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We study the potential for pleasant and cooperative contact to reduce prejudice between religious groups in India. We randomly assign Hindu and Muslim participants into groups, in which they interact over the course of a week-long vocational training program. A novel feature of our study is that all of the participants were women. We find that intergroup contact reduces the prejudice of both Hindu and Muslim participants toward members of the other religion one week after the training program concluded. While we find that most of the positive effect of intergroup contact on reducing prejudice dissipates after six months, effects on Hindu attitudes toward Muslims are persistent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Dams fully mitigate the effect of rainfall shocks on agricultural production and religious conflict between Hindus and Muslims in India. • We find that the link between rainfall and religious conflict works through the agricultural income channel. • We do not find supportive evidence for other channels linking rainfall shocks to religious conflict. • Dams may be a useful tool for mitigating the effects of climate change. Sarsons (2015) finds that, while agricultural income in India is less sensitive to rainfall in dam-fed districts, rainfall shocks have a larger (or equally large) effect on religious riots between Muslims and Hindus in dam-fed districts than in rain-fed districts. This is inconsistent with agricultural income being the sole channel through which rainfall affects religious conflict in India. In this comment, we show that this result originates from the use of state-specific time trends and interaction models. Once we replace state-specific time trends with state-year fixed effects (in slit sample regressions) and allow state-year fixed effects to be different between rain-fed and dam-fed districts (in interaction models), we find that while (fractional) rainfall shocks affect agricultural production and religious violence in rain-fed districts, they have no effect on agricultural production and religious violence in dam-fed districts. In other words, dams fully mitigate the effect of rainfall shocks on agricultural output and religious violence in the Indian context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]