The purpose of this dissertation is to investigate how can certain public policies affect female sex ratio and female empowerment. This dissertation also proposes an alternative mechanism that can be used to appropriately target population sub-groups for the implementation of public health related policies. Skewed sex ratio against female children is a persistent problem in India and sex selective abortions is concluded to be the most probable reason behind it. The biggest public taken by the Indian Government, in various stages, to address this issue is to impose a legal ban on any public or private health facility offering this service. The first chapter of this dissertation investigates whether the first stage of this policy was successful in improving the birth rate of female children. A much discussed hypothesis is that women's education or women's access to finance leads to betterment of the life outcomes of children in terms of school enrolment, child labor and female empowerment by improving their control over household resources. The second chapter of this dissertation looks at whether micro-credit programs directed towards educated women have any differential impact on social outcomes like school enrolment rates, child labor, expenditure on health and female empowerment. Another important issue that is extremely important in today's world is the appropriate targeting of public health policies. The third chapter of this dissertation proposes an alternative measure to estimate the extent of malnutrition across various population sub samples. This purpose of this measure is to construct a cardinal method enabling consistent comparison of the depth and severity of health deprivation across various population sub-groups.

Child health is a major concern in developing countries. Annually six million children die before their fifth birthday. Eighty percent of the deaths happen in Sub Saharan Africa and Asia and forty five percent of these deaths are caused by under-nutrition. For those children who survive, thirty three percent are stunted over their life time. In this dissertation I identify two mechanisms through which we can deal with the problem. One is the role of health policy and the other is the role of economic growth. In the case of the former, we are now aware from extant literature in economics that investments in health and education resources for children under the age of six will positively impact their long run health and productivity outcomes. In chapter two and three of the dissertation, I evaluate the benefits and the unintended consequences of providing government subsidized health insurance policy to children under the age of six in Vietnam. I find that parents are more likely to take children who are covered by health insurance to doctors and spend more on their health. However, this comes at the cost of human capital investments such as health and education spending for older children in the household who are not eligible for the policy. Women, who are primary care givers in the house, allocate more time in the labor market once their children are covered by insurance. This increases both spending on food and health within the household. Chapter four models the relationship between economic growth and child health, as measured by height for age z (HAZ) scores. With the help of new methodological and conceptual tools, this paper shows that economic growth provides a cushion against the rapid loss of HAZ in the first two years of a child's life. The paper also shows that economic growth in the birth year of a child has cumulative positive effects on HAZ when they are between the ages of one to three. At age four, economic growth in the more recent period and the current disease environment may play a bigger role in determining child health.

This dissertation presents three chapters on female labor supply and marital stability in developing countries. The first two chapters focus on female labor supply in India. In the first chapter, I study the relationship between husband's earning and female labor supply of married women in India. Despite economic growth, fertility reductions, and improvement in education, female labor force participation in India declined from 35% to 27% between 1999 and 2012. This chapter examines the degree to which the decline can be attributed to an increase in the earnings of married males. Using two datasets and three sources of variation in married male earnings, I find a robust and negative elasticity of married female labor supply with respect to married male earnings. Subgroup and robustness analyses indicate the presence of a household-level income effect. Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that this relationship can account for over 40% of the above decline in married female labor supply. Continuing with this investigation in the second chapter, I study the role of other spatial and individual characteristics behind the changes in female labor supply in India during the same period. Based on the decomposition analysis of changes in labor supply for paid versus unpaid work in rural areas, I find that geographical characteristics, such as the capital intensity of agriculture, are important drivers of changes in married female labor force participation in paid jobs but not in unpaid jobs. Individual-level variables, such as age, education, caste, and religion, are significant determinants of both paid and unpaid labor jobs of married women in rural India. In the third chapter, we study the effect of fertility challenges faced by couples on divorce in developing countries. Using the Demographic and Health Surveys from 66 countries over 23 years, we find that, infertility, the first-born child being a daughter, and death of the first-born child significantly increase the likelihood of divorce in a marriage. These findings lend support for the implications of theoretical analysis by Becker (1977), which says that unanticipated shocks increase marital instability by generating greater differences between the expected and actual utility from a union.

The first chapter of my dissertation analyzes Affirmative Action in higher education in India to investigate whether making access to college easier can incentivize underprivileged students in the target group to remain in school. I use a difference-in-difference strategy to

find a direct effect of the policy on college enrollments and high-school completion. Using an instrumental variable (IV) strategy wherein I instrument increased access to college with this exogenous policy shock, I am able to establish a casual pathway from increase in college access to increase in school enrollments.

