Abstracts

Waiting Your Turn: Sibling Rivalry, Birth Order, and Dowry in Rural India

with Ajinkya Keskar and Sulagna Mookerjee · Submitted

Using complete sibling marriage histories from rural India (REDS 1999), we show that birth-order marriage norms generate sibling competition. Women with a next-younger sister marry earlier when closely spaced, match with less-educated husbands, and pay lower dowries; men with a next-younger brother show parallel disadvantages in schooling, marriage timing, and spousal education. More than 80% of both men and women marry in gender-specific birth order, and family fixed-effects estimates reveal systematic later-born advantages.

More Than a Meal: Impact of the World's Largest School Feeding Programme on Child Outcomes

We evaluate India's Midday Meal Scheme using a triple difference design that combines the staggered rollout across states, cohort exposure at primary-school age, and neighbourhood-level access to a compliant school, drawing on the 2006 wave of REDS. Separating official eligibility from effective access shows that the gains run through the latter: conditional on local access, eligibility at the primary level raised enrolment by 6.1 pp and reduced child wage labour by 6.0 pp, with no detectable effect on nutrition. Enrolment gains are larger for girls, the fall in wage labour is concentrated among boys, and girls become less likely to be used as substitutes for domestic work. Effects grow with longer exposure, so last-mile delivery rather than statutory eligibility determines whether large-scale programmes succeed.

Intergenerational Dowry Persistence in India

We investigate the relationship between parental dowry and their children's marital payments, and how that relationship differs for daughters and sons, and we quantify the extent of dowry inflation across generations. We supplement the descriptive work with data from a field survey on how these decisions are made within the household.

Does the US' Immigrant STEM Advantage Erode with Assimilation? U.S. Schooling Exposure and College Major Choice

with Zhihan Lin

We ask whether exposure to US schooling moves childhood immigrants' college major choices towards the native-born benchmark, using variation in age at arrival. We separate the access margin (college completion) from the choice margin (STEM conditional on obtaining a BA), and the two move in opposite directions. We find each additional year of US exposure raises BA attainment but lowers the probability of a STEM major among graduates by 0.54 pp. Childhood immigrants converge to their native-born counterparts, thus eroding America's immigrant STEM over-selection.