Research

Working papers

Job Market Paper

• The Role of Affirmative Action in Enrollment, Test Scores, and School Quality: Evidence from India [SSRN ungated] Under review

  Abstract: I provide among the first causal evidence on the impact of the world's largest affirmative action program in entry-level primary education on student achievement. India's Right to Education Act (RTE) mandates private schools to reserve 25% of seats for disadvantaged students, yet despite being in existence for over a decade, its effectiveness remains understudied. Using lottery-based allocation of seats and combining administrative and primary survey data from a large Indian state, I find that RTE beneficiaries experience significant improvements in English test scores (0.18 SD), driven by access to higher quality private schools and increased time spent in educational activities. Importantly, I document substantial heterogeneity within the private sector: students attending elite private schools show gains of 0.48-0.69 SD in English. I make three key contributions: First, I demonstrate the effectiveness of affirmative action targeting early education when most such policies focus on higher education. Second, I provide causal evidence of how quality variation within the private sector affects children's outcomes, documenting that private school premium is not homogeneous. Third, I find that higher-quality private schools adapt better to educational disruptions in remote learning contexts, while demonstrating external validity of my overall results.

Other Working papers

• The Unintended Benefits of Women’s Empowerment on Household Sanitation (with Md Moshi Ul Alam) Under review

  Abstract: Existing research shows that women benefit more from private toilets, but misperceptions about the net benefits from toilets and lack of women’s decision-making power can hinder toilet adoption by households. In this paper, we explore a novel link between household sanitation and policies that empower women. We show that a policy aimed at improving women’s property inheritance rights in India led to an increase in toilet adoption in the households of treated cohorts by at least 10%. Prior literature shows mixed evidence on whether the policy increased women’s inheritance, but shows that the policy had significant indirect effects, such as improving women’s education. To generate empirical tests for the mechanisms driving our main results, we build a discrete choice model with idiosyncratic household preference shocks that produces policy-relevant complementarity between women’s education and decision-making power in adoption of a household public good valued more by women. Using a heterogeneity-robust event-study design, we find that, consistent with our model, the increase in toilet adoption is concentrated in states where the policy boosted women’s education—plausibly reducing misperceptions about the benefits of toilets—and increased women’s decision-making power. Our findings highlight that policies empowering women can yield unintended benefits beyond their original scope—while we document improvements in toilet coverage, the implications extend to other household investments where women’s preferences are stronger, but various frictions limit adoption.

  (Previously circulated as Female Inheritance Rights and Household Sanitation)

• Parental Investments and Sibling Spillover Effects of Affirmative Action Policies: Evidence from India (draft coming soon)

  Abstract: This paper examines the sibling spillover effects of India’s Right to Education Act (RTE) during the period of COVID-19 induced school closures, focusing on the educational outcomes of siblings of policy applicants. The RTE mandates all private schools to reserve 25% of the incoming seats in grade 1 for low socioeconomic status students. Using administrative data of households that applied under this policy and survey data on educational outcomes of applicant children and their siblings, I estimate the intent-to-treat effects (ITT) of being a sibling in a household where the applicant child won the grade 1 private school lottery. My findings indicate that younger siblings in winning households were less likely to be formally enrolled in school compared to their peers in losing households, but benefitted from increased access to remote learning resources provided by the older applicant child’s private school. Additionally, there were no significant differences in parental monetary and time investments between siblings in winning and losing households. This study shows that well implemented affirmative action policies during economic hardships, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, can act as a safety net not only for the targeted individuals, but also benefit non-targeted individuals and can mitigate long-term educational inequalities.

Selected works in progress

• Spatial Inequality and School Choice Mechanisms - with Md Moshi Ul Alam, Chao Fu, YingHua He