Excited to share our new paper: "Reconciling Affirmative Action and Merit: Evidence and Design from India," joint work with @orhanaygun_boun . India operates one of the world's largest affirmative action systems, directly shaping the life outcomes of tens of millions of people each year. Our paper analyzes this system through the lens of market design — and uncovers a fundamental legal tension at its core. Two landmark Supreme Court rulings are at the heart of the story: 📌 Indra Sawhney (1992) established three foundational principles — the over-and-above principle, within-category fairness, and quota-filling subject to eligibility — which together uniquely characterize the assignment rule India has used for decades. 📌 Ashoka Kumar Thakur (2008) introduced an OBC eligibility cutoff tied to the open-category score and recommended converting unfilled OBC seats into open-category positions. We show that these two judgments are mathematically incompatible: no assignment rule can simultaneously satisfy all the resulting axioms. To resolve this, we: ✔ Characterize the unique rule implementing the Ashoka Kumar Thakur cutoff mandate (AKT rule) — and show it can be severely wasteful. ✔ Propose a family of soft-reserve rules satisfying the Indra Sawhney principles with OBC de-reservation, and prove that the Forward Transfer (FT) rule merit-dominates all others in this family. ✔ Introduce η*, a reinterpretation of the cutoff policy that eliminates the endogenous feedback loop, resolves the impossibility, and strictly improves upon FT in meritocratic terms. The result is a clear merit ranking: η* ≻ FT ≻ other soft-reserve rules ≻ Indra Sawhney ≻ AKT. All proposed rules are practically implementable within India's existing centralized admission platforms — no new data or infrastructure required. Happy to share the paper with anyone interested! @econD47 #india @January #economics #publicpolicy