Working Papers
Working Papers
Using nationally representative longitudinal data from the Consumer Pyramids Household Survey, we examine the effect of childbirth on female labour market outcomes in India. Contrary to findings from similar studies in developed countries, we do not observe any motherhood penalty in earnings, employment or work hours post-childbirth, after accounting for unobserved individual heterogeneity. Interestingly, we find that the birth of a child leads to a 27.4% and 32.6% increase in women’s average earnings in urban and rural regions, respectively, relative to non-mothers. This motherhood premium seems to arise partly due to higher employment after childbirth. Further, we find that the increase in the likelihood of employment is predominantly observed among women from lower caste, Hindu religion, lower income quartiles, those with primary education, and with higher-order births in urban regions. In rural regions, the effect is restricted to women from the lowest income quartiles. We find that the presence of older siblings in the household increases the likelihood of women’s employment by 3.7 percentage points. These findings underscore the role of socio-economic factors in shaping the labour market outcomes of women in India.
Using nationally representative data from the Annual Survey of Industries, we examine the effects of India’s Maternity Benefit (Amendment) Act, 2017, which extends the paid maternity leave from 12 weeks to 26 weeks on firms’ hiring decisions and gender-specific employment outcomes. We use the institutional variation of the policy mandate, which applies only to firms with 10 or more employees, to define treatment and control firms. Our results reveal that firms respond to the mandate primarily through labour substitution, i.e., replacing female workers with male workers rather than bearing the increased cost of female employment. We find a decline of 8.4% in female workers and 9.5% in female mandays worked, accompanied by an increase of 2.6% in male workers and 2.1% in male mandays. This substitution is concentrated in industries with high female employment shares, while firms in low female-share industries show no female employment effects but exhibit positive spillovers to male wages. Firm output and profit are unaffected, indicating that male workers serve as effective production substitutes. These findings imply well-intentioned maternity leave policies can inadvertently reinforce gender labour market disparities.
When Cash Targets Women: Evidence from the Unconditional Cash Transfer Programs in India (with Souvik Banerjee, Sankar Mukhopadhyay, and Partha Deb)