Research

Publications

Younger Children and Mothers’ Labour Supply in Rural India: Evidence from Fertility Stopping Behaviour (Accepted at Journal of Population Research)

This paper estimates the causal effect of having young children aged 0 to 5 years on mothers’ labour force participation in rural India. In order to address the potential endogeneity in the fertility decision, I exploit Indian families’ preference for having sons. I leverage exogenous variation in the gender of older children aged 6+ years as an instrumental variable for having younger children aged 0 to 5 years in the family. IV estimates show that the mothers’ participation is significantly reduced by 9.9% due to the presence of young children aged 0 to 5 years in the household, with the negative effect mostly driven by mothers belonging to the highest income quartile; mothers with high education; and mothers residing in nuclear families.

Working Papers

The Role of Social Identity and Perceived Discrimination in Human Capital Formation: Evidence from India (R&R at Journal of Development Studies)

I examine the role of caste and parents’ perceived social discrimination on human capital development in India. I investigate the age at which gaps across castes in children’s cognitive outcomes and parental investments in children’s education originate and how they evolve over time from the age of 5 years to 15 years. I find significant and persistent differences in test scores as well as parental investment between children belonging to lower vs. upper Hindu castes. These gaps cannot be completely explained by the differences in SES across castes. Parents’ perceived social discrimination hampers parental investment throughout the childhood, but it negatively affects children’s outcomes only at later ages.

Prenatal Sex Detection Technology and Mothers’ Labour Supply in India  (joint with Marco Bertoni and Guglielmo Weber)

The advent of prenatal sex diagnostic technology (PSDT) in India in mid-eighties has made it easier for women to identify the sex of the children before their birth, giving them an option to abort unwanted female foetuses and attain desired sex composition of children without having to undergo repeated pregnancies. In this paper we investigate the impact of this technology on mothers’ labour supply using triple differencing. Our strategy combines supply-driven changes in ultrasound availability with plausibly exogenous family-level variation in the incentive to sex-select and son preference at the regional level which captures variation in proclivity to sex-select at the regional level. We find a significant reduction in mothers’ labour supply subsequent to wider availability of PSDT in India post 1995. We further investigate various underlying channels linking prenatal sex selection and mothers’ labour supply and identify two important channels- changes in fertility and reduction in postnatal discrimination against firstborn girls.

Work in Progress

Malaria and Economic Development in the Short-term: Plasmodium falciparum vs Plasmodium vivax (joint with Michaela Kecskesova  and Stepan Mikula)

Investor Sentiment in the Indian E-commerce Landscape (Joint with Kamlesh Kumar, Piyasha Majumdar and Sumeet Swarup)