The Impact of Groundwater Accessibility on the Performance of Firms

A seminar on “The Impact of Groundwater Accessibility on the Performance of Firms” with Dr Sheetal Sekhri, Department of Economics, University of Virginia, USA will be held at NCAER on July 17, 2018.

This presentation is based on the joint work of Sheetal Sekhri with Jiahua Liu. In this paper, the authors evaluate the impact of groundwater accessibility on the performance of firms. The authors use a physical limitation that discontinuously raises the cost of accessing groundwater at a depth of 8 meters to examine how such a jump in the cost of groundwater access affects firm outcomes. Employing nationally representative Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprise Census data along with groundwater measures from observation wells in India in a regression discontinuity design framework, the authors find that firm outcomes worsen in areas where the cost of groundwater access is high. The authors examine mechanisms and find that evidence weighs in favour of groundwater inaccessibility changing the composition of firms for the micro, small, and medium enterprises as opposed to the dampening of demand due to a decline in the agricultural sector. The authors do not find evidence of forward linkages in the agricultural and industrial sectors.

Sheetal Sekhri is an Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies at the Department of Economics, University of Virginia, USA. She is also a Fellow at the International Growth Centre, London School of Economics. Her fields of interest are development economics, applied microeconomics, environmental and natural resource economics. Her research focuses on the delivery of public services and safety nets, higher education and skill development, and water-related issues in India.

She has a BS from Iowa State University, and an MA and PhD in Economics from Brown University.

For queries, please contact Ms Sudesh Bala at sbala@ncaer.org or on 91-11-2345-2722.