The second chapter presents an analytical framework that can represent Adaptive Preferences, a class of Endogenous Preferences that are dependent on the feasible opportunity set. The model is developed using an expected utility framework that assigns `utility' to pairs of opportunity sets and preference orderings. It is then possible to show under what conditions an individual will choose to adapt (or un-adapt) their preferences. Parallel to the model I present a case study of "Gendered Preferences" as a case of Adaptive Preferences.

In the third chapter, which is part of a joint project with Joseph Cummins, William Dow, and Nicholas Wilson, we analyze data from Demographic Health Surveys (DHS) in 30 Sub Saharan African (SSA) countries for the period 1986-2011 to estimate the relationship between individual fertility decisions and regional aggregates of infant mortality rate (IMR). We find evidence that local regional aggregates of infant mortality have a lagged relationship to individual fertility decisions. A decrease in infant mortality in a region leads to a decline in the probability of birth for an individual woman with a lag of 3 years.

Poverty alleviation and welfare improvement of the poor

have been the primary goals of policy makers in the developing

world. Governments, policymakers, and international development

agencies have regularly allocated a wide range of resources in

attempts to improve socio-economic indicators of well-being amongst

the poor. Careful analysis backed by rigorous evaluation of these

efforts is of utmost importance in order to ascertain whether these

goals are being met. My work focuses on some of the development

goals and the role of policy efforts in addressing these.

This dissertation presents three chapters on child health outcomes in India and sub-Saharan Africa. The goal of this research is to analyze how large-scale policies have intended or unintended impacts on the lives of people living in underdeveloped regions. In the first chapter, I study the effects of a change in trade policy, the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), on infant and neonatal mortality in sub-Saharan Africa. Increased exports and increasing opportunities for employment of mothers may contribute towards improving health of the child, due to rising incomes (income effect) or may deteriorate health of the child as the mother stays away from home (substitution effect). Empirically, I find that the increase in exports from 30 sub-Saharan countries help in reducing infant mortality by 9% of the sample mean or around 7 deaths per 1000 using the most comprehensive health data available for these countries, Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS). This decrease in infant deaths operates through increasing health seeking behavior of mother, increased possession of assets, and increased maternal labor supply in non-agricultural sectors. The second chapter analyzes the paradox of decreasing infant mortality but not a corresponding improvement in malnutrition in India over time. We look at the effects of mortality selection on anthropometric scores in India using three rounds of National Family and Health Surveys (NFHS) and find evidence of significant negative mortality selection. Specifically, children with sample average characteristics that survive, with controls for unobservable characteristics of groups of women, have lower HAZ scores than a child randomly drawn from the population. In the third chapter, I delve into the impact of rural road creation (Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana, PMGSY) on infant and neonatal mortality and sex-ratio in India. To study this effect at the village-level a unique micro dataset using nationwide health data surveys and online road construction data is created. Using two different empirical approaches, I find no significant changes in these statistics after the road creation in the short term. These findings will help in conceptualizing future policy actions to effectively improve child health for these developing economies.

My dissertation is comprised of three independent empirical chapters. Below is a brief description of each.

The first Chapter is titled Infant Mortality Rates in India: District-Level Variations and Correlations". This paper examines the correlates of infant mortality in India using district-level data from the 1991 and 2001 Census of India. While infant mortality rates have dropped across districts over this ten year period, there still remains a lot of heterogeneity across districts and hence across the states. Using a panel data set of 666 districts, the analysis seeks to determine which of socio and or economic factors play an important role in reducing infant mortality rates. In our empirical work, the explanatory variables used are male and female literacy, male and female labor force participation, the level of poverty, urbanization and other socio-economic variables. We use quantile regression analysis to determine which of these factors impact infant mortality. Quantile regression is preferred over OLS because it allows us to estimate models for the conditional median function, and the full range of other conditional quantile functions and therefore provides a more complete statistical analysis of the stochastic relationship among random variables. The analysis brings out the powerful in influence of woman's characteristics on infant mortality, especially literacy and labor force participation. Increases in both of these variables significantly reduce child mortality at the district level. Improvements in male laborers in non-agricultural work and reductions in poverty also reduce child mortality, but their quantitative impact is weak in comparison. Further the non-parametric analysis reinforces the results found in the parametric section. They indicate that the action or the impact of the covariates is strongest in the districts which lie in the center of the conditional distribution, rather than those at the extreme. This analysis allows us to determine in which districts the impact of additional target policies would yield the greatest reduction in infant mortality.

