Articles and work in progress

Can forced sterilization programs targeting men lead to male-perpetrated violence? This paper investigates the impact of a government-mandated male sterilization program introduced in India on the rise of violence. Launched in April 1976, the program predominantly targeted men and saw heterogeneous implementation across India over 10 months. Using various household surveys and newly digitized historical data sources, we study whether the program triggered unintended effects on violence, measured by crime rates. Using a difference-in-differences strategy by exploiting geographical variation in coercion intensity, we find that an increase in exposure to the program led to an increase in violent crime rates of 7% on average, which persisted over time. Violent crimes against women primarily drive the increase in crime rates, as rapes are increasing by 22% on average. We find that the program was ineffective in reducing fertility, so we hypothesize that a forced sterilization program targeting men may increase violence against women through one main channel: the procedure inducing trauma, impacting perceptions of masculinity. In line with this channel, we see that districts with high coercion intensity correlate with more harmful gender norms: higher levels and acceptance of Intimate Partner Violence, lower bargaining power of women and lower contraception adoption.

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

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, World Bank Working Paper, IZA Working Paper