Working Papers
Embedded livelihoods: The structure of street vending markets in India
with Muskan Jain
supported by IGC, BA, H.E.R. (STICERD)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 com- pounds 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 com- plementarities that sustain vendor livelihoods.
Beyond Enforcement: Understanding Street Vendor Preferences for Evidence-Based Urban Planning
with Muskan Jain
supported by IGC, BA, H.E.R. (STICERD)[Draft available upon request]
Place-based formalization programmes for street vendors consistently fail to attract uptake, even as vendors face regular evictions and express demand for secure tenure. We study the sources of this failure using a stated preferences experiment with 2,922 street vendors across 206 marketplaces in Patna, Bihar. Because spatial frictions, zone design failures, coordination failure, and information frictions are observationally equivalent, each predicts low take-up, we design the experiment to jointly identify and quantify all four. Vendors express large willingness to pay for formal zones, confirming that formality itself is valued. The binding constraints are spatial: marginal vendors are willing to pay approximately INR 1,322 (roughly two days of average profit) to reduce commuting distance by one kilometre, and rent sensitivity dominates all other zone attributes. Coordination failure exists but is quantitatively small; moving from zero to full peer coordination shifts relocation probability by less than the equivalent of a 0.5 km reduction in distance. An embedded information experiment shows that informing vendors about the policy achieves the same result as closing a one kilometer gap. Together, the results imply that zones are failing because they are mis-targeted and overpriced, not because vendors are stuck in a coordination trap.
Work In Progress
Making Green Transition Work: Adoption of Electric Vehicles in India
with Linchuan Xu
supported by IGCWhile electric vehicle (EV) adoption has surged in developed countries, far less is known about how this green transition will unfold in the Global South. Against the backdrop of rapid industrialization and motorization, developing countries will soon become the primary carbon emitters for the next generation. Facilitating EV transition may therefore become the most crucial lever to reach the right balance between economic growth and reducing emissions. This project will provide the first in-depth documentation of EV transition in India over the last decade and discuss how to make green transition work in developing economies. Transport accounts for around 14% of energy-related CO2 emissions in India and is one of the fastest-growing emissions sectors. EV adoption is now central to India’s Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and Low-Emission Development Strategy (LEDS). India is also one of the first developing countries to launch policies such as FAME (Faster Adoption and Manufacturing of Electric Vehicles) to speed up EV uptake, yet progress has been uneven across states and vehicle segments. Absence of systematic data and empirical analysis has left open questions about the effectiveness of EV policies and their heterogeneities. This project will build a novel comprehensive dataset combining vehicle registrations, state and national policies, charging infrastructure, and congestion and local air pollution data. We will answer three interrelated questions: (1) What is the status of EV adoption in India, and how does it vary spatially and by vehicle segments? (2) How effective have subsidies and other policies been in driving uptake? (3) Through a general equilibrium framework, we explore what combinations of policies—like congestion pricing or targeted subsidies—can accelerate adoption and generate environmental benefits most cost-effectively? With reduced-form regression-analysis and quantitative modelling, we identify the main barriers and the right incentives to scale up green transition in the developing world.
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 IGCDo 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
with Swati Dhingra
supported by LSE Seed Research FundStreet 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