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portfolio

Strategy and Coordination in Risky Household Decisions (Job Market Paper)

Abstract: Do spouses successfully coordinate risk-taking decisions in the household? This paper uses a lab-in-field experiment between married couples in Bangladesh to show that most people hold mistaken beliefs about their spouse’s risk-taking behavior. In a sequential lottery-choice game husbands and wives each selected a lottery while sharing the total winnings from both. Under imperfect information about their spouse’s choice, only about one in four subjects successfully coordinate their choice with their spouse’s choice so as to achieve their intended risk exposure level for the household. Biased beliefs about the spouse’s choice, led 23% of subjects to accept excessively risky lotteries and 24% to sacrifice profitable opportunities. Coordination failures are particularly pronounced when one spouse actively attempts to counter or ignore the other’s choice, a behavior typically shown by men. Variation in non-cognitive skills helps explain this pattern: personality traits systematically predict whether spouses accommodate or counter their partner’s decisions. Moreover, when one spouse exhibits countering behavior, the other often mirrors it, amplifying coordination failure within the household. Linking experimental behavior to real-world outcomes, I document evidence of asymmetric information between spouses regarding household savings, physical assets, and outstanding loans. Coordination errors in the experiment predict biased beliefs about a spouse’s savings for different purposes, like investment into children and emergency needs. Crucially, larger coordination errors significantly increase the likelihood that households were unable to cope with adverse shocks in the past twelve months using available resources, forcing them to sell productive assets or resort to migration

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Agricultural Mechanization and Gendered Structural Transformation in India (With Kajal Gulati and Samuel S. Bird)

Abstract: We show that large-scale public works programs targeted at rural women are not sufficient to offset the decline in women’s labor force participation driven by broader structural transformation. We examine the differential effects of agricultural mechanization on women’s employment by leveraging the staggered roll-out of India’s National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS), the world’s largest public works program. By exploiting spatial and temporal variation in district soil texture and national trends in mechanization, we find that NREGS did not mitigate women’s exit from the labor force spurred by agricultural mechanization. Instead, the mechanization-induced decline in women’s labor force participation is larger in NREGS than in non-NREGS districts. On the intensive margin, NREGS did not influence the reduction in days worked by women per week. These findings highlight the limits of public works programs in counteracting gender-biased impacts of structural change.

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How Transitions into Marriage and Parenthood Shape Individual Gender Role Attitudes: Evidence from Egypt (With Kajari Saha and Shraddha Yadav)

Abstract: Despite progress towards a more gender equal society, substantial gender-based disparities persist in the division of paid and unpaid work, often unpinned by deeply rooted attitudes surrounding gender appropriate roles in work and family life. Therefore, understanding how gender role attitudes form is crucial for addressing persistent gender-based disparities in the labor market and beyond. Using longitudinal data from Egypt, this study examines how key life-events such as marriage and parenthood shape the gender role attitudes of men and women. We find that marriage leads to a significant shift towards more conservative attitudes among women, with no comparable shift observed after parenthood. For men, no statistically significant change is observed after transition to either marriage or parenthood. Notably, the observed shift towards more conservative attitudes among women is driven primarily by women who were relatively more progressive before marriage. Additionally, we find that the absolute distance between the gender role attitude index of women and their husbands declines post marriage, suggesting that women may adjust their views to align more closely with a new, gendered marital identity.

Indigenous Communities and Species Conservation – Examining the Role of Nature-Based Practices in Promoting Ecosystem Services.” (With Shadi Atallah, Sahan Dissanayake and Adrian Lopes)

Abstract: Indigenous peoples around the world have cultural and ritualistic practices relating to nature that play an important role in the preservation of biodiversity. However, the effects of such practices on natural ecosystems are underestimated for they are little understood by modern industrialized society. Indigenous peoples observe nature-based religions wherein wild plants and animals are revered, and an unintentional consequence is biodiversity preservation. We empirically document the nature-based traditions of the Rabari tribespeople of India and evaluate their contribution to ecosystem sustainability through a discrete choice experiment. The Rabari are a tribe of semi-nomadic herders in Rajasthan, India, who share their living space with a wide variety of plants and animals, including a high concentration of leopards. They are devout Hindus who consider protecting leopards a religious duty. Comparing the willingness to accept predation losses between Rabari and non-Rabari subjects we are to measure the additional existence value of leopards to the Rabari. Since nature-based indigenous traditions aren’t typically evaluated in the literature, we use multidisciplinary analyses using ecology, environmental economics, and anthropology. This research would be relevant to both academics and policy practitioners, and enhance our understanding of indigenous traditions and their contributions to overall environmental sustainability.

