"Gendered Language in Job Ads and Applicant Behaviour: Evidence from India" (with Sugat Chaturvedi and Zahra Siddique). Accepted, Labour Economics. [Previously titled: Words Matter: Gender, Jobs and Applicant Behavior in India (Working paper: Ashoka DP) ]
"Women’s Work, Social Norms and the Marriage Market" (with Farzana Afridi, Abhishek Arora, Diva Dhar). Accepted Economic Development and Cultural Change [Working paper: Ashoka Economics Discussion Paper]
"Trade Disruptions and Reshoring (with Anindya S Chakrabarti and Shekhar Tomar)" Accepted, AEJ: Applied [Working paper: SSRN]
"Using Domain-Specific Word Embeddings to Examine the Demand for Skills" (with Sugat Chaturvedi and Zahra Siddique) Accepted, Research in Labor Economics, Volume 52: Big Data in Labor Market Research [Working paper: Ashoka Economics Discussion Paper, IZA Working Paper]
"When Do Gender Quotas Change Policy? Evidence from Household Toilet Provision in India" (with Sugat Chaturvedi and Sabyasachi Das) Accepted, Economic Development and Cultural Change [Working paper (Previously titled: The importance of being earnest: What explains the gender quota effect in politics?): Ashoka Economics Discussion Paper]
"What Determines Women’s Labor Supply? The Role of Home Productivity and Social Norms" (with Farzana Afridi and Monisankar Bishnu) Journal of Demographic Economics, 90: 55-87, 2024. [IZA Discussion Paper]
“COVID–19, Income Shocks and Female Employment.” (with Ishaan Bansal). Feminist Economics, 2023, 29(4), 285–317. [Working paper: Ashoka DP]
"Maternity Benefits and Child Health: Unintended Gendered Effects" (with Aishwarya Kekre) Journal of Comparative Economics, 2023 Volume 51, Issue 3, Pages 880-898 . [Working paper: Ashoka DP]
"Gender and Mechanization: Evidence from Indian Agriculture” (with Farzana Afridi and Monisankar Bishnu) American Journal of Agricultural Economics 105, no. 1: 52-75, 2023. [Working paper: IZA Discussion Paper ]
"The Gendered Effects of Droughts: Production Shocks and Labor Response in Agriculture" (with Farzana Afridi and Nikita Sangwan) Labour Economics, 2022, vol. 78, issue C . [IZA Working Paper]
"Access to Toilets and Violence Against Women" (with Amzad Hossain and Sheetal Sekhri) Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, 114: 102695. 2022. [Ashoka Economics Discussion Paper]
"Employment Guaranteed? Social Protection during a Pandemic” (with Farzana Afridi and Nikita Sangwan) Oxford Open Economics, Volume 1, 2022 [Paper]
“Public Safety for Women: Is Regulation of Social Drinking Spaces Effective?” (with Saloni Khurana), The Journal of Development Studies, 58(1), 164-182 [Working paper version: Ashoka Economics Discussion Paper]
"COVID-19 and Supply Chain Disruption: Evidence from Food Markets in India (with Shekhar Tomar), American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 103(1): 35-52, 2020. [Published Article; Working paper versions: SSRN; Ashoka Economics Discussion Paper]
"Back to the plough: Women managers and farm productivity in India.” World Development 124, 2019.
"Why are fewer married women joining the work force in Rural India? A decomposition analysis.” (with Farzana Afridi, Taryn Dinkelman) Journal of Population Economics, 31(3): 783-818, 2018. [IZA Working paper: Click here]
"Rural Construction Employment Boom during 2000-12: Evidence from NSSO Surveys." (with R. Nagaraj) Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 52, Issue No. 52 , 2017. [Click here]
“Rainfall shocks and Gender Wage Gap: Agricultural labor in India.” World Development 91: 156-172, 2017.
“Caste, Female Labor Supply and the Gender Wage Gap in India: Boserup Revisited.” (with Bharat Ramaswami), Economic Development and Cultural Change 65 (2): 339-378, 2017. [Working paper: Click here]
“Farm wages and Public works: How robust are the impacts of National Rural Employment Guarantee Act?” Indian Growth and Development Review 8(1):19-72, April 2015.
Evolution of wage inequality in India (1983–2017): The role of occupational task content. In Tasks, skills, and institutions: The changing nature of work and inequality, (with Saloni Khurana) edited by Carlos Gradín, Piotr Lewandowski, Simone Schotte, and Kunal Sen. Oxford University Press [UNUWIDER Discussion Paper]
"Banking the Underbanked: Capital Investment and Credit-Constrained Firms " (with Nirupama Kulkarni and S K Ritadhi) [Working paper: Ashoka Economics Discussion Paper]
Inadequate banking infrastructure can exacerbate inequalities across firms. We exploit a place-based policy at scale – India’s nationwide bank expansion policy in 2005 that incentivized banks to open branches in “underbanked” districts – and employing a regression discontinuity design identify substantial increases in capital expenditures and credit growth of manufacturing establishments post-intervention. We find that establishments most likely to be credit constrained i.e., small, young and those not publicly listed drive these effects. Using novel regulatory data we find evidence in support of two mechanisms – increased hiring of bank officers and physical proximity of lenders to small, informationally opaque borrowers that explain the uptick in capital spending by small firms.
(Previous version circulated as: Bank Branch Expansions and Capital Investment by Credit-Constrained Firms)
"Trumping Immigration: Visa Uncertainty and Jobs Relocation" (with Ritam Chaurey and Shekhar Tomar) [Working paper]
Exploiting President Trump's win in the 2016 Republican primary election, we estimate the impact of the ensuing uncertainty around H-1B immigration policies on the demand for workers in India. Using postings data from the largest Indian jobs platform, we find that firms more reliant on H-1B visas for filling US-based positions increase their postings for India-based jobs immediately after Trump's primary win in June, which led to increased migration policy uncertainty. This surge is attributed to heightened relocation of jobs from the US to India for occupations more amenable to offshoring. India-headquartered firms lead this change and witness an increase in their exports.
