Lachi Singh

Lachi Singh

PhD candidate, LSE

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Hi, I’m Lachi!

I am a PhD candidate in Economics at the London School of Economics (LSE). I work in development, labour and environmental economics.

My research looks at informal labour markets in developing countries: how workers choose where to relocate under formalization policies, and how they adapt to extreme weather. I enjoy building original datasets, from field surveys to administrative records, to answer hard questions.

I am affiliated with STICERD, CEP (Labour Programme), Economics of Environment and Energy (EEE), and the Global Action for Policy (GAP) Initiative at Northeastern University.

I am from Ranchi, a city in Jharkhand, India. I hold a BA (Hons) in Economics from Miranda House, University of Delhi, and an MA in International and Development Economics from Yale. Before the PhD, I was a pre-doctoral fellow at Yale’s Tobin Center for Economic Policy.

I am on the 2026-27 job market.

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 had mixed success, and their effects depend on design. Firms that operate on public land pose a distinct problem: the state cannot grant them legal status without also choosing where they may trade, so formality is offered at a location rather than at a price. We study this trade-off for street vendors, who account for 1.5 to 6.8% of employment in low- and middle-income countries and are commonly formalised through government-built vending zones. We embed a stated-preference experiment in an original geolocated survey of 2,922 vendors in 206 marketplaces in Patna, India, where the Street Vendors Act of 2014 makes certification free but ties legal protection to a vending zone. At an unchanged commute, the average vendor’s willingness to pay for a protected spot is 4.5% of monthly sales, and predicted take-up of a free spot is 68%. Willingness to pay falls to 2.1% of sales when the commute rises by 1 km and reaches zero at about 3.8 km; a 5 km move reduces take-up twice as much as a rent of 2% of sales. A randomised information treatment raises take-up by about 3 percentage points at every design. The results indicate that low take-up of vending zones reflects the relocation cost that place-based formalisation imposes, not low demand for formal status.

  • 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.

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

    Meena, vegetable seller

    • Meena at 4:30am, dressing in the dark before her workday begins
    • Meena at the wholesale market
    • Meena at her vending spot
    • Meena in heavy rain
    • Meena distress selling at the end of the day

    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.

Work In Progress

  • Weathering the Waste: Inventory Choice, Market Aggregation and Food Loss Among Urban Street Vendors

    with Swati Dhingra

    supported by Global Sustainability Research Fund (LSE) and IGC
    AEA RCT Registry

    Do decentralized markets efficiently aggregate supply decisions when firms must commit inventory under correlated uncertainty? We study street vendors selling perishable produce in Patna, India, who first commit to inventory at wholesale markets then set retail prices during the trading day. Demand uncertainty is driven by weather and marketplace-day footfall affecting all vendors simultaneously. Waste from spoilage provides a direct measure of costly supply mistakes. We develop a two-stage model identifying three inefficiency channels: business-stealing through prices, availability externalities through stockout spillovers, and coordination failure under correlated shocks. We show correlated uncertainty amplifies competitive inefficiency: safety-stock wedges scale with total uncertainty, and common shocks create non-diversifiable market volatility. Our empirical strategy combines vendor-level panel data with randomized price experiments. We test whether vendors optimize individually and whether markets achieve efficient aggregation, classifying behaviour into scenarios based on individual versus market efficiency. The analysis will establish whether inefficiency arises from individual mistakes (learning errors, biases) or market failures (strategic competition, coordination), a distinction critical for policy, since if markets exhibit individual efficiency with market inefficiency, improving individual forecasting cannot address strategic externalities. The findings inform intervention design in committed-supply markets facing growing demand volatility from climate change.

  • Exposure to Pollution, Productivity and Well-Being: Street Vending Sector in India

    supported by LSE Seed Research Fund

    Street vendors constitute a significant portion of the informal workforce in low- and middle-income countries. They operate in public spaces that are often marked by inadequate sanitation, high noise levels, and air pollution. Prolonged exposure to such unfavourable working conditions can adversely affect both worker productivity and physical and mental health. Focusing on a city in India, this project aims to gather comprehensive data on marketplace/workplace characteristics including physical environment features like local pollution, as well as vendor characteristics. The goal is to understand the role of street vendors in well-being of city residents and explore potential policy solutions to enhance their working conditions and better integrate them into the urban landscape.

  • From Street to Screen: Digital Marketplaces and the Informal Economy

    Informal businesses such as street vending are a large source of urban self-employment in developing countries. In India, an estimated 40 million people sell food, produce, and household goods from carts and pavements, working long hours for earnings that depend heavily on foot traffic. Digital platforms have meanwhile reshaped retail and delivery for formal businesses. This shift has largely bypassed informal vendors while intensifying the competition they face, as customers move online. This project asks a simple question: can cheap digital access raise and stabilise street vendors’ earnings? We test a lightweight marketplace tool built around how vendors actually work, and ask whether it increases market access, smooths earnings across good and bad days, and enables demand pooling with nearby vendors selling complementary goods.

Teaching