The second paper is titled Same-sex siblings and their affect on mothers labor supply in South Africa". This study aims to look at the labor-supply consequences of childbearing for women in South Africa. However due to the endogeneity of fertility, the research question becomes complicated. Using parental preferences for a mixed sibling-sex composition I construct instrumental variables (IV) estimates of the eect of childbearing on labor supply of all women aged 15-35 years having more than two children. The data used for the study is the 10% household sample from the 2001 census. The covariate of interest in the labor supply model is the indicator More than two children. Demographic variables include mother's age, age of the mother at first birth, years of schooling, indicators for race, and an urban dummy. Labor-supply variables include hours worked per week, worked for pay and total income. Unlike previous studies which restrict their sample to include only female household heads or spouse of male household heads, this study expands the sample size to include all childbearing women in the household aged 15-35. The IV estimates that exploit the fertility consequences of sibling sex do not conrm the OLS estimates showing that more children lead to lowering of female labor supply. While OLS estimates exaggerate the causal effect of children, children seem to have a smaller effect on the labor supply of college-educated women. I find that labor market outcomes of childbearing are more severe for married women in South Africa.

The third paper is on The effect of Immigration on Ethnic Composition and Occupational Reallocation". Over the last 30 years, the U.S. labor market has been transformed by the 'second great migration'. Much of this immigration has been among the lower skilled; the share of High School Dropout (HSD) workers who are foreign born increased from 12% in 1980 to 44% in 2007. At the same time, native born HSD workers grew more slowly than any other educational category, falling by nearly 6%. These two outcomes have inevitably lead to much speculation that immigrants depress the wages of similarly skilled natives. The labor economics literature, however, has found little empirical evidence to support this claim. We aim to assess whether the impact of immigration is mitigated by occupational transition of natives. Being over represented among HSDs, we focus on the labor market outcomes for Black workers. We use data from the 5% public use sample of the census (1980, 1990 and 2000) as well as the 1% sample of the population from the American Community Survey (2005, 2006 and 2007) to estimate the effect of occupational reallocation on the wages of Black workers as well as the eect of immigration on reallocation. A shift-share analysis reveals that occupational transitions caused wages for Blacks to rise by 46% more than they would have with a static occupational distribution. However, we find that these occupational shifts were due to crowding out effect of Hispanics on Black occupations: a 10 percentage point increase in the share of workers in an occupation who are Hispanics leads to a 5 percentage point decrease in the share of Black workers in that occupation. This is significantly large to explain substantially, occupations that declined in importance for Blacks during the period of study. We nd a strong correlation between importance of occupations to Hispanic and Blacks, suggesting that most occupational transition for these two groups has not only been driven by outside factors such as trade and technological change, but that these shocks are affecting the two groups similarly.

This dissertation presents three independent research projects.

The first chapter of this thesis studies the impact of gender composition of teams on employee productivity, using a randomized controlled trial. The study was conducted in Indian call centers located in five Indian cities. This is the first study to estimate the causal impact of opposite gender peers on performance in the workplace setting. For identification, call center employees were randomized into either mixed gender teams (30-50% female peers) or control groups of same gender teams. The study finds precisely estimated zero effects on both productivity (intensive margin) and share of days worked during the study period (extensive margin) of being assigned to a mixed gender team. There is evidence that conditional on being assigned to mixed gender teams,

men with progressive gender attitudes have higher productivity than men with

regressive gender attitude. There is an overall increase in the secondary outcomes of

knowledge sharing, dating and comfort with the opposite gender for male employees

in mixed gender teams, relative to all male teams.

The second chapter also uses the setting of Indian call center industry, and studies the impact of air pollution on productivity. Air pollution above the threshold 35.4 µg/m3 PM2.5 is viewed as harmful according to both WHO and EPA guidelines. The study finds that days on which pollution is above the threshold, average productivity decreases by 0.19 standard deviations. The study also finds evidence of efficiency loss on high pollution days.

