Title: Forced Displacement and Social Capital: Long-run Impact of the Indian Partition
The next seminar in the regular series of seminars will be presented by Prof Abhiroop Mukhopadhyay, a professor in the Economics and Planning Unit at the Indian Statistical Institute, New Delhi.
Date: Tuesday, 14 June 2022
Time: 5 pm IST
Venue: Seminar Hall, Main Building
Join the seminar virtually here.
Abstract: In this paper, we investigate whether the historical shock of the Indian Partition, one of the largest forced displacements in the twentieth century, affected social capital in affected parts of India in the long run. India was partitioned in 1947 into India and Pakistan (East and West Pakistan). At this time, many Hindus and Sikhs migrated from Pakistan to India while Muslims migrated from India to Pakistan. The Partition shock is measured as the proportion of “displaced” migrants in Indian districts in 1951 from census data. Using data from the World Health Organisation Survey on the Aged and Elderly conducted in six Indian states, we find that social capital is lower in districts that received more Partition migrants. The effect remains strongly robust to spatial robustness checks, contemporary differences in demographics and income, public goods provisions, literacy, urbanisation and the gender ratio. We find these effects are mediated through riots, conflicts and violent crime starting from Partition and continuing through to more recent times. Our study contributes to the understanding of large forced displacement events and their shadow on institutions-here social capital-over the long run.
About the scholar: Abhiroop received his PhD from Pennsylvania State University in 2004. He did his Master’s in Economics from the Delhi School of Economics in 1997. Abhiroop has served as the Sir Ratan Tata Senior Fellow at the Institute of Economic Growth, as an academic visitor at the India Observatory, London School of Economics, London, and as a visiting researcher at the Chr. Michelson Institute (Bergen), Groupement de Recherche en Economie Quantitative d’Aix Marseille, Marseille and at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid;, and as a research associate at the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy. He was awarded the Mahalanobis Medal 2018 by The Indian Econometric Society.
He recently conducted a national-level workshop at the Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics on the broad topic of Political Economy.
The seminar will be held on 14th June (Tuesday) from 5 PM onwards in the seminar hall.
Kindly make it convenient to attend. Join the seminar virtually here.
