Publications
Investing in the Next Generation: The Long-Run Impacts of a Liquidity Shock, with Patrick Agte, Erica Field, Rohini Pande, and Natalia Rigol. Forthcoming, American Economic Review (2024).
Liquidity constraints often require poor entrepreneurs to allocate scarce capital between business and education investment opportunities. To examine this trade-off and implications for intergenerational mobility, we exploit experimental variation in income from a liquidity shock and track schooling and business outcomes over 11 years. On average, children from treatment households are 35% more likely to attend college. However, education gains only accrue to literate households. In contrast, illiterate treatment households experience declines in child schooling alongside microenterprise expansion and parental income gains. As a result, treatment lowers intergenerational educational mobility and forecasted earnings equality.
Household Matters: Revisiting the Returns to Capital among Female Microentrepreneurs, with Erica Field, Rohini Pande, and Natalia Rigol. American Economic Review: Insights (2019), vol. 1, pp. 141–160.
Multiple field experiments report positive financial returns to capital shocks for male and not female microentrepreneurs. But these analyses overlook the fact that female entrepreneurs often reside with male entrepreneurs. Using data from experiments in India, Sri Lanka, and Ghana, we show that the observed gender gap in microenterprise responses does not reflect lower returns on investment, when measured at the household level. Instead, the absence of a profit response among female-run enterprises reflects the fact that women's capital is typically invested into their husband's enterprise. We cannot reject equivalence of household-level income gains for male and female capital shock recipients.
Male Social Status and Women's Work, with Erica Field, Rohini Pande, Natalia Rigol, Simone Schaner, and Charity Troyer-Moore. AEA Papers and Proceedings (2018), vol. 108, pp. 363–367.
Female labor force participation varies significantly even among countries with similar levels of economic development. Recent studies have shown that gender norms can help explain these differences in women's work, but the channels through which norms impact women's employment decisions are not well understood. We present novel data on spouses' preferences and perceptions of community attitudes about female labor in rural India and document associations with female work. We find that the perceived social cost of women's work falls on men and that husbands' opposition to female labor is associated with their wives' lower take-up of employment.
Working Papers and Work in Progress
The Economics of Caste Norms: Purity, Status, and Women's Work in India, with Patrick Agte (2025).
Caste norms, the religious and social rules that underpin the Hindu caste system, impose strong constraints on behavior: women should stay secluded within the home, caste groups should stay segregated, and certain foods should not be eaten. This paper shows that caste norms are weakened when Hindus live alongside Adivasis, an indigenous minority outside of the caste system. Using a number of estimation strategies, including a historical natural experiment that led to local variation in Adivasi population share, we show that having more Adivasi neighbors decreases Hindus’ adherence to a wide range of caste rules. Hindu women in Adivasi-majority villages are 50% more likely to work and have substantially higher earnings. Individuals higher on the caste hierarchy are less likely to practice “untouchability” towards those lower than them and villages are more likely to be integrated. We argue that Hindus adhere to caste norms as an investment in status within the caste system, and that this investment is less valuable when Adivasis—a lower-status out-group—form a larger share of the village population. Consistent with this explanation, caste norms are weaker in areas where British colonial policy led Adivasis to hold more land and political power, increasing the returns to social and economic interactions with Adivasis independent of their population share.
Integrating Women into Male-Dominated Workplaces: Experimental Evidence from Policing in India, with Gabi Kruks-Wisner, Akshay Mangla, and Sandip Sukhtankar.
Women remain underrepresented and face high attrition in male-dominated public-sector institutions, even where gender quotas increase hiring. We study whether targeted workplace supports improve the integration and early-career outcomes of women in policing. In partnership with the police force of a large Indian state, we implement a randomized controlled trial that assigns newly recruited female officers either a same-gender peer, a senior mentor, or no additional support. Both peer and mentorship interventions significantly reduce isolation and improve mental health among new female officers. Mentorship further increases self-efficacy and long-term career aspirations. We also evaluate the impact of female officers on men in their units and find that, while there is no evidence of backlash against female officers themselves, their integration increases male officers’ bias against female complainants in gender-based violence cases. This pattern is consistent with reduced direct exposure of male officers to female complainants when female officers assume primary responsibility for these cases. The findings highlight both the benefits of workplace supports for women and the potential for unintended effects when integrating women into male-dominated organizations.
Teacher Identity and the Development of Social Preferences: Evidence from Teacher Lotteries in India, with Patrick Agte, Rohit Joseph, and S.K. Ritadhi.
The Long-Run Impacts of Indigenous Land Alienation Laws: Evidence from India, with Patrick Agte and Pratik Mahajan.
Other Papers
Female Labour Force Participation, with Rachel Heath, Girija Borker, Anne Fitzpatrick, Anthony Keats, Madeline McKelway, Andreas Menzel, Teresa Molina, and Garima Sharma. VoxDevLit (2024), vol 11, issue 1.