Shiv Hastawala
Ph.D., State University of New York at Binghamton, Binghamton NYGlobal Scholar
Shiv Hastawala
Ph.D., State University of New York at Binghamton, Binghamton NYMy research focuses on the areas in which policies can improve development and the well-being of households in India when faced with binding constraints and the way in which these interact with information and access. The regions that I cover include education, governance, agriculture, and access to finance, as these are treated as interrelated as households face pervasive frictions in last-mile delivery, bargaining power, and transaction costs. The tools that I use include causal inference that isolates the impact of the policy and identifies heterogeneity.
In our paper “Female Politicians and Corruption in Rural India,” my colleagues and I use the random assignment of reserved positions for female village council chiefs to provide an estimate of the causal effect of female leadership on household reported bribes. We see a differential treatment effect such that the single term of female leadership does not reduce bribes, whereas two terms of reserved positions lead to a decrease in the probability of payments as well as the amount of bribes paid. We interpret this shift through credibility formation and by learning about competence and transparency in beneficiary selection.
In “(En-)lightening Children: Assessing the Impacts of Access to Electricity on Children’s Achievement Levels,” my co-authors and I examine the effect of electrification on learning achievement. By making use of a quasi-experimental setting afforded by a universal electrification campaign in West Bengal, I find a positive effect on reading achievement, with greater gains for the youngest, and provide evidence on external validity using a nationally representative panel dataset.In “Bank Presence and Formal Household Credit in India,” I employ a regression discontinuity design surrounding the policy of branch expansion of banks in 2005. The study seeks to determine whether improved presence of banks will cause a change in the sources of the major loans of households from informal sources to banks. The study finds that there is no change in the sources of major loans of households, except for loans for education, and that it is mainly rural households that contribute to findings of no change. Findings support that banks locate their branches primarily in urban areas within treated districts.
In our Agricultural Export Zone projects, my collaborators and I use staggered adoption difference-in-differences methods to examine the redistribution of land into horticulture and the use of fertilizers induced by agricultural export promotion. Through all my projects, the critical question is: What is the set of policies that eases constraints effectively and what is the set of institutional requirements for the additional openings to benefit households?
Shiv Hastawala is a Global Scholar at Chanakya University’s Centre for Integral Economics, with a background in applied micro-economics. The focus of his research is on the intersection of development, institutions, and public policy in the Indian context, where he examines the role of limited infrastructure, local governance, and access to financial services in determining human capital development.
His publishing credits include the European Journal of Political Economy, where he and co-authors examine the long-term effects of female leadership on bribery using randomized gender reservations in village councils, and the Review of Development Economics, where he and other authors estimate the gains from electrification-induced learning in West Bengal.
His current projects include testing whether the opening of bank branches changes the main source of loans for households from informal to formal financial institutions and whether special areas for agricultural exports influence the reallocation of agricultural resources.
Shiv completed his PhD in Economics from SUNY Binghamton and has taught Development Economics, Intermediate Macroeconomics, and Principles of Economics. His interests are working on large datasets in R and Stata and maintaining a publicly accessible repository of datasets for replication and policy-directed research.
- Ph.D., Economics, Department of Economics, 2024, State University of New York at Binghamton, Binghamton NY
- M.A., Economics, 2017, University of Hyderabad, hyderabaf
- B.A., (Hons) Economics, 2014, University of Delhi, delhi
- S. Chatterjee, S. Hastawala, and E. Taveras, “Female politicians and corruption in rural India,” European Journal of Political Economy, vol. 90, art. no. 102764, 2025, doi: 10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2025.102764.
- S. Chatterjee, S. Hastawala, and J. Kamal, “(En-) ‘lightening’ children: Assessing the impacts of access to electricity on learning achievement levels,” Review of Development Economics, vol. 27, no. 4, pp. 2489-2517, 2023, doi: 10.1111/rode.13042.
WORKING PAPERS
- S. Hastawala, “Bank presence and formal household credit in India,” Working paper, 2025.
- S. Chatterjee, S. Hastawala, and S. Ojha, “Place-based policy and agricultural commercialization: Evidence from India’s export zones,” Working paper, 2025.
- Designing and Running Randomized Evaluations certified by MITx (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), May 2025
- Qualified the National Eligibility Test for Assistant Professor in Economics, conducted by the University Grants Commission, November 2017
- S. Chatterjee, S. Hastawala, and J. Kamal, “Lighting the path to learning: Can electricity boost children’s test scores?,” Ideas for India, Apr. 23, 2025. [Online]. Available: https://www.ideasforindia.in/topics/human-development/lighting-the-path-to-learning-can-electricity-boost-children-s-test-scores. [Accessed: Dec. 16, 2025].
- S. Hastawala, “Universal basic income and the Indian macroeconomy,” Ideas for India, Oct. 6, 2017. [Online]. Available: https://www.ideasforindia.in/topics/poverty-inequality/universal-basic-income-and-the-indian-macroeconomy. [Accessed: Dec. 16, 2025].
- S. Hastawala, “The view from Sitapur: Of the Indian economy that I knew, or so I thought,” The Hindu, Jul. 29, 2018. [Online]. Available: https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/open-page/the-view-from-sitapur/article24541729.ece. [Accessed: Dec. 16, 2025].