Religious Identity and the Provision of Public Goods: Evidence from the Indian Princely States∗

Identifying the effect of a ruler’s religious identity on policy is challenging because religious identity rarely varies over time and place. We address this problem by ex-ploiting quasi-random variation in the religion of rulers in the Indian Princely States. Using data from the 1911 census, we find that Muslim-ruled states had lower Hindu literacy but the religion of the ruler had no statistically significant impact on Mus-lim literacy, railroad ownership, or post office provision. These results support the hypothesis that rulers provide less public goods when religious institutions provide