Kabeer Bora

Kabeer Bora

Assistant Professor of Economics
University of Missouri–Kansas City

I use empirical tools to study classical political economy, economic history, Indian economy, and labor institutions.

Research

Peer-reviewed publications

01 2026

The Political Economy of Stagnation: Salariat Formation, Class Location, and the Inhibition of Capital Accumulation in Assam.

Review of Radical Political Economics

Paper ↗

This paper argues that Assam’s structural underdevelopment is the endogenous product of a historically entrenched salariat—a class fraction whose material reproduction depends on state patronage, formed through the articulation of precolonial corvée labor relations with British colonial administration. Modifying Bardhan’s (1984) dominant-proprietary-class framework and drawing on Poulantzas (1975) and Wright (1985), the paper specifies the political and ideological forms of uncontested salariat hegemony and explains why threats to credential monopoly generate the ethnic, sons-of-soil mobilizations that have defined Assam’s modern political history.

02 2026

An Unequal Equalization: Understanding the Response of Rates of Profit during the First Age of Globalization (1870–1913).

Review of Social Economy

Paper ↗

Using net productive capital stock and two independent instrumental variable strategies—climate uncertainty shocks in trading partners and the steamship revolution (Pascali 2017)—we estimate that a 1% increase in trade openness raised the net rate of profit by 0.30–0.33 percentage points in seven capitalist economies during 1870–1913. The effect operates primarily through exports, consistent with a surplus-realization mechanism. We also document β-convergence in profit rates (half-life of 25–36 years), consistent with the Marxian tendency toward equalization, though σ-convergence follows a non-monotone path.

03 2025

The Drain Gain: An Investigation into How Colonial Drain Helped Keep the British Economy Buoyant.

World Marxist Review, 2(1):93–120

Paper ↗

India’s colonial history has received substantial scholarly attention, with the drain of wealth a particular focus. This study shifts the lens to examine how this drain from India to Britain played a crucial role in Britain’s own economic development, particularly in counteracting the tendency of the falling rate of profit.

04 2023

Importing Sobrie’Tea’: Understanding the Tea Trade during the Industrial Revolution.

Arthaniti: Journal of Economic Theory and Practice, 4(2)

Paper ↗

This paper concentrates on the consumption of tea—entirely imported—and explores why demand for it increased during the Industrial Revolution by examining the effect of working hours on tea imports between 1760 and 1834. It identifies the determinants of tea demand while underlining the crucial role that increasing working hours played during this period.

Under review

05 —

Amending Amenables: Labor Law and the Direction of Technical Change in Indian Manufacturing.

Conditionally accepted, Metroeconomica

Draft ↗

India’s 1982 amendment to the Industrial Disputes Act required firms with 100 or more workers to obtain permission for layoffs and closure, making labor quasi-fixed. Using Annual Survey of Industries data and a difference-in-discontinuities design at the 100-worker threshold, we find treated private firms raised capital intensity by 15% and cut capital productivity by 14% in 1983, with labor productivity unchanged through 1986. The real wage did not move; the cost of adjusting labor did. This is defensive capital deepening: capital-using restructuring without the labor-saving gain of canonical Marx-biased technical change.

Working papers

06 —

Trade Exposure and the Persistence of Petty Production in Post-Liberalization India.

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Draft ↗

Does trade integration transform how firms are socially organized? In India, seven out of ten establishments still hire no workers. Using the universe of firms in the Economic Census from 1998 to 2015 and a measure of each district’s exposure to world demand, we find that the effect of trade liberalization on the share of these family-run, no-hired-labor firms is precisely null. Other work on formalization has found that the share of workers employed in formal firms increases due to trade liberalization; however, the evidence here suggests that the social organization of work is largely untouched by trade, both in manufacturing establishments and across non-farm employment.

Teaching

Contact

Department of Economics
203 E, Manheim Hall · 710 E 52nd Street
Kansas City, MO 64110, United States
816-235-1136 · kabeerbora@umkc.edu