dependence on male household members for travel. Using novel administrative data on firms in Delhi, we find that access to a new transit station increases female employment substantially more than male employment. Strikingly, counterfactual decompositions suggest this is not primarily driven by women commuting further; in fact, pilot field work shows that most workers take jobs within 1-2 kilometers of home. Instead, the gains appear to operate through firm composition: the types of firms locating near transit stations are disproportionately those that hire women. Preliminary field data point to a further mechanism: female consumers are more elastic to new transit access than female workers, and this consumer inflow shapes employer demand for female labor. To pin down these channels, we use crowdsourced safety data alongside original field surveys currently underway in Delhi to estimate gender-specific elasticities of labor supply to travel time, safety, and own-neighborhood preference, as well as employer responsiveness to female consumer composition, which we will incorporate into the structural model.

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)