Maulik Jagnani

This paper provides the first evidence on the long run importance of child sleep for learning outcomes. I show later sunset reduces children's sleep: when the sun sets later, children go to bed later; however, children fail to compensate by waking up later. Sleep-deprived students decrease time spent studying and increase time allocated to sedentary and compensatory leisure activities. Overall, sustained sunset-induced sleep deficits translate into fewer years of education and decrease primary and middle school completion rates among school-age children.

Conference Presentations:

2018 WEAI Graduate Student Workshop, 2018 Young Economists Symposium/EconCon, 2018 NEUDC, 2018 ISI Delhi Conference, 2019 PacDev, 2019 PAA Annual Meetings, 2020 AEA Annual Meetings.

We present the first estimates of the effects of higher education investments on lower levels of schooling. Using the roll-out of elite public colleges in India, we show that investments in higher education increased educational attainment among school-age children. Private schools entered districts with new elite public colleges, and students switched from public to private schools. In addition, elite public colleges crowded in investments in electricity, roads, and water services. We find suggestive evidence that public investments in infrastructure may have reduced setup costs for private schools, and consequently, travel costs for school-going children.

Conference Presentations:

2016 ISI Delhi Conference, 2017 EMCON, 2017 APPAM Annual Meetings, 2017 NEUDC, 2018 AEA Annual Meetings, 2018 PacDev.

We estimate the effects of temperature on human capital production in India. We show that high temperatures reduce math and reading test scores among school-age children. Agricultural income is one mechanism driving this relationship---hot days during the growing season reduce agricultural yields and test scores with comparatively modest effects of hot days in the non-growing season. The roll-out of a workfare program, by providing a safety net for the poor, substantially weakens the link between temperature and test scores. Our results imply that absent social protection programs, higher temperatures will have large negative impacts on human capital production of poor populations in agrarian economies.

Conference Presentations:

2016 ISI Delhi Conference, 2017 NAREA Meetings, 2017 PAA Annual Meetings, 2017 NBER Summer Institute EEE, 2017 AAEA Annual Meetings, 2017 AERE Annual Meetings, 2017 PacDev, 2017 MWIEDC, 2018 AEA Annual Meetings, 2018 CSAE.

We present evidence that farmers adjust agricultural inputs in response to within-season temperature variation, undertaking defensive investments to reduce the adverse agroecological impacts of warmer temperatures. Using panel data from Kenyan maize growing households, we find that higher temperatures early in the growing season increase the use of pesticides, while reducing fertilizer use. Warmer temperatures throughout the season increase weeding effort. These adjustments arise because greater heat increases the incidence of pests, crop diseases and weeds, compelling farmers to divert investment from productivity-enhancing technologies like fertilizer to adaptive, loss-reducing, defensive inputs like pesticides and weeding labor.

Conference Presentations:

2017 AERE Annual Meetings, 2017 Environmental and Resource Economics Workshop - CU Boulder, 2018 IPWSD - Columbia University, 2018 CSAE, 2018 AAEA Annual Meetings, 2018 ICAE Annual Meeting, 2019 NEUDC.

We conduct a lab-in-the-field experiment to identify parents’ preferences for investing in their children. The experiment exogenously varied the short-run returns to educational investments to identify how much parents care about maximizing total household earnings, minimizing cross-sibling inequality in “outcomes” (child-level earnings), and minimizing cross-sibling inequality in “inputs” (child-level investments). We show that while parents place some weight on maximizing earnings, they also display a strong preference for equality in inputs, forgoing roughly 40% of their potential earnings or 90% of a day’s wage to equalize inputs. We find no evidence that parents care about equalizing outcomes.

Conference Presentations:

2018 Advances with Field Experiments, 2019 NBER Education Meetings, 2019 MWIEDC, 2019 BREAD Pre-Conference, 2019 SEEDEC, 2019 RISE, 2019 SITE, 2019 NEUDC.