"Minimum Wages and Wage Inequality in India” (with Saloni Khurana and Kunal Sen) [Working paper: UNUWIDER]
Using nationally representative data on employment and earnings, this paper documents a fall in wage inequality in India over the last two decades. It then examines the role played by increasing minimum wages for the lowest skilled workers in India in contributing to the observed decline. Exploiting regional variation in changes in minimum wages over time in the country, we find that an increase in minimum wages by one percent led to an increase in wages for workers in the lowest quintile by 0.17%. This effect is smaller at upper wage quintiles and insignificant for the highest wage quintile. Counterfactual wage estimations show that the increases in minimum wages explain 26% of the decline in wage inequality. These findings underscore the important role played by rising minimum wages in reducing wage disparities in India.
"Scaling Up to Decrease the Divide: Firm Size and Female Employment” (with Pubali Chakraborty) [Working paper]
Using firm and individual-level data, we show a positive relationship between relative female employment and firm size. We then use a difference-in-difference strategy exploiting a natural experiment in Indian labor law amendments that raised firm size thresholds for regulatory compliance. We document a resulting 4.2% increase in female worker share in the treated states, along with a 5% and 15% rise in employment and output, respectively. Larger firms providing amenities like maternity benefits, transport, and paid leave, valued more by women, likely drive these results. Our findings suggest that policies promoting firm growth can enhance female employment.
"The unintended impacts of legislating to handle workplace sexual harassment" (with Sonia Bhalotra, Medha Chatterjee, Daksh Walia) [Draft coming soon]
India is one of the few countries that has mandated firms to set up an internal complaints committee to encourage reporting and redressal of sexual harassment against women under the 2013 Prevention of Sexual Harassment (POSH) Act. We examine the impacts of this legislation on the employment of women relative to men, leveraging a discontinuity in the scope of the mandate, which requires workplaces with ten or more workers to comply with its provisions. The analysis proceeds in two steps. First, using nationally representative individual-level survey data that cover employment in paid work across sectors, we estimate about 12% decline in the probability that women relative to men are in wage work in regulated vs. unregulated enterprises after the Act. Second, we use data on registered manufacturing enterprises and find that the share of women in regulated firms falls by close to 5% and that this is driven by regulated vs unregulated firms hiring men at a faster rate than they hire women relative to before the policy change. We verify these findings using combined data from unregistered and registered manufacturing enterprises surveys. Overall, while the work environment may have improved for some women following POSH, our results show an increase in the chances that employed women are in smaller (unregulated) firms where both wages and amenities are lower. In the former data, the relative decline in female employment is significantly larger in occupations that had a lower share of women at baseline. Analogously, in the firm level data it is significantly larger in firms that had a lower share of women at baseline. Thus, POSH acted to intensify workplace gender segregation. Our findings cohere with previous evidence that firms often respond to costly legislation by changing gender composition of employment.
"Restart: Women, career breaks and employer response in India" (with Nandhini S) [Working Paper]
Gender gap in access to gainful employment opportunities is a striking feature across countries. An under studied aspect of the gap is role played by the labor market for women who return after a career break. In India, the number of women who have taken a career break are estimated to be around 7 million. This paper uses a correspondence study experiment to determine the extent of discrimination faced by women returning back to work after a break in the Indian private sector. On average, women who take a break receive 49\% lower call backs than other women with similar characteristics but who have not taken a break. This penalty is larger in specialized skill intensive sectors like finance that in sectors like HR which require more generic skills. However, simply indicating upskilling certifications does not lead to a statistically significant difference in callbacks for women who take a break. Further, this penalty is larger in smaller firms and from those located in north India. These findings are consistent with taste-based theories of discrimination since large firms often make commitments to have gender inclusive policies and northern Indian states have more regressive gender attitudes.
"Are Crop Residue Burning Bans Effective? Evidence from India" (with Shefali Khanna and Sudarshan RSA) [Working Paper: Ashoka, SSRN]
Crop residue burning (CRB) is a leading cause of high air pollution in developing countries. We examine the effectiveness of India’s largest ban on CRB using a difference-in-differences strategy that exploits its implementation in select states. We find that there was a reduction in fire counts by 30% of the pre-ban mean albeit waning to near-zero two-three years after the ban. Using state-level data on fines, we show that burning initially reduced in areas where the ban was relatively better enforced, generating uncertainty for farmers. However, low levels of overall enforcement led to a return to the old status-quo.
"From Dusk Till Dawn: Impact of Lifting Night Shift Bans on Female Employment" (with Bhanu Gupta, Anisha Sharma, Daksh Walia)
We examine whether lifting a ban on females working in night shifts can spur firm demand for female labor. Exploiting staggered state-level reforms in India between and using dynamic difference-in-differences estimation, we find that following the regulatory relaxation, large firms significantly increased both the share and number of female workers. Further, we find that this driven by firms in export-oriented industries and tighter labor markets. The findings demonstrate that removing gender-discriminatory regulations can expand female employment and improve firm flexibility in hiring.
1. "Bridging the Miles: Spatial Factors in Job Application and Selection" (with Shekhar Tomar)
2. "Improving women’s work opportunities: The role of skills and their complementarities in a digital world" (with Farzana Afridi, Tanu Gupta, Rachel Heath) - Data collection complete
3. "Supporting Women's Re-Entry into the Labour Force " (with Gaurav Chiplunkar, Ashwini Deshpande, Nandhini S, Niharika Singh) - Baseline ongoing