Bipul Verma

I am currently a fifth year Economics PhD student at University of Minnesota.
My research interest lies in the domain of Macroeconomics, Growth and Development, Spatial Economics and Environment Economics.

Email: verma176@umn.edu
Address: 1925 South 4th Street, 3-141 Hanson Hall, Minneapolis, MN 55455

Working Papers

Tertiary Education and Growth in Services: Evidence from College Expansion in India (JMP)

This paper revisits the longstanding question of whether education causes economic growth by examining the consequences of the post-2000 liberalization of the higher education sector in India. Exploiting spatial heterogeneity in college expansion—arising from nationwide deregulation and institutional constraints on college location, I estimate the causal effects of an exogenous increase in the local supply of college-educated workers on regional structural transformation and growth. I find that the increase in the share of college graduates between 2001 and 2011 accounts for 79% of the decline in the aggregate agriculture employment share, 99% of the increase in the aggregate service sector employment share, and 39% of the growth in value added per worker in the informal sector. Moreover, the expansion of skilled labor supply is associated with rising employment shares in large, skill-intensive industries within both manufacturing and services. These findings suggest that improving access to higher education can drive structural transformation, economic modernization, and growth.

Higher Education Policies and Spatial Inequality Across US States with Sang Min Lee
[Presented: SED Winter 2024, Scheduled: Urban Econ Association, USC, U Monash, LAEF-NYU]

To what extent have the federal and state higher education policies—which have affected the supply and demand of college education—contributed to the growing cross-state wage inequality since 1980? To address this question, we develop and estimate a quantitative spatial model with endogenous college education and migration. The model features skill-biased technical changes and agglomeration effects, which means that a state’s average wage rises as more residents attain college degrees or as college-educated workers migrate into the state. Counterfactual analyses reveal that tuition discounts and public appropriations by the federal and state governments have become more progressive. In the baseline, the standard deviation of log mean wages across states increased from 0.087 in 1980 to 0.117 in 2019. In contrast, had the higher education policies remained at their 1980 levels, the standard deviation would have risen by 73% more to 0.139 by 2019. Agglomeration effects played a significant role in this result: if they had been half as strong as estimated, the standard deviation would have increased by 17% more (instead of 73%) in the counterfactual than in the baseline.

Revisiting Global Income Convergence in 21st Century
[Submitted]

Recent research has documented a reversal from divergence to convergence in income levels between rich and poor countries after 2000. This paper employs a growth accounting framework that incorporates heterogeneity in capital income shares–unlike the constant one-third share typically assumed–to investigate global income dynamics over the time period 1980-2019. I find that while output levels began to converge only after 2000, capital (physical and human) had already been converging during 1980-2000. The divergence in total factor productivity (TFP) during this earlier period offset the gains from capital convergence, resulting in little overall income convergence. After 2000, capital maintained its pattern of convergence, and, unlike in the earlier period, TFP also began to converge. Quantitatively, more than half of the convergence between 2000 and 2019—and nearly all the convergence between 1980 and 2019 outside Sub-Saharan Africa—can be attributed to the convergence in capital rather than to improvements in TFP. These findings highlight that factor accumulation has played a much larger role in driving long-run convergence dynamics than previously documented in the literature.

Labor Market Returns to Improvement in Education Quality: Evidence from India with Ravinder

Despite the huge deficiencies in foundational literacy and numeracy skills in developing economies, the extent to which foundational skills affect labor market outcomes remains insufficiently explored. This paper studies the causal impact of improved foundational skills-measured through mathematics and reading scores-on earnings in rural India. Employing a regression discontinuity design across districts, we estimate that a one standard deviation increase in district-level math and reading test scores raises individual earnings by 70% and 179%, respectively. These estimates are substantially larger than returns to additional years of schooling or comparable test score improvements observed in developed economies.

Work in Progress

Demography and Structural Transformation with Ruyan Liao

Labor Market Dynamics in Developing Economies with Ravinder

Multi-region Carbon Tax under Time Inconsistency with Honey Batra, Monishankar Bishnu, and Tridip Ray

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