Siddharth Kishore

Well-resourced interest groups often have the upper hand in legislative processes. They can invest in professional lobbying, build personal relationships with lawmakers, and supply sophisticated technical and political information during policy deliberations. Nonetheless, interest groups that lack capacity to intensively lobby can seek influence in other ways, for example, by giving testimony or submitting position letters intermittently. We argue that legislators have incentives to pay attention to intermittent advocacy because it provides constituency perspectives that might not otherwise be available to legislators. Intermittent advocacy can be especially informative when done in conjunction with other groups. We leverage a unique opportunity to observe both professional lobbying and position letters on bills introduced in the California State Legislature, focusing on bills that address the impacts of climate change—an issue mobilizing a range of organized interests and posing great risks to modern society. We develop an index of interest group diversity and show that letters of support from a diverse set of small, less politically active groups increase the likelihood that a bill passes committee. Our findings illuminate how advocacy tactics differ by organization type and demonstrate that groups that lack capacity to intensively lobby can influence legislative outcomes.

We exploit the staggered timing of an employment guarantee program in rural India to investigate how providing work opportunities affects married women’s use of family planning methods. Using survey data from rural India, we employ a difference-in-differences strategy and inverse-probability-of-treatment weighting to control for confounding factors influencing family planning decisions. Results suggest an increase of 1.8 percentage points (a 3.2% increase from the variable’s sample mean) in the use of modern family planning methods among married women after the introduction of an employment guarantee program. Results are robust to the choice of controls, regression weights, and matching method. We also demonstrate that program impacts increase with the amount of time a workfare program has been in place. These results provide empirical evidence that employment guarantees that include women can affect family planning choices, with important implications for economic development outcomes.

This paper explores the impact of monsoon rainfall shocks on child health outcomes in rural India at varying levels of soil organic carbon. I combine high resolution spatial data on soil organic carbon content and weather with the Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) for India (2015-2016) to estimate the linkage between monsoon rainfall shock, soil health, and child health. Weather variables and soil determine crop productivity and thus affect human health through food access in low- and middle-income countries. I contribute to the literature by demonstrating direct and indirect impact of soil health on childhood outcome of wasting. Using a coarsened exact matching method, I estimate that having high soil health can result in 26 percent improvement in child wasting. I also demonstrate that having high soil health can moderate adverse impacts from weather shocks.