Completed Papers:

Incentives for Girls and Gender Bias in India (Job Market Paper)

While it is well known that gender gaps in India are driven by the presence of high son preference, the underlying causes of son preference are not well understood. I argue that an important determinant of son preference is the high future costs of girls in India. I link changes in these costs to gender bias by analyzing the Bhagyalakshmi program introduced in the state of Karnataka, India in 2006. Bhagyalakshmi provides households with large monetary benefits at the birth of daughters. Using geographic variation in exposure to the program together with temporal variation in a difference-in-differences and triple difference framework, I show that a decrease in the future costs of girls because of the Bhagyalakshmi program increases the female-to-male child sex ratio. Further, I find that reductions in future costs of girls reduces the girl deficit at birth and girl deficit after birth. I also find that girls do better in the long-run as evidenced by improvements in nutritional outcomes. My analysis shows that changing the high future costs of girls through economic incentives can reduce behaviours emanating out of son preference such as sex-selective abortions, son-biased fertility stopping and excess female mortality.

Is She Free to Work? Impact of Rural Health Insurance on Labour Supply in India (Under Review)

Health shocks impose a substantial burden on households and communities. In the absence of adequate health insurance households are pushed into poverty and this decreases labour supply and productivity. In this study, I examine whether provision of free rural health insurance in a developing country increases labour supply by enabling households to cope with health shocks. To isolate causal effects, I use the phased-in implementation of the Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana (RSBY) - a rural health insurance program in India - and apply a difference-in-difference and triple difference design to examine impacts on labour supply. I find that in treated districts, women are increasingly likely to spend more hours per week on the labour market after the introduction of the RSBY. Further, those in households with fewer working age members and a higher number of dependents see the largest impacts. I also find that there is a substitution of adult for child labour. I provide some suggestive evidence that the main mechanism through which impacts are seen is through an increase in healthcare utilization and a decrease in time spent in domestic activities such as caregiving tasks for women. Additionally, men are less likely to miss work due to major morbidities and hospitalization utilization rates increase. This suggests that the program acts through two channels: a reduction in time spent at home for women and decreased financial vulnerability due to health shocks.

How Soon in Now? Evidence of Present Bias from Convex Time Budget Experiments (Joint with Pamela Jakiela and Johannes Haushofer) Under Review (NBER Working Paper #23558)

Empirically observed intertemporal choices about money have long been thought to exhibit present bias, i.e. higher short-term compared to long-term discount rates. Recently, this view has been called into question on both empirical and theoretical grounds, and a spate of recent findings suggest that present bias for money is minimal or non-existent when one allows for curvature in the utility function and transaction costs are tightly controlled. However, an alternative interpretation of many of these findings is that, in the interest of equalizing transaction costs across earlier and later payments, small delays were introduced between the time of the experiment and the soonest payment. We conduct a laboratory experiment in Kenya in which we elicit time and risk preference parameters from 494 participants, using convex time budgets and tightly controlling for transaction costs. We vary whether same-day payments are made immediately after the experimental session or at the close of the business day. Using the Kenyan mobile money system M-Pesa to make real-time transfers to subjects' phones allows us to make the soonest payments truly immediate. We find strong evidence of present bias, with estimates of the present bias parameter ranging from 0.902 to 0.924 — but only when same-day payments are made immediately after the experiment. This result suggests that present bias for money does in fact exist, but only for truly immediate payments.

The Effect of a Public Works Program on Mental Health in India (Joint with Magda Tsaneva) Journal of Development Studies, 2018: 1-17

This paper studies the short-run effect of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme in India on mental health. Our preferred approach uses a difference-in-difference analysis with variation in district implementation dates and location of residence. We find that in the first year of the program, women in recipient districts were less likely to feel suicidal. We examine heterogeneity by treatment intensity and further show that women in high-intensity program districts were also less likely to experience depression symptoms, hopelessness, low self-esteem and anxiety. Men, on the other hand, did not experience significant changes in their mental health. We further examine mechanisms that may underlie the relationship between the program and women’s mental health. We find that the program increased consumption in households of both female and male respondents but only women were significantly more likely to work and also work longer hours and more days per week. This suggests that the main mechanism, at least in the short-run, was likely not reducing poverty and increasing consumption but rather providing women with greater economic security and independence.

Work in Progress:

Income Shocks, Public Works and Human Capital Investments: Evidence from India

I analyze the functioning of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) in India as a safety net for children. A large fraction of the population in poor countries is primarily dependent on rain-fed agriculture as a primary source of employment, either as hired labour or through subsistence agriculture. Extreme volatility of agricultural yields and labour demand in agriculture because of erratic weather conditions combined with poorly developed credit and insurance markets implies that households face large swings in their optimal consumption streams. Early life exposure to economic shocks has important implications not only for subsequent adult health and other socio-economic outcomes but also for perpetuating intergenerational poverty. In this context, social protection programs like the NREGS in India were conceptualized to serve as safety nets in the face of volatility for households. NREGS is the largest program of its kind in the world with annual expenditures equaling about 1 percent of India’s GDP. The extent to which a safety net like the NREGS buffers children from productivity shocks depends on: (a) the manner in which a productivity shock changes total income and the relative price of time and (b) the relative importance of income and time in the health and human capital production functions. In this study, I use rainfall fluctuations in rural India to assess whether the NREGS ameliorates the negative impacts of productivity shocks on human capital investment and nutrition of children. Further, I test whether the NREGS only compensates for shocks that happen contemporaneously with the program or whether it helps mitigate the nutritional and educational impacts of shocks experienced earlier in childhood through catch-up growth.