This paper exploits an exogenous shift in the trade policy in India to study the impact of industrialization on son preference. Using a difference-in-differences strategy, we find that households are more likely to have a male child in regions with higher trade openness relative to regions with...

We study the effect of the world's largest school feeding program on children's learning outcomes. Staggered implementation across different states of a 2001 Indian Supreme Court Directive mandating the introduction of free school lunches in public primary schools generates plausibly exogenous...

This paper exploits an exogenous shift in the trade policy in India to study the impact of industrialization on son preference. Using a difference-in-differences strategy, we find that households are more likely to have a male child in regions with higher trade openness relative to regions with...

We study the role of formal institutions of contract enforcement in facilitating investments in small and medium firms(MSME). In a framework where established entrepreneurs can enforce contracts informally using their network ties and hierarchical advantage, we argue that an efficient formal...

We propose a regional inequality-based mechanism to explain the heterogeneity in the spread of Covid-19 and test it using data from India. We argue that a core-periphery economic structure is likely to increase the spread of infection because it involves movement of goods and people across the...