Research

Breaking Barriers on Reproductive Choice of Women:  Evidence from Digital Healthcare Platforms in India (draft coming soon)

In developing countries, it is difficult for women to procure contraceptives due to socioeconomic barriers in the form of stigma around gender expression of reproductive care. In contrast to over-the-counter purchases at pharmacies, digital healthcare platforms provide anonymity, doorstep services and empowers women to maintain autonomy over reproductive choice. In this vein, my study will provide first empirical evidence on the impact of e-pharmacies on women’s reproductive choices in India. I exploit the launch of e-pharmacies in India as a shock to empirically estimate this relation using a difference-in-differences framework. I find evidence of a significant decline in abortions in the districts where e-pharmacies launch their operation, while effect on birth remains ambiguous. These effects are potentially driven by a significant increase in usage of contraceptives, especially to delay or postpone pregnancies and by empowerment of women in decision-making for using contraceptives.

Strong IPR, Better Inclusion? Impact of WTO Accession on Female AI Inventors in China (Revise & Resubmit, Research Policy) 

with Sawan Rathi , Chirantan Chatterjee and Matthew J. Higgins 

Do stronger intellectual property rights (IPR) incentivize women’s participation in innovation? We provide new causal evidence on this question using the USPTO’s Artificial Intelligence Patent Dataset. Our identification strategy exploits China’s WTO TRIPS accession, which led to a substantial strengthening of IPR in 2002. Our results show that post-WTO accession, the number of patents with at least one female inventor in China rose by 95%, and the number of individual female inventors increased by 111%, relative to other countries. We also find significant improvement in patent quality measured by forward citations, strategic importance, and patent impact scores. Heterogeneity analysis shows that gains were concentrated in less complex AI technologies such as computer vision and knowledge processing, with smaller increases in frontier areas like machine learning and evolutionary computation. Our results are robust to alternative control groups, synthetic controls, coarsened exact matching, and randomized inference tests. We identify three mechanisms underlying this surge in female innovation. First, the share of domestic female inventors on patenting teams rose sharply. Second, patents with female inventors increasingly originated from private firms rather than state-owned enterprises, reflecting market liberalization effects. Third, systematic investment in women’s higher education expanded the pool of qualified female researchers. Together, these findings suggest that while China’s WTO accession provided an exogenous policy shock, complementary institutional reforms were essential in enabling women’s participation in the innovation economy. Overall, the results highlight that stronger intellectual property rights when embedded in supportive institutional contexts can foster both technological progress and gender inclusion.

NBER working paper 32547 

Income Shock and Women's Health Spending: Evidence from India  (submitted) 

with Sambit Bhattacharyya , Chirantan Chatterjee and Somdeep Chatterjee 

Conventional wisdom states that healthcare is a luxury good. Spending on healthcare is expected to rise disproportionately with rising income. However, India appears to be a clear outlier with its aggregate national healthcare spending falling during rapid economic expansion. We explore this curious anomaly by estimating the causal effect of income on healthcare expenditure using large longitudinal household and patient level administrative datasets covering the period 2016-2020. An unanticipated shock in the form of a reduction in mandated employees’ provident fund contribution for women is used to identify the causal effect in female led households. We find that an unanticipated income shock is associated with a decrease in overall spending on healthcare in female led households even after controlling for improved health outcomes for women, health-status, healthcare utilization at the intensive margin (i.e., hospital visits to seek treatment). Our results suggest that healthcare spending by females in India and the global South is guided by dynamic preferences and social norms.

Working paper series 1324, University of Sussex Business School