PUBLICATIONS

The Ties that Bind us: Social Networks and Productivity in the Factory (with Farzana Afridi and Amrita Dhillon), Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Volume 218, Pages 470-485.

Social Protection Policies and Women’s Employment During COVID-19 (with Nikita Sangwan), Contextualizing the COVID Pandemic in India, Springer 2023.

Understanding the barriers to women’s career advancement in manufacturing sector: diagnostic study of Indian garment factories, IWWAGE working paper series, 2021

Using Social Connections and Financial Incentives to Solve Coordination Failure: A Quasi-Field Experiment in India's Manufacturing Sector (with Farzana Afridi,  Amrita Dhillon, Sherry Xin Li ) ,  Journal of Development Economics, 144, 1024–45, May 2020.

Social Networks and Labour Productivity: A Survey of Recent Theory and Evidence (with Farzana Afridi and Amrita Dhillon),  Indian Economic Review, 50, 25–42, 2015.

WORKING PAPERS

Labor market shocks, Social Protection and Women's Work  (with Nikita Sangwan), IEG Working Paper No. 453, 2022.

Abstract: 

In this study we focus on the lockdown in response to the Covid-19 pandemic that highlighted the vulnerabilities faced by women in labor markets - globally and domestically. We investigate whether public policy measures mitigate these vulnerabilities. In particular, we study the implications of lockdown triggered reverse migration on Labor Force Participation of rural women, focusing on mandated provisions under MGNREGA and GKRA. We find evidence of complementarity of the two social employment schemes and rule out any crowding out of NREGA person-days by GKRA. Our analysis shows that despite these schemes rural women lost employment due to competition from men. Their share in NREGA person-days fell by 0.4\% during the pandemic. Interestingly, the mandated provisions for women in NREGA works helped women preserve their employment status. Our findings underscore the need for special provisions and targeted programs for women to reduce their withdrawal and enhance their participation in the labor market. Our results are robust to seasonality patterns in rural employment and MGNREGA. Furthermore, we validate our findings using monthly individual-level employment data from Consumer Pyramids Household Survey (CPHS), CMIE.

Breaking Glass-Ceiling for Women using Vertical Ties: Evidence from Indian Garment Manufacturing (with Ajit Mishra), Working paper ,University of Bath 2023.

Abstract: 

Large manufacturing factories majorly rely on referrals for screening workers for managerial roles. We use knowledge acquisition and signaling model to show that historically disadvantaged groups lose promotions when the non-referral screening process is relatively costly for the management making stereotypes persistent and self-fulfilling. We overcome sample size issues to test the predictions of the model by using unique and novel data collection process from Indian garment manufacturing factories. We find that women are less likely to be referred for high-valued managerial roles and in the short run, women can signal their aspirations and ability by forming vertical ties to break the `glass ceiling'. Further, management can ask/assign male intermediate managers to specifically mentor more women workers to balance gender representation at managerial levels.

Gender and Workplace Interactions: Who is Likely to Lose?, IEG Working Paper No. 426, 2021

Abstract: 

Workplace interactions have been identified as a valuable source of information and career advancement. This study examines workplace interaction by looking at personal ties of 1744 blue-collar workers in 2 garment manufacturing units in the National Capital Region (NCR) of Delhi, India. Data analysis shows that men have a more expansive set of personal ties, even after controlling for variation in interpersonal and workplace-related characteristics. Women's personal networks are smaller, clustered within their functional units and more homogeneous. While supervisors do not figure in personal networks of either gender, women are significantly less likely to mobilize interactions with supervisors for professional or personal purposes. Thus, women's personal ties at the workplace exhibit patterns that are opposite of those identified by existing literature as instrumental for career advancement.

Does negative marking lead to gendered exam taking behavior: experimental evidence from India (with Nandana Sengupta, Sumitava Mukherjee)

Abstract: 

Negative marking penalty for incorrect answers is used as a common assessment tool in competitive exams globally to disincentivize random guessing. It has been argued however that negative marking can create gendered outcomes due to systematic behavioral differences in confidence and loss aversion. We mimic a competitive exam set up in a behavioral experiment with 275 B.Tech. students from elite engineering institutes in India using a time-pressured MCQ quiz consisting of two sections: simple arithmetic and logical reasoning where participants were randomly assigned to sessions with and without negative marking for incorrect answers. We find a gendered impact of penalty in the simple arithmetic section only. Females in penalty treatment in the SA section attempt around 4 fewer questions and get around 3 fewer questions correct, out of 20, as compared to everyone else. This has a direct implication on their final scores and comparative ranks. We find no such gender differences in the logical reasoning section. We argue that task-specific gender stereotypes leads to gender-differences in exam-taking behavior resulting in the demonstrated heterogeneity in outcomes by section. Our study is the first to causally estimate the impact of negative-marking on test outcomes in a developing country with policy implications for the screening processes used by STEM institutes across the globe.

Debunking myths associated with affirmative action: using evidence from Supernumerary Seat Scheme (with Nandana Sengupta)

We estimate the causal impact of a landmark gender-based affirmative action policy in India—the Supernumerary Seats Scheme (SSS)—which mandated a minimum 14% female enrollment across all B.Tech programs in the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), the country’s premier engineering institutions. Exploiting the sudden introduction of the policy in 2018, we apply a two-way fixed effects framework to measure its implications for academic performance among admitted cohorts. We find that the SSS substantially widened pre-existing entry-rank gaps between male and female students but did not translate into poorer academic outcomes for women. Despite lower entry ranks, female students perform comparably to their male peers by graduation, and the entry-rank differentials fully close by exit. Moreover, women in the post-policy cohorts complete roughly nine additional credits on average, suggesting compensatory effort. Our findings are robust to program fixed effects, controls for individual ability, and elective choices. Our findings challenge “mismatch” hypotheses commonly associated with affirmative action and indicate that the current screening mechanisms undervalue the academic potential of female candidates. The evidence underscores the need to reconsider how merit is assessed in highly competitive, male-dominated educational environments.

UPCOMING WORK

Efficacy of negative marking as a screening tool: a survey of recent exam taking behavior studies

Negative marking is used globally in screening and assessment processes to eliminate guess work and identify true rigor of an examinee. Traditional evaluation approaches assume an examinee to be a risk neutral expected score maximizer and contends that penalty based scoring rules has no other impact than to deter random guessing. However, recently, the discourse has shifted to an examinee being a utility maximizer, where negative marking may elicit systematic differences in preferences for certain demographic groups resulting in different outcomes, for the same level of knowledge or ability. In this article, we throw light on the evidence from the existing studies that look at exam taking behavior in the presence of negative marking based assessment. We identify three major gaps in the existing literature - i.) absence of precise causal impact of negative marking and the underlying mechanisms, ii) lack of studies from Global South where social conditions differ significantly making it an important setting to study, and iii.) studies have mostly focused on gender gaps in outcomes due to negative marking. A useful extension would be to study it's impact with intersectionality and on other historically marginalized communities too. 

Teams, leadership and attitudes (with Nandana Sengupta)