Research

The Indian government has been debating raising the minimum legal age of marriage for women from 18 to 21. This paper asks how constraints on marriage timing affect women’s educational attainment in India. Using variation from a common social norm that daughters marry in birth order, I estimate the causal effect of age at marriage on schooling. Preliminary estimates from the 2008 Rural Economic and Demographic Survey (REDS) suggest that delaying marriage by one year increases women’s educational attainment by 1.7 years and raises the probability of completing high school by 4.4 percentage points.

I then develop and estimate an equilibrium model of marriage and schooling decisions to analyze the effects of raising the minimum legal age of marriage. In the model, households choose dowry offers and educational investments over daughters’ life cycles in a directed-search marriage market with dowries. They trade off early marriage against delaying marriage to invest in education, recognizing that these choices shape future match opportunities, dowries, and the marriage prospects of younger siblings. The model quantifies the effects of the minimum marriage age reform on education, dowries, marriage-market returns to education, and welfare, including heterogeneity by household wealth.

How does the birth of a child alter the allocation of resources within the household? Using panel data from the Japanese Panel Survey of Consumers (JPSC), I document that women’s share of household consumption expenditures falls sharply after the birth of the first child and remains persistently lower for at least ten years. Time-use data show a parallel reallocation: women's housework and childcare rise substantially while market work and leisure fall, while husbands' time allocation changes much less.

I then test whether this decline reflects greater maternal altruism or a decrease in women's bargaining power within the household. To do so, I exploit a 2007 Japanese pension reform that improved the outside option of women married to husbands in permanent employment. Using a difference-in-differences design, I test whether the post-birth decline in women’s resource shares becomes smaller for affected wives after the reform.

This paper examines how firearm dispossession laws for domestic abusers affect the use of protection orders and intimate partner violence (IPV). We construct a novel county-level panel of protection order filings from annual judicial reports in Colorado, Minnesota, Nevada, Tennessee, Vermont, and the District of Columbia, and combine these data with county-level intimate-partner homicide outcomes. We use a difference-in-differences design to exploit the staggered rollout of firearm dispossession laws. A key source of treatment heterogeneity is the variation in judicial discretion and enforcement procedures. Some states mandate the surrender of firearms upon issuance of a protection order, while others grant judges discretion. States also vary in whether they specify clear surrender procedures. Preliminary estimates suggest that states that mandate the surrender of firearms experience a statistically significant reduction in intimate-partner homicides. 

This project studies how women’s age and educational attainment affect marriage prospects in India. Using a randomized field experiment on an online Indian matchmaking platform, I create fictitious female profiles that vary in age and education and use male users’ views and invitations to connect to measure interest from prospective grooms. The design allows me to estimate whether older women face a penalty in the marriage market, whether education increases women’s desirability, and whether higher education can offset any penalty associated with age. More broadly, it examines how marriage-market returns may shape women’s incentives to delay marriage and invest in schooling.

This paper examines whether childhood exposure to the Food Stamp Program (FSP) improved intergenerational health mobility using Panel Study of Income Dynamics data and the program’s 1961–1975 rollout as a natural experiment. We find that full childhood access to food stamps reduced the persistence of poor health between parents and children by roughly half and increased upward health mobility, measured as the implied change in the child’s expected adult health rank when parental health is low, by about 14 percentile ranks when moving from zero to full childhood exposure. These effects, while large, are estimated with large confidence intervals due to a modest sample size. Our results suggest that early-life nutrition assistance can help break the cycle of poor health across generations. We discuss potential mechanisms, placebo and robustness checks, and limitations, and highlight implications for health equity and social safety net policy. 

I study whether having a first-born son affects a mother's exposure to domestic violence in India. Using data from the National Family Health Survey (2019-21), I exploit quasi-random variation in the sex of the first child, and estimate the causal effect of first-born child sex on multiple dimensions of violence, including physical, sexual and emotional abuse.  I further examine heterogeneity across birth cohorts with varying exposure to prenatal sex determination technology. Preliminary findings indicate that having a first-born son reduces mothers' exposure to severe physical and sexual violence.