Research

Publications and accepted papers

Abstract: Bans on sex-selective abortions, typically implemented to make sex ratios more equitable, may have adverse welfare consequences on surviving children. Exploiting a natural experiment in India in the form of a ban on prenatal sex selection, we examine the impact of the ban on postnatal health outcomes. We first show that the ban led to an increase in the proportion of female children being born in the whole sample and among firstborn female families in particular. Strikingly, we also find that the ban led to a worsening of mortality outcomes for both girls and boys in firstborn female families. In terms of mechanisms, we find that fertility increases in firstborn families after the ban, pointing to the following channel: firstborn female families are disproportionately affected by the ban and are more likely to use the son-biased fertility stopping rule to achieve a desired number of sons. Children in firstborn female families thus face greater competition for parental resources which drives the relative worsening of their health outcomes.

VoxEU column on this paper. 

Ideas for India post on this paper. 

Ashoka University Discussion Paper Series No. 58.


Abstract: Policy measures that seek to address son preference through restrictions on the tools of sex-selective abortions, without addressing the underlying causes, have been found to generate negative welfare consequences for unwanted surviving girls. Unlike these top-down supply-side measures, demand-side measures that focus on increasing the demand for girls by shifting social norms of son preference can mitigate these adverse welfare consequences. We study the impact of an intervention aimed at reducing discrimination against girls, which has both supply-side and demand-side elements. The intervention, implemented in India between 2015-18 included a mass media campaign designed to increase the perception of the value of a female child, while also tightening the policing of illegal sex-selective abortions. We exploit variation in the timing of exposure to the programme across Indian districts as well as quasi-exogenous variation in the sex of the firstborn child to identify the impact of the programme and find that it led to an increased proportion of female births as well as a reduction in the gender gap in mortality in intensively treated families. The main mechanism that explains our results is a relative increase in health investments in daughters, such as breastfeeding and vaccinations.


Supplementary Materials.

VoxEU column on this paper. 

Ashoka University Discussion Paper Series No. 85.


Abstract: I estimate the effect of financial constraints on the response of firms that import inputs to a large exchange rate depreciation. Using data from a census on Indonesian firms, I find that while domestic importers face lower value added due to a rise in their costs of production, foreign-owned importers fare better: they are more likely to sustain higher value added, hire more labour and use more materials than domestic owned firms. These effects are driven by firms in industries with high demand for external finance, emphasising the importance of access to finance in mitigating the impact of trade and credit shocks. This suggests another channel through which FDI can add value to a firm in a developing country, particularly with the increasing importance of trade in intermediate goods.


Awarded the Kuznets Prize 2023, for the best article published in the Journal of Population Economics in the previous year.

Abstract: We study whether legal restrictions on prenatal discrimination against females leads to a shift by parents towards postnatal discrimination. We exploit the staggered introduction of a ban on sex-selective abortions across states in India to find that a legal restriction on abortions in India led to an increase in the number of females born, as well as a widening in the gender gap in educational attainment. Females born in states affected by the ban are 2.3, 3.5 and 3.2 percentage points less likely to complete grade 10, complete grade 12 and enter university relative to males. These effects are concentrated among non-wealthy households that lacked the resources to evade the ban. Investigating mechanisms, we find that the relative reduction in investments in female education were not driven by family size but because surviving females were now relatively unwanted. Discrimination is amplified among higher order births and among females with relatively few sisters. Finally, these negative effects exist despite the existence of a marriage market channel through which parents increase investments in their daughters' education to increase the probability that they make a high-quality match. 

VoxEU column on this paper. 

Media mentions: IndiaSpend, 

Ashoka University Discussion Paper Series No. 37.


SERI Working Paper No. 2

Abstract: How do students decide what major to study and what explains the low enrolment of women in science and economics? Using data on the subjective expectations of undergraduate students who are in the process of selecting a major, we model major choice as a function of major-specific and job-specific attributes. We identify significant gender differences in the preferences for different attributes as well as in the expectations of future outcomes, especially of grades. Women are willing to pay twice as much as men for course enjoyment and higher grades, even as they expect lower grades in science and economics. This suggests that in addition to gender differences in preferences being shaped by pervasive norms about which subjects are considered  more suitable for women, women also suffer from a relative confidence gap in their major-specific abilities. 

Ideas for India post on this paper.
Hindustan Times article on this paper. Link.


Supplementary Materials

Abstract: The effect of an aggregate economic shock on human capital formation is theoretically ambiguous. When real wages fall during a recession, households face both a drop in their real incomes, as well as lower wages in available jobs. I exploit the heterogeneous impact of an economic recession as measured by the variation in rice price increases to find that, for net consumers of rice, higher rice price increases are associated with small declines in school participation for younger children, who have limited labour market opportunities, and large declines in employment for older children, who face higher opportunity costs of schooling. The results are reversed for net producers of rice. The fall in wages protects older children from suffering adverse long-run consequences to their educational attainment. However, children who face higher wages during critical junctures in their schooling are more likely to start working and reduce human capital investments. These differences in investments have significant long-term effects on later-life income, employment status and sector of employment. 


