Policy Writing
Chapter 10: Policy Recommendations for Advancing the Education Sector in Pakistan — In Striving to Meet the Sustainable Development Goals: Next Steps for Policymakers and Practitioners, Asian Development Bank Institute (with Sabrin Beg).
We provide a description of accountability mechanisms in Pakistan’s education sector and compare the effectiveness of public and private schools. The analysis focuses on school inputs—such as amenities, teacher availability, and teacher quality—and school outputs, measured by student learning outcomes. The study highlights significant disparities between the two sectors. Despite public schools having greater resource availability, private schools often outperform them. We argue that accountability mechanisms play a central role in explaining these differences. In particular, effective incentives must reward performance in order to motivate school personnel to exert effort.
Works in Progress
When Divorce Becomes Harder: Marriage Markets and Women's Outcomes, with Rounak Bose
This paper studies the effects of the 2019 ban on instant unilateral divorce (“triple talaq”) on marriage formation and household outcomes among Muslims in India. The reform criminalized the practice by which Muslim husbands could instantly dissolve a marriage, substantially increasing the legal and social costs of divorce. I examine whether this change altered who enters marriage and the types of households that form afterward. Using nationally representative data from the National Family Health Survey and the Periodic Labour Force Survey, I exploit variation across marriage cohorts before and after the reform to estimate its effects on marriage timing, spousal characteristics, education, labor market outcomes, and women’s role in household decision-making. The results suggest meaningful shifts in marriage timing and household formation, alongside changes in women’s employment and participation in household decisions. These findings highlight how reforms to family law can influence not only marital stability but also the composition of the marriage market and the distribution of bargaining power within households.
Intended and Unintended Consequences of a De Facto Inheritance Reform, with Sabrin Beg, Erica Field, Jeremy Lebow, Kate Vyborny and Suzanna Khalifa
De jure reforms to improve women’s legal rights are often not enforced in practice. In this study, we examine the effects of a land records reform in Punjab, Pakistan on de facto land rights of females, who are legally entitled to a share of parental land. This reform digitized and centralized land records and created a biometric verification requirement intended to limit females' exclusion from the inheritance process. Exploiting the staggered rollout of the reform across Punjab as well as the quasi-random timing of father/husband deaths, we find that it significantly increased the probability of female inheritance from 13% to 22%. However, we also find evidence of unintended consequences for younger women: they marry earlier and without consenting to their choice of spouse, marry lower quality spouses, are more likely to have children by their early twenties, and are more likely to drop out of school if they have large, expected increases in inheritance. These responses may be due to intrahousehold resource reallocation away from daughters in response to a forced inheritance transfer. The unintended marriage effects could also be driven by female land inheritance being used as a substitute for more liquid forms of dowry, as well as attempts to keep land in the family, either by marrying daughters off younger to exclude them from family negotiations or through consanguineous marriages.
Child Health Consequences and Son preference of a De Facto Inheritance Reform
This paper examines how reforms that enhance women’s property rights can unintentionally exacerbate gender bias in child health when social norms favor sons. Using the staggered rollout of the Punjab Land Records Management and Information System (LRMIS) in Pakistan, which digitized land records and made inheritance enforcement more transparent, we show that improved inheritance access for women increased the perceived cost of daughters. Households responded by reallocating resources toward sons, widening gender gaps in early-life health outcomes. Exploiting temporal and spatial variation in reform exposure across birth cohorts and districts, we estimate a difference-in-differences model linking children’s health and survival outcomes to local implementation timing. The results indicate significant declines in vaccination rates, care-seeking, and survival for girls, while boys’ outcomes remained stable or improved. These findings highlight a paradox of progressive legal reforms: in contexts with entrenched son preference, policies that raise women’s economic rights may—at least in the short run—intensify discriminatory behaviors within households.