Prickly Neighbors: Religion, Risk, and Human–Wildlife Coexistence.” (With Adrian Lopes and Dina Tasneem)

Abstract: Indigenous communities safeguard a significant share of the world’s remaining biodiversity, yet their cultural and behavioral contributions to conservation are often overlooked. This project examines how belief systems influence human responses to ecological uncertainty—specifically, whether religious and cultural traditions shape tolerance toward living with large predators. Focusing on the Rabari of Rajasthan, India—semi-nomadic herders who have peacefully coexisted with leopards for generations—the study investigates whether their belief that leopards are divine incarnations of their patron goddess affects how they perceive and respond to uncertain natural risks such as livestock predation. Using a novel ambiguity eliciation design we measure subject’s attitude toward predation-led undertainty as well as more general sources of uncertainty. This approach allows us to identify how cultural and religious beliefs shape behavioral adaptations under ecological uncertainty. This research constitutes the first empirical attempt to link religious beliefs with ambiguity preferences and extends behavioral economics beyond Western settings and risk-based models. By studying individuals whose livelihoods depend on the ecosystems they share with wildlife, the project generates ecologically grounded evidence on how inherited belief systems influence decision-making under uncertainty. The findings will offer a novel behavioral mechanism explaining the observed association between religiosity, pro-environmental attitudes, and biodiversity conservation. Beyond advancing academic understanding, the research has practical implications for conservation policy—demonstrating how indigenous traditions can facilitate coexistence and mitigate human–wildlife conflict.

publications

Women’s Land Ownership and Household Decisions: Implications for Child Health in Rural India

Published in Axes of Sustainable Development and Growth in India: Essays in Honour of Professor Jyoti K. Parikh (Springer), 2023

Abstract: Women in India undertake around 80% of farm work. They are mostly engaged in farm work that is labour intensive and non-mechanized. In rural landowning households, only 16% of women own land. The absence of land ownership affects the economic empowerment of women in agriculture. An increase in women’s access to economic resources results in higher investment in human capital. Empowerment of women through land and ownership rights can improve children’s nutritional status, especially for children under-5. This study aims at understanding the effects of women’s land ownership rights on women’s empowerment and maternal and child health outcomes in rural India using NFHS-4 data. The results demonstrate a positive relationship between women’s land ownership and women’s autonomy. It is shown that joint ownership of land for women is insufficient to improve empowerment, and it is only in the case of sole ownership that women’s autonomy and decision-making powers improve. A direct positive relationship between women’s land ownership and women’s health outcome was found. However, no direct association between women’s land ownership and children’s nutritional status measured by stunting and underweight was observed.

Recommended citation: Saha, K., Pandey, V. L., & Dev, S. M. (2023). "Women’s Land Ownership and Household Decisions: Implications for Child Health in Rural India." In *Axes of Sustainable Development and Growth in India: Essays in Honour of Professor Jyoti K. Parikh*. Springer.
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Women’s Work and Agricultural Productivity Gaps in India

Published in American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 2025

Abstract: Most studies on gender gaps in agricultural productivity leverage within-household differences between plots managed by women and men. Such a gender-based division of plot management simplifies empirical tests for productivity differences, but it is not a common arrangement outside some locations in sub-Saharan Africa. In most rural households, women and men jointly participate in production, complicating the identification of gender-based productivity differences. This study proposes a broader empirical test of productivity gaps that applies to such systems and is rooted in gender-based inequities rather than gender per se. We explore productivity gaps in rice-cultivating Indian households, where women and men perform distinct cultivation tasks. We measure productivity gaps based on the differential use of family and hired female labor across households and then compare them with gaps based on the differential use of family and hired male labor. Using plot-level data, we identify significant gender-based productivity gaps after controlling for input use and plot- and household-level characteristics, along with using village fixed effects and machine learning estimators to address selection and model misspecification concerns. We find that households using family female labor have lower agricultural productivity than those also hiring female workers, such that forgone production value is greater than the cost of hiring women. We find suggestive evidence that this gap stems from skill differences between hired and family female workers. In contrast, we find no similar gap regarding male labor use. Overall, household welfare is lower because of gender-based inequities, and highlights the potential productivity implications of expanding women’s labor choices in both on- and off-farm roles.

Recommended citation: Gulati, K., Saha, K., & Lybbert, T. J. (2025). "Women’s Work and Agricultural Productivity Gaps in India." American Journal of Agricultural Economics.
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teaching

Teaching experience 1

Undergraduate course, University 1, Department, 2014

This is a description of a teaching experience. You can use markdown like any other post.

Teaching experience 2

Workshop, University 1, Department, 2015