This data set contains experimental data collected as part of the field experiments conducted in West Bengal. These experiments study the effect of religious identity and religious fragmentation on cooperation, rent-seeking and income distribution among Hindu and Muslim groups. We study the effect of religious identity among Hindu and Muslim groups by varying the way our subjects are matched with each other. We implement in-group/in-group treatments where Muslim subjects play with fellow Muslim subjects and Hindu subjects play with fellow Hindu subjects; we also implement in-group/out-group treatments where Hindu subjects play with Muslim subjects. Finally, we have a control treatment where the identity of a subject's match is uncertain. To study the effect of fragmentation, we resort to a quasi-experimental approach. We take religious composition of villages as fixed, based on the village-level survey on religious fragmentation by Das et al. (2011). We select villages in two districts in West Bengal which conform to one of three categories: Muslim-dominated, where over 90% of the population is Muslim; Hindu-dominated, where over 90% of the population is Hindu; and fragmented, where the Muslim and Hindu communities are roughly equal. Our experimental design combines identity treatments with village types to understand how social identity interacts with fragmentation. For more details on the analysis of the data, please see the link to the first working paper to have come out of this project, which can be found in the "Related Resources" section. Tackling increasing resource scarcity is one of the major challenges to policy-makers in developing countries. An important aspect of resource scarcity involves public goods. Lack of public goods, like health and education, can significantly reduce the welfare of individuals and households and often this affects the poorest the most. In India, these issues are amplified by the existence of a long-standing social structure based around caste and religion. Such social fragmentation can result in social exclusion and/or lower public good provision. This project investigates the behavioural foundations of inter-group discrimination on economic performance in rural West Bengal, India. It builds on existing household survey work on religious- and caste-based social exclusion in villages in West Bengal by conducting a series of field experiments. Field experiments study the decisions of agents who in their daily lives are affected by poverty, and help determine the extent to which their preferences regarding caste, ethnicity and religion determine their willingness to socially exclude others or themselves to be excluded. This project‘s findings will help policy-makers to the extent that they facilitate the identification of the right policy response to social exclusion and lower economic performance, which in turn are key determinants of poverty.

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