Political Cycles in Crop Residue Burning: Evidence from India

This paper examines the relationship between electoral incentives and crop residue burning (CRB) in India. Exploiting the asynchronous nature of state legislative assembly elections, we investigate whether the proximity to election timing influences CRB incidence. We construct a novel dataset combining 1-km resolution daily NASA remote sensing data on CRB with state electoral constituency information. Our findings reveal a significant increase in CRB before elections, suggesting political incentives play a role in its persistence. We provide evidence that this pre-electoral spike is unlikely to be driven by increased crop production, pointing instead to the relaxed law enforcement for political gain.