Working Paper
Female Leaders and Women’s Labor Supply: Evidence from Close Elections in India (Job Market Paper)
Abstract: Electoral gender quotas rest on the assumption that the gender of the officeholder matters for the women she represents. I examine whether electing female legislators affects women's labor supply in India, where female labor force participation remains among the lowest in the world. I combine a large, nationally representative household panel tracking individual employment outcomes from 2016 to 2023 with state legislative assembly election results, and I exploit close elections between male and female candidates in a regression discontinuity design. When a female candidate narrowly defeats a male opponent, women in the constituency increase paid work time by about 0.57 hours per day, while female labor force participation shows no persistent change. The effect emerges gradually over the electoral term and is concentrated in constituencies with more progressive gender norms, weakening as conservatism rises and disappearing where norms are most conservative. Unpaid household work falls in urban households, where paid work rises most. I find no effects on access to public goods, income, credit, or men's labor supply. These results indicate that female political representation operates along the intensive margin of labor supply rather than by expanding participation at the extensive margin, with suggestive evidence that it works through the legitimation of more progressive norms.
Work in Progress
Religious Identity in India with Prof. Joseph Flavian Gomes (UCLouvain) and Prof. Klaus Desmet (SMU)
Abstract: This paper studies how nationalist politics influence religious identity choices in India, focusing on the consumption of religious identity goods (i.e., religiously taboo goods). Using household-level panel data from 200,000 households over 120 months, combined with electoral outcomes from more than 4,000 Indian assembly constituencies, we apply a staggered event study design to assess the impact of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a Hindu nationalist party, winning close elections. Comparing constituencies where the BJP narrowly won to those where it narrowly lost, our preliminary results show that household expenditure on taboo religious goods—such as meat—declines significantly before the election in treatment constituencies relative to control ones, but then begins to increase afterward. These findings suggest that religious salience may be heightened in anticipation of political outcomes, raising the possibility that election trends could be reflected in pre-election consumption patterns of religiously taboo goods
Hashish Ban, Poverty, and the Rise of Maoist Conflict in Nepal with Jing Rong Zeng (Paris School of Economics) and Clarice Manuel (UNamur & UCLouvain)
Other Research
Trade Openness and Bilateral Relation: Exploring Verbal and Material Interactions between Countries (Master's Thesis)
Supervised by: Prof. Gonzague Vannoorenberghe
An investigation on the gender pay gap in Nepal using the Blinder-Oaxaca Decomposition Method (Bachelor's Research Project)
Supervised by: Prof. Mani Nepal
Research Assistantship
Summer RA for Joseph Flavian Gomes at UCLouvain (2023), Belgium
Winter RA for Prof. Dhiraj Giri at Kathmandu University (2018), Nepal
Research Consultancy
Research Associate at MOSES Pvt. Ltd, Strategic partner of Frost & Sullivan (F&S) (2020), Nepal - Full Time
Data Analysis Consultant at BBC Media Action Nepal (2019), Nepal - Part Time