Abstracts

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

with Ajinkya Keskar and Sulagna Mookerjee · R&R at Labour Economics

In societies with strong birth-order marriage norms and marital payments, same-sex siblings create queue pressure, and additional daughters can split a family's dowry-paying capacity, limiting the matches it can finance. We estimate how sibling gender composition and birth order affect household formation in rural India using the 1999 Rural Economic and Demographic Survey, which records age at marriage, own education, spouse education, and dowry transfers for all siblings in sampled households. Women with a next-younger sister marry husbands with 0.32 fewer years of education and pay Rs. 13,034 less in dowry; among closely spaced sisters, they marry 0.35 years earlier. We document a novel parallel pattern for men: those with a next-younger brother have 0.26 fewer years of education, marry earlier, and match with a less-educated spouse, while their dowry receipts remain unchanged. Family fixed-effects estimates show a later-born advantage in marriage timing, education, spouse quality, and transfers. The results show that the effects of sibling composition are not confined to daughters: they also shape sons' human capital and matches, while marital transfers respond asymmetrically by gender.

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

I 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

I investigate the persistence of dowry payments across generations, how this relationship differs for sons and daughters, and the extent of dowry inflation over time. Using the Rural Economic and Demographic Survey, I trace dowry across two generational links—from grandparents to household heads and from household heads to their children—measuring persistence through intergenerational elasticities and rank-rank coefficients. Preliminary estimates reveal substantial and remarkably stable persistence: conditional elasticities are 0.35 and 0.30 across the two generations, respectively, with similar patterns for sons and daughters. Rank-rank coefficients of 0.25 and 0.31 further suggest that families retain some of their relative position in the dowry distribution across generations. I complement these findings with an original 2026 field survey of 550 households in Lucknow and Prayagraj, examining how individuals' experiences with dowry shape their perceptions of the practice and relate to transfers at their children's marriages.

Immigrant Assimilation in American Higher Education

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.