Working Papers
Maternal Working Hours and Child's Cognitive Development in India: Evidence from Bunching Designs. (Job Market Paper)
When mothers work longer hours, does it benefit children through increased income, or hurt them by reducing the time they spend with their mothers? In this paper, I study the effect of maternal working hours on children’s cognitive outcomes in India. I employ a bunching design for identification and model selection, exploiting the fact that 41% of mothers in my data work zero hours. I find that the number of hours a mother works has little effect on children’s reading, mathematics, and writing outcomes. These estimates suggest a near-zero net trade-off between income gains and time costs.
Living Arrangement and Mental Health among the Elderly: Evidence from India (with Ajinkya Keskar and Sulagna Mookerjee) (draft in progress)
This paper studies two questions: First, does having a firstborn son affect parents’ physical health in later life? Second, does co-residing with at least one adult son improve parents’ mental and physical well-being? We exploit the quasi-random nature of first-born child sex to identify the effect of first-born sons on later-life physical health. To study co-residence, we use the construction of India’s Golden Quadrilateral (GQ) highway as a source of exogenous variation in sons’ co-residence decisions through migration decisions. Using these two sources of variation, we ask whether it is child-gender composition or proximity to sons that matters more for parents’ well-being. Preliminary results indicate that having a first-born son has little to no effect on parents’ physical health, while co-residing with at least one son is associated with substantially better mental health for mothers but not for fathers, and only modest gains in physical health.
Work in Progress
Intergenerational Effect of Adult Literacy Program on Children's Educational Outcomes: Evidence from India (with Opinder Kaur)
Air Pollution and Cognition (with Shiv Hastawala)
Intergenerational Effect of College Expansion Program on Children's Educational Outcomes: Evidence from India