Summary: One of the most egregious manifestations of gender bias is the phenomenon of "missing women". The number of missing women is projected to increase to 150 million by 2035, as a result of prenatal sex selection and excess female mortality relative to men, and is reflected in male-biased sex ratios at all ages. The economics literature identifies several proximate causes of the deficit of females, including the widespread use of prenatal sex selection in many Asian countries, which has been fueled by the diffusion of ultrasound and other foetal sex detection technology. The use of prenatal sex selection has become even more expansive with a decline in fertility, as parents with a preference for sons are less likely to achieve their desired sex composition of children at lower levels of fertility. Gender discrimination in investments in health and nutrition also leads to excess female mortality among children through multiple channels.

The deeper causes of son preference lie in the socioeconomic and cultural norms embedded in patriarchal societies, and a recent economics literature seeks to quantify the impact of these norms and customs on the sex ratio. Particularly important are the norms of patrilineality – where property and assets are passed through the male line – and patrilocality – where elderly parents coreside with their sons, while their daughters move to live with their husbands’ families after marriage. Another strand of the literature explores the hypothesis that the devaluing of women has roots in historical agricultural systems: societies that have made little use of women’s labour are today the ones with the largest female deficits. Finally, economic development is often associated with a decline in son preference, but, in practice, many correlates of development, such as women’s education, income and work status, have little impact on the sex ratio unless accompanied by more extensive social transformations.

A number of policies have been implemented by governments around the world to tackle this issue, including legislative bans on different forms of gender discrimination, financial incentives for families to compensate them for the perceived additional costs of having a daughter, and media and advocacy campaigns that seek to increase the inherent demand for daughters by shifting the norm of son preference. Quantitative evaluations of some of these policies find mixed results. Where policies are unable to address the root causes of son preference, they often simply deflect discrimination from the targeted margin to another margin, and in some cases, they even fail in their core objectives. On the other hand, the expansion of social safety nets has had a considerable impact in reducing the reliance of parents on their sons. Similarly, media and advocacy campaigns that aim to increase the perceived value of women have also shown promise, even if their progress appears slow. Analysis of the welfare consequences of such interventions suggests that governments must pay close attention to underlying sociocultural norms when designing policy. 

Working papers

Understanding the Impact of Low-Cost Loans on Labor Trafficking Outcomes (2024). With Beata Luczywek and Manisha Shah. NBER Working Paper 32912.

Abstract: Approximately 27.5 million individuals fell victim to forced labor in 2021. The Indian construction industry is particularly vulnerable to forced labor as workers experience excessive work hours, required work on rest days, and unpaid wages. Micro-contractors (MCs), who oversee worker environments, frequently struggle with their own financial constraints due to limited access to working capital. This study investigates whether alleviating MC liquidity constraints improves labor conditions for their workers in Bengaluru and Delhi by offering randomly selected MCs access to low-cost loans. Our findings reveal this intervention does not improve working conditions overall; in fact, some outcomes slightly worsen. However, workers employed by more educated and non-migrant treatment MCs experience significantly better labor conditions, underscoring important heterogeneity among MCs. This research offers new causal insights into efforts to combat forced labor.


From Dusk Till Dawn: The Impact of Lifting Night Shift Bans on Female Employment (2025). With Bhanu Gupta, Kanika Mahajan and Daksh Walia. Ashoka University Economics Discussion Paper 147. 

Abstract: We examine whether lifting a ban on the employment of female workers at night can spur firm demand for female labor. Different states in India have amended their labor regulations to remove a prohibition on the employment of female workers on night shifts in factories. Using firm-level panel data and a dynamic difference-in-differences estimator we find that following the regulatory relaxation, large firms significantly increased both the share and number of female workers. These effects are driven by larger firms operating in export-oriented industries and tighter labor markets. Our findings demonstrate that removing gender-discriminatory regulations can expand female employment and improve firm flexibility in hiring.

Ideas for India post on this paper.

Is Language a Bridge or Barrier? Impact of linguistic distance on woman and child health in India (2025). With Advaith Jayakumar. Ashoka University Economics Discussion Paper 150.

Abstract: We measure the impact of a lack of familiarity with a dominant language on health outcomes and health-seeking behavior among women and children in India. We use language tree data from the Ethnologue to measure the linguistic distance between a person’s mother tongue and the dominant language of the region they live in. We find evidence that increasing linguistic distance results in increased morbidity among women as well as reduced vaccine take-up for their children. Key mechanisms are reduced exposure to health information and decreased autonomy among women, making them less likely to be able to travel to a health clinic by themselves. Our results are robust to a number of alternative measures of linguistic distance, and suggest an added burden of being a migrant.


