Siddhant Agarwal

MS, Managerial Economics and Strategy

Contact Information

Kellogg School of Management
Northwestern University
2211 Campus Drive
Evanston, IL 60208

Phone: +1-773-858-547
Email: siddhant.agarwal@kellogg.northwestern.edu

Primary Fields

Labor Economics, Development Economics, Political Economy

Education

MS, Managerial Economics and Strategy, Northwestern University, 2024
MS, Quantitative Economics, Indian Statistical Institute (Delhi), 2016
BS, Economics, Presidency University (Kolkata), 2014

Job Market Paper

Workhour Normality and Gender Gaps: Evidence from Brazilian Exporters

Abstract: Workhours are ‘normal’ when they match the rest of the economy and are regular. Exporting firms’ foreign trading partners often operate in different time zones and can induce abnormal working hours. Using a comprehensive employer-employee matched dataset from Brazil, I show that the further away an exporting firm’s trading partner is temporally, the wider are the gender gaps in employment and earnings in exporting firms. Two extra hours of difference of an exporter from their trading partners lead to a decrease in the proportion of female employees by 1.2 percentage points, and a rise in the earnings gender gap by 0.84 percentage points. This accounts for more than 40% of the extra gender earnings gap seen between exporting firms and domestic firms. Exporters pay a premium to all their employees but this “exporter wage premium” is 2 percentage points smaller for women workers. Temporal distance explains 42% of this difference. Exporters’ temporal distance leads to a 0.15 percentage point widening of the gender earnings gap in the whole Brazilian formal economy, which is an increase of 1.2% . Men’s earnings are unaffected by the temporal distance to their trading partners. The contractual basic salary and hourly wage rate are unaffected by temporal distance, and contractual hours are only marginally affected. Rather, the difference in earnings arises due to overtime pay, commissions, and bonuses. Using a panel event study design, I also find that new mothers are 2.4 percentage points more likely to leave exporting firms with far away trading partners than they are to leave exporting firms with closer partners within a year of giving birth. This difference becomes stark again as their children reach school-going age. Schoolhours overlap, the overlap between Brazilian schoolhours and trading partners’ workhours, is also the most potent temporal measure, suggesting that childcare is an important driver of these effects. The earnings gap is worsened amongst white collar workers and managers, but not amongst blue collar workers, emphasizing that temporal distance matters because it creates frictions in synchronous communication and management.

Publications

Redistributing Teachers using Local Transfers

with Athisii Kayina, Abhiroop Mukhopadhyay, and Anugula N. Reddy

World Development (2018), 110: 333–344

Brief abstract: In this paper we show that local redistribution of educational resources via teacher transfers between neighboring public schools can improve equity in access to teachers. Transfers from teacher surplus schools to deficit schools within a 10 km radius in Haryana, a state of India for which we have geo-coded location of schools in 2013, enables 19 percent of deficit schools to meet the minimum requirement. We use the mandated norms in the Right to Education Act in India, to define deficit and surplus schools. We also provide a characterization of schools that are in deficit and those in surplus. We find that connectedness, the social composition of the enrolled students, the income of the neighborhood are important determinants of a school being in deficit. Surplus schools mirror the results on deficit, but not always so: they are far more heterogenous. A comparison of transfers that follow our redistribution rule to transfers resulting from an actual transfer policy shows that while our rule removes deficits in rural areas, the actual transfers favored more developed regions.

Works in Progress

Reservations and Caste Endogamy in India

Brief abstract: In this paper, I study how reservations (quotas) in government jobs and higher educational institutions affected the caste-endogamous nature of marriages in India. The Area Restriction Removal Act of 1976 harmonized Scheduled Caste status for jatis (sub-castes) within states, and led to exogenous variation in the access to reservations for individuals from the same jati within the same linguistic area. I find that the rates of endogamy do not fall due to affirmative action, suggesting that the distate for exogamy is higher than the benefits from higher employment opportunities and potential earnings for partners and future children.

From Patronage to Merit: Civil Service Examinations in the US

Brief abstract: Using a novel panel of all U.S. federal bureaucrats from 1817 to 1905, I study how much political influence was exerted on the careers of bureaucrats at different stages of development of the federal bureaucracy and whether reforms defending against partisan capture effective. I exploit the staggered introduction of meritocratic appointments starting in 1883, which allows me to investigate effects of merit on selection and career evolution.

References

Prof. Benjamin Friedrich (benjamin.friedrich@kellogg.northwestern.edu)

Prof. Edoardo Teso (edoardo.teso@kellogg.northwestern.edu)

Prof. Meghan Busse (m-busse@kellogg.northwestern.edu)