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Working Papers

• The Spatial Cost of Formality: Street Vendors' Preferences in India (Job Market Paper)

  with Muskan Jain

  supported by IGC, British Academy, Hub of Equal Representation (STICERD)

  Working Paper (PDF)

  Formalisation policies in developing countries have proven hard to get right, and how much they achieve is sensitive to policy design. The problem is harder still for informal firms trading on public land, because a state cannot grant such a firm legal status without also deciding where it may trade. A large group of these firms is street vendors, who sell from carts, stalls and ground displays on streets and pavements and account for between 1.5 and 6.8 per cent of employment in low- and middle-income countries. States therefore offer them formality at a location rather than at a price, and deliver it through government-built vending zones that commonly stand empty. We price what relocation costs these firms, using a stated-preference experiment embedded in an original geolocated survey of 2,922 street vendors across 206 marketplaces in Patna, India, where the Street Vendors Act of 2014 makes certification free and attaches the protected spot to a location instead. Vendors value formality: at an unchanged commute the average vendor would pay up to 4.5 per cent of monthly sales for a zone, and 68 per cent accept one when the spot is free. Distance then consumes that value, and unevenly. The acceptable rent falls to 2.1 per cent of sales one kilometre further out and to nothing at about 3.8 kilometres, with more than half the value going in the first kilometre alone. Rent and information shift take-up less than distance does over the moves a zone is likely to require. Zones sit empty not because the state has failed to offer formality or because vendors do not want it, but because conferring it requires moving the firm, and moving it costs most of what it is worth.

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• Embedded livelihoods: The structure of street vending markets in India

  with Muskan Jain

  supported by IGC, British Academy, Hub of Equal Representation (STICERD)

  IGC Outputs (Working Paper, Policy Brief), British Academy Ideas Festival (Quiz, Slides)

  Street vending provides livelihoods for millions of workers across the developing world, yet the sector remains poorly understood and subject to repeated policy interventions that have largely failed. This paper provides a comprehensive microeconomic profile of street vending markets in Patna, Bihar, using original survey data from 2,922 stationary vendors across 206 marketplaces. We document that vendors are deeply embedded in overlapping social, spatial, and economic structures that make their livelihoods far more organized and far harder to administratively reshape than standard policy frameworks assume. Entry into vending and product choice are mediated by family networks; labour is almost entirely household-based; procurement is organized through stable relational ties with suppliers; and vendors cluster in spatially differentiated markets from which they derive substantial agglomeration economies. Pricing is implicitly coordinated through shared wholesale cost anchors, and 99 percent of vendors have never changed their marketplace despite operating without legal tenure and facing regular eviction pressure. The regulatory environment compounds this vulnerability: fewer than 2 percent of vendors are aware of the Street Vendors Act of 2014, which was designed to protect them, and over 40 percent report moderate to high psychological distress. We argue that the concept of embeddedness offers a more accurate framework for understanding this sector than the atomistic agent model implicit in most policy interventions, and that formalization efforts, particularly spatial relocation mandates, will continue to fail until they account for the social, spatial, and economic complementarities that sustain vendor livelihoods.

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  A day in the life, from our British Academy Ideas Festival exhibition

  MeenaRajuSuresh

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  Meena, vegetable seller

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  Meena, Raju and Suresh are fictional characters created to illustrate findings from real survey data. Illustrations by Nikkhil Nair.

• Making EV Transition Work in India

  with Linchuan Xu

  supported by IGC

  [Draft available upon request]

  How can governments facilitate electric vehicle (EV) adoption in developing countries? We construct a novel and comprehensive dataset for India covering vehicle registrations, government policies, and charging infrastructure rollout to answer this question. Our estimates from a structural model of vehicle demand suggest that a 10% purchase subsidy raises EV registrations by 13% for two-wheelers and 21% for four-wheelers. Charging station deployment is more effective at raising EV adoption in areas with greater power grid capacity. We evaluate the impact of prioritizing two-wheelers in the recent policy debate in India. In a budget-neutral counterfactual, reallocating existing state level four-wheeler subsidies to two-wheelers raises aggregate EV adoption by 5.5% while extending the reach of subsidies to more lower-income households.

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