The third chapter studies the effect of co-residence with parents-in-law on female labor force participation (FLFP) in India. Using two rounds of nationally representative panel data of women, death of healthy parent-in-law is taken as an exogenous shock to co-residence with parent-in-law. The paper provides evidence that death of a father-in-law leads to a 11.2 percentage point or 25% increase in FLFP. There is also an

increase in FLFP by 11 percentage points following the loss of a working mother-

in-law, providing evidence of an added worker effect in the household. On the secondary outcome of empowerment, death of mother-in-law increases women's empowerment by 16.7%.

Despite strong recent economic growth, gender inequality remains a major concern for India. This dissertation examines the effectiveness of public policy in improving some important human development outcomes, with a focus on gender issues. The national Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostics Techniques (PNDT) Act of 1994, implemented in 1996, banned sex-selective abortions in the Indian states which hitherto had not legislated such a policy. Using village-level and town-level longitudinal data from the 1991 and 2001 censuses, along with household survey data from other sources, the first essay finds a significantly positive impact of the PNDT Act on the female-to-male juvenile sex ratio (number of females per 1000 males below the age of 6 years). Although researchers frequently mention the futility of the Act, this study is among the first to use a treatment-effect type analysis of the pre-ban and post-ban periods to show that the law hindered any further worsening of the gender imbalance in India. I find that in the possible absence of the PNDT Act, juvenile sex ratio would have declined by another 13-20 points on average. A second study evaluates the `unintended consequences' of the PNDT Act on child quality. Using household survey data from two time periods, and exploiting a natural experiment framework originating from the timing of the PNDT Act, I find a mixed impact of the law on gender-relative child quality outcomes. Since the PNDT Act partially improved the sex ratio but did not uniformly worsen the nutritional and immunization status of girls, it could be regarded as a truly welfare enhancing public policy. Finally, a third study examines the effectiveness of the Indian school feeding program in improving the nutritional and learning outcomes of children. Using a household fixed-effect and a propensity score matching framework, the outcomes of children receiving school meals are compared with that of similar children who are not covered under the program. The results show that the school meal program generally does not have any significant effect on the child nutrition nor learning outcomes, neither does it have any impact on the relative outcomes of the girl children.

This dissertation is composed of two essays focusing on some key emerging issues of health economics in developing countries. In the first chapter, I examine the role of the largest public works program in the world- the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) - in buffering the negative effects of early childhood exposure to rainfall shocks on long-term health outcomes. Collecting very detailed administrative records of rainfall shocks and policy coverage, I integrate it with a rich household level panel data from the Young Lives Survey, that follows children from year 2002 to 2010. Using three waves of the panel data spanning over eight years, the study employs individual-fixed effects estimation to analyze the extent of catch-up in height for age for the rural sample exploiting the phase wise variation in roll out of the policy across households. We find while the program does not help correct long term past health deficiencies, it is useful in buffering recent drought shocks. Interestingly, we find the extent of this mitigation varies by policy relevant subgroups, where we find it benefits significantly the poor households from lower caste and lower educational background. We find early drought exposure decreases the height for age score by .4 standard deviations and increases average stunting rate by 8%. For individuals exposed to drought, we find an increase in one standard deviation in average program days increases height-for-age by around .26 standard deviations, which is about half the rural-urban gap in terms of magnitude. The findings indicate while there is long-run impact of early-life conditions on health several years later, access to the program helps to partially mitigate recent shocks but not correct for longer-term past deficiencies. Since there is little scope of remediation in correcting past deficiencies, the study highlights the key role that a social protection policy can play in safe-guarding households against such negative shocks.

The second chapter examines the extent of reporting biases in self-reported health response across demographic sub-groups using the unique nationally representative data collected by the World Health Survey-SAGE survey from India, that has self-reported assessments of health linked to anchoring vignettes as well as objective measures like body mass index and performance tests on a range of different domains of health. Analysis of the vignettes responses reveals a systematic under-reporting of worse health among the individuals from less developed states in India, which is statistically significant across various health domains. While males and urban residents were found to systematically under-report ill-health, individuals over 60 years were found to over-report ill health. Utilizing a battery of objective health measures, we introduce a methodology to implicitly test the assumption of `response consistency' in vignettes and confirm its validity by identifying similar systematic bias in self-reported health responses across covariates. Further examination of reporting bias by exploiting the individual fixed effects reveals that substantial variation in self-reported health remains unexplained even after controlling for the usual covariates. The results seem to suggest that systematic differences in self-reported health response, even within a country, needs to be accounted for while making inter group comparisons valid and lends support to the use of the vignette technique for identifying this bias.