A one-third quota rule for women in local political leadership seats in India increases the number of female candidates who later contest seats in state and national legislatures. This arises from the candidacy of beneficiaries who gained political experience due to the quotas and career politicians who continue contesting in longer-exposed areas. The policy accounts for a substantial portion of the increase in female candidates for high office since the mid-1990s. Women have a higher probability of a top finish when running on major party tickets or contesting in areas that overlap with their local constituency.

Portfolio sorting is ubiquitous in the empirical finance literature, where it has been widely used to identify pricing anomalies. Despite its popularity, little attention has been paid to the statistical properties of the procedure. We develop a general framework for portfolio sorting by casting it as a nonparametric estimator. We present valid asymptotic inference methods and a valid mean square error expansion of the estimator leading to an optimal choice for the number of portfolios. In practical settings, the optimal choice may be much larger than the standard choices of five or ten. To illustrate the relevance of our results, we revisit the size and momentum anomalies.