Title: Holy Cow! Conflicts, Markets, and Costs of Intolerance
(The paper is a joint work with Jitendra Singh (Ashoka University))
Abstract: "Dormant societal conflicts can rapidly escalate into violent outbreaks when aggregators of private opinion and discontent, such as election results, alter norms of tolerance that sustain mutually beneficial market exchanges. We examine India’s shift towards Hindu majoritarianism post-2014, a period marked by a burst of violent attacks by cow-protection vigilantes on minorities engaged in the informal cattle market, thereby disrupting it. Using a Regression Discontinuity Design, we find that violence more than doubled in regions where the Hindu majoritarian party won the election. We show that the market disruption increased cattle abandonment — stemming from rural households’ inability to sell unproductive cattle. Abandoned cattle led to large social costs, including human fatalities from road accidents involving stray cattle. Our unique dataset integrates electoral outcomes, a high-frequency household panel, livestock censuses, road accident statistics, media coverage of vigilante violence, and records of Hindu-Muslim conflicts. Through an event study design informed by a model of interlinked markets, we document a decline of over 10% in cattle holdings in affected areas and a 200% rise in road accidents, leading to human deaths and injuries. Primary survey data further highlight substantial crop damage from stray cattle in rural regions. The study highlights the staggering social costs incurred when mirrors of public opinion disintegrate a culture of tolerance."