Working Papers
Dams and Rural Labor Markets in India
Does large-scale infrastructure reverse structural transformation in the places that host it? Combining India’s national registry of large dams with a three-round census panel of the villages surrounding dam sites, I show that where dams are completed, the composition of local work shifts back toward agricultural wage labor while non-farm employment contracts — the opposite of the transition India recorded nationally over the same decades. Identification comes from timing rather than placement: villages near completed dams are compared with villages near sanctioned-but-unfinished dams, which share the same siting characteristics. I find that the shift is concentrated in tribal villages, that women bear the larger share of the non-farm contraction, and that effects are largest upstream of the dam, where irrigation benefits cannot reach, separating winners from losers within a dam’s vicinity in a way district-level designs cannot. The results supply a labor-market mechanism for the well-known finding that dams raise poverty in their own districts.
Balancing Motherhood and Employment: Analyzing the Consequences of Extended Maternity Leave in India
Studies the labor market effects of India’s 2017 extension of paid maternity leave from 12 to 26 weeks. Using a difference-in-differences design on three rounds of National Family Health Survey data (2005–2021), I find the policy reduced labor force participation among prime-childbearing-age women (20–34) by 2.6 percentage points, with the largest declines among the youngest (20–24) and most educated women — evidence consistent with employer reluctance to hire women of childbearing age as compliance costs rose. Results are robust to placebo and parallel-trends tests.
What Binds Women’s Decision-Making?
Sole-authored structured evidence review synthesizing 89 studies of gender-transformative approaches. Finds that household say, collective voice, and public participation follow distinct production functions, contrary to the conventional cascade theory of change.