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

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.

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)