Informality, firm size, and labour market segmentation in Indonesia

Abstract: I test the hypothesis that there exists a significant earnings differential between similar workers in the formal and informal sectors of a large developing economy. Using longitudinal data from Indonesia that provides information on the labour incomes of both the salaried and the self-employed, I find that after controlling for firm size and individual-specific heterogeneity, there is no formal sector earnings premium, except for jobs in the public sector. I examine biases arising from the potentially endogenous sorting of individuals into employment sectors. I also control for the presence of unpaid family workers in the sample, measurement error in the explanatory variables and non-random attrition over the length of the survey. The evidence in this paper questions the commonly held belief that labour markets in developing countries are segmented because of legal institutions (minimum wages, mandated benefits and trade unions) that serve to protect high formal sector earnings. Similar developing country research on informality and firm size has focused primarily on Latin American and African countries and has frequently ignored the incomes of the self-employed; this paper sheds light on labour mobility across a spectrum of formality, firm size and self employment in one of Asia’s largest developing economies. 

Ongoing projects

Empowering Women through Safety at Work: An Experiment with SMEs in Urban India. With Livia Alfonsi, Lori Beaman and Karmini Sharma. Baseline preparation stage - Conditionally accepted via pre-results review at the Journal of Development Economics. 

Abstract: This study investigates the role of workplace safety in empowering women in SMEs in urban India. We design and evaluate a large-scale randomized controlled trial offering sexual harassment training to employers and employees across the universe of retail markets in Delhi. The intervention focuses on increasing awareness, reshaping attitudes, and improving business practices related to workplace safety, with outcomes measured at both employer and employee levels. We also test the effectiveness of three motivational nudges – gender equality, legal compliance, and peer influence – in encouraging firms to adopt the training. By examining take-up patterns and intervention impacts, this study provides critical evidence on addressing sexual harassment in resource-constrained settings and its broader implications for business practices in a never-before studied context. The findings contribute to understanding how targeted interventions can promote safer workplaces for inclusive growth and gender equity in low-income urban labor markets. 

Sexual harassment and safe workplaces: Why don't more firms invest in safer workplaces for women? In this project, we explore firm-side constraints on reducing sexual harassment in the workplace and measure some of the costs of failing to do so, particularly in terms of hiring and retaining women employees. With Lori Beaman and Karmini Sharma. 

Female employment and occupational choice: In this project, we aim to explore how women, particularly entrepreneurs, decide which occupations to pursue. We want to understand if they are responsive to underlying demand, or if they are simply constrained to enter a small number of sectors, irrespective of returns, due to gendered norms, limited exposure and resources. With Ashwini Deshpande.

The capital punishment and crime: An evaluation on the deterrent effect of the capital punishment in India on violent and other crime, using a new dataset detailing all executions that have taken place in the last 15 years. With Ashwini Deshpande.

Other writing

India at Work: Challenges and the road ahead - Policy Discussion Paper, Isaac Centre for Public Policy, July 17, 2025. 

Banning sex-selective abortion has unintended effects on the health and education of children in India - VoxEU. October 27, 2023.

How does a ban on sex-selective abortions affect child health? - Ideas for India. July 31, 2023. With Aparajita Dasgupta.

The link between India's gender pay gap and women's enrolment in STEM majors - Hindustan Times. March 31, 2022.

The perils of tackling skewed sex ratios through a crackdown on sex-selective abortions - CEDA Data Narrative, Centre for Economic Data and Policy - January 2021. With Aparajita Dasgupta

Preferences or expectations? Understanding the gender gap in major choice - Ideas for India, October 2020. With Aparajita Dasgupta.

Provide Equity, Not Debt - Business Today, May 31, 2020. With Marti G. Subrahmanyam.

INDIA: Surmounting the economic challenges of COVID-19. Counterpoint, Arthur D. Little’s Report. May 2020. With Ashwini Deshpande, Anisha Sharma & Aparajita Dasgupta.

Rejuvenating MSME sector in the corona crisis: Firms are better supported through “pseudo-equity” than debt finance - Times of India, April 28, 2020. With Marti G. Subrahmanyam.

The Coronavirus Pandemic: Are we ready for the long haul? Ashoka University Policy Brief No. 1. Also published in Ideas for India, The Wire and Scroll. April 2020. With Abhinash Borah, Sabyasachi Das, Aparajita Dasgupta, Ashwini Deshpande, Kanika Mahajan, Bharat Ramaswami, Anuradha Saha, Anisha Sharma

Project for the 15th Finance Commission on conditional fiscal transfers in India (with the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy), 2018.

Cleaning Delhi's Air: Implementation Action Plan (with the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy), 2017.

Project for the Fiscal Responsibility and Budgetary Management Review Committee (with the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy), 2017.

Research report for the 14th Finance Commission on central government control over subnational debt in India (with the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy), 2013.

“Land tenure security: Is titling enough?”  (with Shayak Barman and Paromita Datta-Dey), National Institute of Urban Affairs, Working Paper Series, WP-2006-03, 2006.