Date of Award
Fall 2022
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Economics
First Advisor
Pande, Rohini
Abstract
Although many developing countries have made significant progress in terms of economic growth, many other indicators of development do not show such an upward trend. In particular, the status of women remains challenged and the benefits from economic development might not accrue to this section of the population. One mechanism to tackle this issue is to design and implement policies incentivizing recipients towards desired outcomes. My dissertation is an attempt to study the effectiveness of two such policies that target different outcomes rolled out in India, and show the impact of policy designs on the outcomes they target. The overarching message from my dissertation is that policy designs affect economic decision making process of the recipients and therefore, a careful attention needs to be paid by policymakers when rolling out future policies. In the first chapter, I study conditional cash transfer policies rolled out in multiple states in India since the early 1990's which incentivize births of daughters. Despite rising incomes and falling fertility, India's high male-to-female sex ratio at birth persists. In the presence of son-biased preferences, fertility decline can contribute towards skewed male-to-female sex ratio at birth. The primary question I aim to answer is how these conditional cash transfers affect this tradeoff between sex composition of the children and total fertility. In my context, some of these policies place fertility restrictions where they award benefits to families with less than three children, whereas others award benefits to two girls without any family size restrictions. Exploiting the staggered roll-out of the policies, I first show that the probability of a birth being female among eligible births increased by 0.51 p.p. Second, I present a stylized model where families choose fertility and sex composition of their children with son-biased preferences, costs of raising children, and costly sex selection. The model predicts changes in family decisions due to different rules of the policies. I verify the model predictions by showing that non-restrictive policies were twice as effective in increasing the probability of a birth being female as compared to restrictive ones. However, this came at the cost of a higher fertility, such that the probability of a family having three or more children increased by 7.8 p.p. due to non-restrictive polices. To predict the impacts due to other such policies being currently discussed but not yet implemented, I introduce a dynamic choice model where parents make fertility and sex composition decisions over a finite horizon. I calibrate this model and through simulation exercises, find that restrictive policies are ineffective in incentivizing births of daughters, whereas restricting the number of girls awarded the benefits to each family can curtail fertility increase in the case of non-restrictive policies. In the second chapter, I examine the long term effects of the Mukhyamantri Balika Cycle Yojana studied first by Muralidharan and Prakash (2017). The policy, started in 2006, subsidized bicycles for women enrolled in secondary education in Bihar. I use the neighboring state of Jharkhand as the control state, and use men, who were not treated by the policy, as an additional control group to account for state specific trends affecting the outcomes of interest. Thus, using the variation of the policy exposure across cohorts, states, and sexes, I show that the years of completed education and the probability of enrolling in secondary education among treated women increased by 0.78 years and 7.5 p.p. respectively as compared to the treated cohort of men in Bihar. These results signify an increase in women's years of completed education and secondary education enrollment by 13.3% and 20.5% respectively from the baseline levels. Next, in the long term, I find no significant effects on either labor force participation or marriage market outcomes related to educational attainment of the spouses. However, I do find that the age at marriage of the treated women increased due to the policy. Based on the relationship between increased age at marriage and investments in the offspring documented by past studies, I next investigate the impacts of the policy on the future generation. I document important intergenerational effects by showing that the health outcomes of the children born to the treated women like weight-for-age zscores and hemoglobin levels increased by 0.10 s.d. and 0.25 grams per deciliter respectively, with a corresponding decrease in the probability of being underweight and anemic by 5.6 and 5.2 p.p. respectively. Exploring potential channels, I find that the treated women demand fewer quantity of children, and shift towards greater investment in each child leading to better quality. Thus, this paper suggests that higher education for women can lead to demographic changes through fewer children born and increased investment in each child, which in turn contributes towards better health outcomes among these children.
Recommended Citation
Jorapur, Viraj Rajeev, "Essays in Development Economics" (2022). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 749.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/749
