Articles and work in progress

Do coercive state-led programs have persistent effects on interpersonal violence? This paper investigates the long-run impact of a government-mandated sterilization program predominantly targeting men implemented during India's Emergency (1975--77). Launched in April 1976, the program was implemented with substantial variation in coercion intensity across districts over a period of ten months. Using newly digitized historical records, administrative crime data, and several nationally representative household surveys, we study whether the program generated unintended consequences for violence. Using a difference-in-differences strategy that exploits geographic variation in coercion intensity, we find that greater exposure to the program led to a persistent increase in violent crime. The increase is driven by murders and violence against women: murders rise by 17% and rapes by 33% in high-coercion districts. In contrast, we find little evidence of comparable increases in property crimes or other non-violent offenses. Event-study estimates indicate that these effects emerge after the implementation of the policy and persist for decades. We develop a conceptual framework emphasizing two broad channels through which coercive sterilization may generate persistent increases in violence: a demographic channel and a social channel. We do not find evidence that the program reduced fertility. Instead, the results suggest lasting social consequences. Districts more heavily exposed to coercive sterilization exhibit higher acceptance of intimate partner violence, lower female bargaining power and mobility, and lower male well-being. Taken together, our findings suggest that coercive state interventions may generate persistent increases in interpersonal violence through long-run effects of trauma, threatened masculinity, and the normalization of violence.

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