Two thirds of all Indian women have migrated for marriage, around 300 million women, but little is known about this vast migration. This paper provides a detailed accounting of the puzzlingly large migration of Indian women and evaluates its causes. Contrary to conventional wisdom, marriage...

Do households use savings to buffer against income fluctuations? Despite its common use to understand household savings decisions, the evidence for the buffer-stock model is surprisingly weak and inconsistent. This paper develops new testable implications based on a property of the model that...

This paper examines the changing distribution of where women and girls live in India at the smallest scale possible: India's nearly 600,000 villages. The village level variation in the proportion female is far larger than the variation across districts. Decomposing the variance, I show that...

Despite the evidence for high returns to education at an individual level, large increases in education across the developing world have brought disappointing returns in aggregate. This paper shows that the same pattern holds in India by building aggregates from micro-data so that the...

While it is common to use income uncertainty to explain household saving decisions, there is much disagreement about the importance of precautionary saving. This paper suggests that income uncertainty is not an important motive for saving, although households do have other precautionary reasons...

What financial services matter for growth? This paper examines the effects national banks had on growth in the United States from 1870-1900. These banks were commercial not investment banks: they made short term loans and could not take land as collateral. I use the discontinuity in entry caused...

Credit limit variability is a crucial aspect of the consumption, savings, and debt decisions of households in the United States. Using a large panel this paper first demonstrates that individuals gain and lose access to credit frequently and often have their credit limits reduced unexpectedly....

Although many view financial access as a means of reducing poverty or increasing growth, empirical studies have produced contradictory results. One problem is that most studies cover only a short time frame and do not consider dynamic effects. I show that introducing credit creates a boom in...