Offshore Capital and Onshore Discrimination: The Biased Effects of India's Anti-corruption Campaigns on Muslim Businesses
Speaker: (opens in a new window)Robert Kubinec (New York University Abu Dhabi)
Wednesday, October 5, 14:00–14:45 (Irish time)
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Abstract: Offshore capital flows are a substantively important dimension of international capital mobility. We use leaked data on the ownership of offshore shell companies to estimate Indian firms' propensity to move capital offshore, and we examine how the propensity to offshore varies with the religious identification of a company's board members. We find that when vote share for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) increases within an Indian state's legislature over time, companies with Muslim board members tend to offshore at increasingly lower rates. We argue that this relationship is best explained by the BJP's anti-corruption drives and their much stronger effect on Muslim business owners compared to other ethnic and religious groups.
About the speaker: Robert Kubinec is a political scientist who studies the influence of powerful business interests on policy outcomes in developing countries, especially in the Middle East and North Africa. In addition, he is involved in the development of Bayesian statistical methods for measuring difficult topics like corruption and political ideology. Previously, he was a fellow at the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance at Princeton University.