Research
Published Articles
"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]
"The importance of being earnest: What explains the gender quota effect in politics?" (with Sugat Chaturvedi and Sabyasachi Das) Accepted, Economic Development and Cultural Change [Working paper: Ashoka Economics Discussion Paper]
COVID-19, Income Shocks and Female Employment (with Ishaan Bansal) Accepted, Feminist Economics [Working paper: Ashoka DP]
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]
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.
Book Chapters:
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]
Working Papers
Women’s Work, Social Norms and the Marriage Market (with Farzana Afridi, Abhishek Arora, Diva Dhar) [Working paper: Ashoka Economics Discussion Paper] (R&R Economic Development and Cultural Change)
While it is well-acknowledged that the gendered division of labor within marriage adversely affects women's allocation of time to market work, there is less evidence on how extant social norms can influence women's work choices pre-marriage. We conduct an experiment on an online marriage market platform that allows us to measure preferences of individuals in partner selection in India. We find that employed women receive 14.5% less interest from male suitors relative to unemployed women. In addition, women employed in `masculine' occupations are 3.2% less likely to elicit interest from suitors relative to those in `feminine' occupations. Our results highlight the strong effect of gender norms and patriarchy on marital preferences, especially for men hailing from higher castes and northern India, where communities have more traditional gender norms. These findings suggest that expectations regarding returns in the marriage market may influence women's labor market participation and the nature of market work.
"Words Matter: Gender, Jobs and Applicant Behavior in India" (with Sugat Chaturvedi and Zahra Siddique) [Working paper: Ashoka DP] (Under Review)
We examine employer preferences for hiring men vs women using 160, 000 job ads posted on an online job portal in India, linked with more than 6 million applications. We apply machine learning algorithms on text contained in job ads to predict an employer’s gender preference. We find that advertised wages are lowest in jobs where employers prefer women, even when this preference is implicitly retrieved through the text analysis, and that these jobs also attract a larger share of female applicants. We then systematically uncover what lies beneath these relationships by retrieving words that are predictive of an explicit gender preference, or gendered words, and assigning them to the categories of hard and soft-skills, personality traits, and flexibility. We find that skills related female-gendered words have low returns but attract a higher share of female applicants while male-gendered words indicating decreased flexibility (e.g., frequent travel or unusual working hours) have high returns but result in a smaller share of female applicants. This contributes to a gender earnings gap. Our findings illustrate how gender preferences are partly driven by stereotypes and statistical discrimination.
"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.
"Firm size and Female Employment” (with Pubali Chakraborty) [Working paper]
Using firm and household-level data from India, we establish a positive association between relative female employment and firm size. We find that the proportion of female workers is higher in firms with a larger number of total employees (elasticity of 0.47) and output (elasticity of 0.1). We show that higher benefits and amenities offered by larger firms, like maternity benefits and paid leave, which are likely to be valued more by female workers, with no accompanying increase in the gender wage gap is a plausible mechanism behind our findings. We then exploit a natural experiment in the amendment of labor laws across the Indian states, which increased the firm size thresholds for the applicability of regulatory compliances. Using a difference-in-difference estimation, we find an increase in the proportion of female workers by 13% in treated states vs. control states. One of the channels behind this increase is the accompanying increase in firm size by around 5%, welfare expenses per employee by 13% and no consistent effect on the gender wage gap. Theoretically, we propose a task-based explanation that leads to greater relative demand for women in bigger firms and, consequently, higher investment by them in amenities valued by women leading to ambiguous effects on the gender wage gap. Our results show that policies that increase firm growth, which in turn increase provision of amenities valued by women (without employer backlash), are likely to increase female employment.
Work in Progress
1. "The unintended impacts of legislating to handle workplace sexual harassment" (with Sonia Bhalotra, Medha Chatterjee, Daksh Walia)
2. "Bridging the Miles: Spatial Factors in Job Application and Selection" (with Shekhar Tomar)
3. "Restart: Women, career breaks and firm hiring in India" (with Nandhini S)
4. "Improving women’s work opportunities: The role of skills and their complementarities in a digital world" (with Farzana Afridi, Tanu Gupta, Rachel Heath)