This paper provides novel evidence on how political connections distort environmental regulatory enforcement in Maharashtra’s Sugar Industry, using a unique natural experiment that creates simultaneous bidirectional variation in political access. We exploit a political crisis in Maharashtra, India, which caused some sugar mills to suddenly lose political connections while others gained it. Combining novel data on regulatory punishment, environmental & operational outcomes for sugar mills, we find that mills losing political access experience significantly higher enforcement rates, while mills gaining connections face no change in regulatory pressure. This effect is driven entirely by discretionary enforcement rather than complaint-driven inspections. Using granular emissions monitoring data, we show that this is not driven by changes in environmental performance by mills who lose political connections, while mills gaining connections significantly increase pollution-hiding behavior yet face no regulatory consequences. These findings demonstrate systematic heterogeneity in environmental enforcement in a weak institution setting.

The effectiveness of corporate climate initiatives depends not only on firms' commitments but also on existing asset ownership structure. We study this question in the context of the World Bank's Zero Routine Flaring by 2030 initiative, under which oil and gas companies pledge to eliminate routine flaring from their assets. Using asset-level ownership and satellite-based flaring measurements for nearly 20,000 oil and gas assets worldwide (2012–2024), we exploit staggered firm endorsements to study how committed firms navigate the tradeoff between voice, exercising governance influence to reduce emissions, and exit, divesting from assets that are costly to decarbonize. Committed ownership reduces flaring gradually but persistently, reaching approximately 45% below pre-commitment levels after nine years. The persistence of these gains hinges on continued committed presence: when the last committed owner divests, flaring rises by roughly 40% within two years and exceeds 90% within six years, a result we term the "last good owner effect." Retaining at least one committed voice on the board is both necessary and sufficient to sustain emissions discipline.

This paper studies whether politically driven cross-subsidies in electricity pricing—low tariffs for agricultural users financed by high industrial tariffs—distort structural transformation in India. I assemble a new state–year panel that recovers category-specific electricity prices and sectoral employment to quantify how cross-subsidies shape structural transformation in India. Using a shift-share instrument interacting national coal price movements with state thermal-generation shares, reflecting Coal India’s nationally set coal prices that pass through to power costs, I find that increases in the industrial–agricultural price wedge reallocate employment away from manufacturing toward agriculture. These findings suggest that electricity cross-subsidies can hinder manufacturing-led structural transformation by raising the relative cost of operating capital, with implications for the design of politically salient but distortionary tariff policies.

This paper examines how ownership structure influences environmental outcomes in India’s sugar industry, where mills vary between cooperative and private ownership. We combine satellite data on pollution exposure with mill-level characteristics from the Vasantdada Sugar Institute and regulatory records from the Maharashtra Pollution Control Board. To identify the causal effect of ownership, we exploit variation in the mass sale of sick cooperative mills to private buyers in late 2010s. We test whether cooperative mills generate less pollution due to stronger local accountability: in cooperatives, farmers are both suppliers and shareholders, and they elect the mill chairman, giving them institutional power to demand cleaner operations when pollution harms their land or health. We also examine whether this accountability channel is offset by political capture, using variation in board composition and election timing. The findings contribute to understanding how ownership and governance shape firm behavior in settings with weak formal enforcement and localized externalities.