Research

Working papers

Job Market Paper

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

  Abstract: Worldwide, affirmative action policies are implemented as a means to promote social equity. India's Right to Education Act (RTE), one of the largest affirmative action policies in the world, mandates all private schools to reserve 25% of incoming seats at entry-level grades for low socioeconomic status students. Despite being in existence for more than a decade, the effectiveness of this policy remains largely understudied. In this paper, I estimate the causal impact of RTE's 25% quotas on children's learning outcomes using a combination of rich administrative and survey data in a large state in India. I leverage the lottery based allocation of oversubscribed schools to identify the causal impact of being a beneficiary under this policy. I find that the policy improves children's English test scores by .18 SD via beneficiaries attending better schools, and investing more time in educational activities. While the policy allocates children to private schools, there exists a large variation in the quality of private schools. Hence, I uncover the distribution of effects within the private sector, and find that higher quality private schools boost English test scores by .5-.7 SD, relative to lower quality private schools. My findings are from a context when all learning is remote, and suggest that private schools, especially the ones at the upper end of the quality distribution, do a better job at adapting to, and implementing remote educational technologies, and in doing so, they also enhance children's learning.

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