Research

Working papers

Job Market Paper

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

  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

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

  Abstract: Affirmative action policies that are targeted to specific individuals may have unintended spillover effects. Typically, such spillover effects are absent from the cost-benefit analyses of affirmative action policies. In this paper, I estimate the sibling spillover effects of India's Right to Education Act policy, which mandates all private schools to reserve 25% of incoming seats at entry-level grades for low socioeconomic status students. I combine the administrative data of applications to grade 1 private school admissions under the policy, along with survey data conducted with a sample of applicant households, where I collect detailed data on children's educational outcomes for both the applicants of the policy, and their siblings. Lottery based allocation of oversubscribed private schools leads to a randomization in whether the applicant child wins or loses the private school lottery. I leverage these lotteries to compare educational outcomes of siblings in winning applicant households, relative to siblings in losing applicant households, by comparing households that submitted the same school preferences for applicants under the policy. I find that being in a winning household negatively affects the likelihood of enrollment when the sibling is younger and of pre-school age (by 15 percentage points). This result is potentially driven by the availability of high-quality learning materials from the school attended by the older applicant child who won the lottery to private schools. Conversely, when the sibling is younger, but of primary school entry age, I find that the likelihood of enrollment for siblings increases by 11 percentage points in winning households, relative to losing households. This result indicates that parents in winning households are less likely to delay school enrollment for children that are approaching school entry age. I find no differences in parental time and monetary investments across siblings in winning versus losing households. The results highlight that affirmative action policies may have unintended consequences, beyond targeted individuals, and highlights the importance of considering these spillovers in the cost-benefit analyses of such policies.

• Women’s Inheritance Rights and Household Sanitation (with Md Moshi Ul Alam)

  Abstract: Existing research shows that females derive greater benefits from in-house toilets than males. Given this, we estimate the impact of a policy that increased inheritance rights of females on the presence of a toilet in their marital household in India. Daughters being usually married away to the household of the groom, available household level nationally representative data do not have all original (natal) household characteristics – which determines treatment eligibility. Under generic assumptions, we show that when the treatment is partially observed to the researcher, we can derive bounds on the average treatment effect in a difference-in-differences framework. We estimate that the policy increased the probability of the presence of a toilet in the household a woman marries into by at least 7.4-11.2 percentage points on average. Allowing for heterogeneous treatment effects, we show that the average treatment effect is primarily driven by larger effects in states that adopted the policy later compared to early adopters. In addition, allowing for dynamic effects, we find that the policy had its highest impact on the group of women who were the youngest at the time of policy implementation, thus having the longest exposure to the policy. Our results underscore that policies that empower can offer to be a seemingly unrelated, yet effective policy tool for improving sanitation coverage in regions grappling with open-defecation problems.

Selected works in progress

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