Working Papers
Maternal Working Hours and Child's Cognitive Development in India: Evidence from Bunching Designs. (Job Market Paper) (Featured at the Economic Misfit Job Market Paper Series)
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.
Gender of the firstborn and Mental health in later lives (with Ajinkya Keskar and Sulagna Mookerjee) (draft in progress)
This paper examines the effect of the first-born child’s gender on parents’ mental health in later life. Relying on the exogenous variation in first-child gender, and on the observation that sex selection is generally absent at first birth in India, I find that having a first-born son has limited average effects on parents’ later-life mental health, measured using the CES-D scale. However, the results reveal important heterogeneity by parent gender: fathers with a first-born son exhibit worse mental health outcomes, while the effects for mothers are small and statistically limited. These findings suggest that the traditional preference for sons may be weakening amid social change and modernization, potentially because daughters are increasingly playing a greater role in providing care and emotional support to aging parents.
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