Despite significant improvement in female schooling over the last two decades, only a small proportion of women in South Asia are in wage employment. We revisit this puzzle using a nationally representative data set from Bangladesh. Probit regression results show that even after accounting for...

This paper analyzes the impact of relaxing the One-Child Policy to the Two-Child Policy (TCP) on the employment of couples in China. By exploiting the regional variation in the timing of the policy implementation and the differences in exposure to the policy by subpopulation and by cohorts, we...

This paper examines the intergenerational transmission of gender attitudes in India, a setting where discrimination against women and girls is severe. We use survey data on gender attitudes (specifically, views about the appropriate roles and rights of women and girls) collected from adolescents...

We examine the impact of early marriage across a wide range of outcomes for women in rural western Kenya. The timing of physical maturation in girls has been shown to influence marriage timing in a quasi-random manner, and we find that each additional year that menarche is delayed is associated...

In this paper, we will attempt to clarify some issues commonly found in recent discussions surrounding female headship analysis, in general, and will also discuss recent literature on the relationship between female headship and poverty, in particular. The issues addressed here include: the...

This paper analyzes the relationship between a woman's intrahousehold bargaining position and her welfare within marriage. Simultaneity problems common to the literature are overcome by using dowry to proxy for bargaining position. Omitted variable bias is addressed by using grain shocks in the...

We examine the causal effect of women's age at marriage on prevalence of domestic violence using newly available household data from India. We employ an empirical strategy that utilizes variation in age at menarche to obtain exogenous variation in women's age at marriage. We find robust evidence...

The labor market impacts of women’s age at marriage have recently received significant attention from social scientists. The focus of this literature, however, has been the developed world and almost nothing is known about how a delay in marriage affects labor market prospects of women in...

This paper examines the long-term link between British colonialism and women empowerment in India. We compare women's contemporary economic outcomes across areas that were under direct British colonial rule with areas that were under indirect colonial rule. Controlling for selective annexation...

This study examines the effects of communal violence on women’s marital outcomes. Using individual-level survey data from India and a difference-in-differences approach, the study shows that women’s age of marriage decreased, and the probability of getting married before the age of 18...