Work In Progress

  • Third Way of Green Transition: Adoption of Electric Vehicles in India

    with Linchuan Xu

    There is a growing literature on electric vehicles (EVs) adoption in developed countries, but not much discussion on what that transition path would be for the developing world. The transportation sector in India is characterized by a wide variety of vehicles (two-wheelers, three-wheelers, etc.) with different ownership structure and driving usage. Combining the vehicle registration dataset with measures of pollution, traffic congestion and government subsidies, we explore the effect of subsidies on EV adoption and environment outcomes in India. We use a quantitative framework to explore how complementary policies, such as congestion zones and charging station subsidies, could better facilitate the green transition. We emphasize a unique channel that can contribute to a better understanding of the environmental effects of EV adoption policies in developing countries: a reduction in clean vehicle price due to subsidies could increase vehicle ownership and therefore lead to more traffic congestion. Gasoline vehicle drivers will spend more time on the road generating higher pollution. The overall environmental benefits from EV subsidies will crucially depend on the ownership effect and the speed of substitution from dirty to clean vehicles.

  • Accounting for the Unaccounted: Street Vendors in India

    with Muskan Jain

    93 percent of 2 billion informal workers in the world are concentrated in low-and middle-income countries. This is partly a consequence of rural-to-urban migration in the face of deindustrialization and lack of formal job opportunities. This results in excess labor in urban areas absorbed by informal activities such as street vending. Though highly visible, street vendors are the most unaccounted form of informal employment after home based workers. In this project, we plan to map the allocation of natural markets within a city in order to understand how they interact with the built environment and we plan to systematically collect new data on this subset of informal workers in one city in India through a survey. This data will help us address important economic questions related to occupational choice, organization of street vendors within marketplaces and the role of social networks in the operation of these markets, supply chain networks and constraints to upward mobility. The project aims to understand the economic choices of street vendors better by 1) bridging the data gap and 2) creating a baseline to design interventions relaxing the constraints to upward mobility or formalization in the future.