We investigate the relationship between economic deregulation (delicensing), skill upgrading, and wage inequality during the 1980s and 1990s in India. We use a unique dataset on India's industrial licensing regime to test whether industrial deregulation during the 1980s and 1990s played a role...

The severe anti-female bias in natality and child mortality that gives rise to India’s missing women has been widely documented and various explanations ranging from agricultural labor demand to dowries have been offered in the literature. In general, the low demand for girls has been...

Fertility decline in developing countries may have unexpected demographic consequences. Although lower fertility improves nutrition, health, and human capital investments for surviving children, little is known about the relationship between fertility outcomes and female-male offspring...

The severe anti-female bias in natality and child mortality that gives rise to India's missing women has been widely documented and various explanations ranging from agricultural labor demand to dowries have been offered in the literature. In general, the low demand for girls has been...

This paper aims to summarize the unexplained propensity of children to engage in work, school, or neither. After controlling for a wide range of determinants of child labor, schooling, and idleness, we estimate a hierarchical model that allows for heteroskedastic, spatially correlated random...

We combine data from the 2002 National Population Census and the distribution of the number of victims and human rights violations across 22 departments to examine how the worst period of the civil war in Guatemala, between 1979 and 1984, affected human capital accumulation. The year of birth...

This dissertation investigates the relationship between industrial and trade policies and their impact on firm-level incentives to become more productive. In Chapter two we use a two-sector growth model and show that the impact of a rise in competition in the intermediate goods sector (that...

We provide quasi-experimental evidence on the effects of alcohol regulation on alcohol consumption and associated public health outcomes using detailed individual level and aggregate data from India, where state-level laws regulating the minimum legal drinking age generate substantial variation...

Using data on formal manufacturing plants in India, we report a large but imprecise acceleration in productivity growth starting around the mid-1990s (e.g., 1993-2004 compared to 1980-1992). We trace the acceleration to productivity growth within large plants (200 workers or more), as opposed to...