Abstract: We evaluate India's Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana (PMGKAY), which roughly translates to Prime Minister's Poor Welfare Scheme,  a COVID-era expansion of the Public Distribution System that provided additional free foodgrains to more than 800 million beneficiaries. Linking pre-pandemic baseline data from the Longitudinal Aging Study in India (LASI) to nine rounds of the Real-Time Insights COVID-India panel, I estimate a difference-in-differences model with inverse probability weighting to address the lack of a pre-treatment comparison wave. I find that PMGKAY exposure is associated with a 5.2 percentage point (44 percent) decline in moderate-to-severe food insecurity, with effects concentrated in states with higher Public Distribution System coverage. Because the reduction in food insecurity is not accompanied by any increase in food expenditure, the results are consistent with the program operating through its in-kind transfer design rather than an income effect. 

Abstract: We study how the termination of Emergency Allotments (EA), a temporary supplemental SNAP benefit, affected employment and food spending in the United States. Because 17 states ended EA benefits in 2021–2022 while the remaining 33 states terminated them simultaneously in February 2023, we use the Borusyak, Jaravel, and Spiess (2024) estimator for the early terminations and a late-versus-early state comparison for the simultaneous termination. We find that in the early-terminating states, EA termination had no significant effect on employment, though food spending fell for households with dependents. In the late-terminating states, employment rose among households without dependents while food spending fell among households with dependents — an offsetting pattern across household types. 

I evaluate Mission Parivar Vikas (MPV), a family planning program targeting 146 high-fertility Indian districts, and ask whether the birth spacing it encourages improves early childhood nutrition — specifically stunting, wasting, and being underweight. I plan to exploit MPV's staggered rollout using successive rounds of the National Family Health Survey (NFHS). 

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