Articles and work in progress

Coercive state-led programs are often traumatic episodes that leave lasting effects on individuals

and societies. Do these effects extend to interpersonal violence? This paper examines India's \textit{Emergency}-era sterilization campaign, a 10-month coercive population-control program that predominantly targeted men. Using newly digitized historical records, administrative crime data, and nationally representative household surveys, we exploit district-level variation in coercion intensity to estimate the campaign's long-run effects on violence. We find that greater exposure to coercive sterilization increased violent crime by 14.5% in high-coercion districts. The effect is concentrated in serious interpersonal violence: murders increased by 24%, while reported rapes increased by 103%. We do not find similarly stable effects for property crimes or other non-violent offenses. The age distribution of perpetrators suggests that the increase extended beyond cohorts directly exposed to sterilization, pointing to intergenerational persistence. To understand these effects, we examine the program’s long-run consequences for gender norms and well-being. Survey evidence indicates that more exposed districts later exhibited higher acceptance of intimate partner violence, lower female bargaining power and mobility, lower female sterilization rates, and lower male well-being. We also document a modest fertility backlash against the program's intended objective, although its magnitude is too small to account for the subsequent increase in violence. Together, the results suggest that coercive sterilization generated persistent social and psychological consequences, including long-run increases in violent behavior.

Presented at ASREC Australasia 2023, LAGV 2023, ICDE 2023, World Cliometrics 2023, EDGE Jamboree 2023, 2023 European Winter Meeting of the Econometric Society, 2nd Diversity and Human Capital Workshop, CEPR Economic History Annual Symposium 2024

This paper studies barriers to female entrepreneurship in a developing country context. We develop a theoretical framework that rationalizes investment decisions within households and links intra-household bargaining dynamics with gender norms. We show that spouses’ incentives to invest may diverge, and that relative income shifts must be offset by power redistribution to sustain agreement. Embedding traditional gender norms into this framework, we analyze norms that increase the utility cost of female investment, potentially deterring efficient outcomes. We test the model using two empirical strategies. First, in a field experiment in India, we show that expanded women’s access to microcredit increases investment in income generating activities  and personal consumption for women from castes more supportive of women’s work, but those women also report declines in autonomy. Second, we exploit India’s 2005 GATT accession and find that the removal of textile quotas—benefiting female-intensive sectors—increased female employment in garment but worsened women’s health outcomes in caste and district contexts more supportive of women’s work. Our findings highlight how gender norms and intra-household dynamics can limit both investment and female well-being.

Presented at LAGV 2022, JMA 2022, Workshop in Gender and Family Economics 2022, LAGV 2024, NOVAFRICA 2024, AFSE 2024, ICDE 2024

Family-planning counseling reaches millions of women in low-income countries each year, yet the empirical literature offers little causal evidence on how counseling quality, distinct from access, shapes contraceptive uptake and reproductive outcomes. We exploit random first-counselor assignment in a Malawian family-planning RCT in which 901 postpartum and pregnant women were each allocated to one of six counselors at their first home-visit session. We construct a judge-design instrument from each counselor's leave-one-out average of patient-reported first-session quality on two dimensions: satisfaction with the counselor and the breadth of topics covered. Higher-quality counseling compresses session dose and expands per-session content for both subgroups. Family-planning take-up rises sharply, with particularly large effects on injectable contraception around delivery. Reproductive outcomes diverge in opposite directions by baseline pregnancy status and concentrate among women closest to the peri-partum window: recent postpartum women experience higher birth and pregnancy rates within 24 months, while pregnant women in their third trimester experience lower pregnancy rates. We discuss several readings consistent with this heterogeneity, including a timing-misalignment hypothesis under which post-delivery engagement aligns differently with the fertile horizon across subgroups. Further, we document that the reproductive divergence rests on a single counselor: it does not survive dropping the highest-quality counselor, whereas the family-planning take-up effects remain positive under every leave-one-counselor-out check.

Presented at ASHEcon 2026

We propose an indicator of contraceptive concordance that identifies the alignment between stated preferences for contraception and concurrent contraceptive behavior. Our indicator departs from traditional approaches to measurement in family planning that infer concordance to be the alignment between women's contraceptive (non-)use and their fertility preferences; indicators that are based on these approaches (e.g. unmet need) have been extensively critiqued for not reflecting women’s actual demand for contraception. We estimate our indicator of contraceptive concordance using data from a cross-sectional survey that was conducted with 1,958 married women in rural India. More than half of all women in our sample (51.2 percent) report that they are currently using a contraceptive method, with almost twice as many users reporting that they are using traditional methods relative to users who report using a modern method. More than 3 in 5 women (60.8 percent) were classified as wanting to use a contraceptive method at the time of the survey. We find that 60 percent of women in our sample are classified to be concordant (either wanted users or wanted non-users), while almost 1 in 4 women (24.8 percent) have a preference for using contraception but are not users (unwanted non-users), and 15.2 percent of women in our sample are estimated to have a preference for not using contraception but are users (unwanted users). We discuss the comparative advantages and limitations of our approach relative to traditional measures and other recently developed indicators. 

Published Paper, Replication Files, World Bank Working Paper, IZA Working Paper