UC Irvine

In this dissertation, I study factors that shape women’s economic and social participation.I explore the role of extra-legal factors in decision-making in sexual crime cases, and study aspects of women’s economic participation through their participation in leadership positions and competitive environments, and the intergenerational health impacts of maternal employment opportunities. Evidence suggests that the lack of safety pushes women to choose lower-quality education institutes and drop out of the labor market. The MeToo movement took the world by storm and brought the issue of sexual crimes to center stage. However, we do not know if such global outrage systematically increases the costs of sexual crimes for the perpetrators in form of the punishments meted out to them. In absence of granular data on case-specific judicial outcomes and media reporting, it is hard to rigorously answer this question. Motivated by this, in my first chapter, I investigate if judges are more likely to convict offenders of sexual crimes when they are exposed to more media reports about sexual assaults. I use rich administrative data on the universe of sexual assault cases filed in lower courts in India and high-frequency data on daily media reports about sexual assaults in districts in the country. Using a generalized difference-in-difference model, I find that judges are more likely to convict offenders in sexual assault cases that carry low punishments when they are exposed to more media reports. I find no impact of media reports on more serious sexual assault cases like rape cases, where judicial discretion might be lower since rape cases are filed with more forensic evidence, and convicting the offender here carries harsher punishments. The increase in the probability of conviction for assault cases is likely to be driven through the channel of more scrutiny by the judges in response to media outrage. Apart from safety concerns, women’s participation in the economy is also restricted due to the burden of childcare duties that disproportionately fall on them. In my second chapter titled “Employment Booms and Infant Health: Evidence from Ready-Made Garment Sector in Bangladesh”, I argue that having more women in the labor force can improve their children’s outcomes. I look at the impact of employment booms, particularly beneficial for women, on infant health using evidence from the readymade garment industry in Bangladesh. I exploit exogenous variation in employment created in the sector due to the removal of a trade quota, which made a spatial and temporal variation in employment opportunities for women. Using a difference-in-difference model, I find that access to these jobs leads to increased female labor force participation. Correspondingly, I find that women delay their age at first birth, increase the birth spacing between two births, and breastfeed longer. These channels of better health inputs and behavior collectively lead to an improved survival rate of neonates in areas with a relatively high density of these jobs. Motivated by this positive spillover of women’s economic empowerment, in the third chapter of my dissertation, I explore if women’s representation in leadership positions matters for educational outcomes. In this paper, I ask if constituencies with female leaders in India see higher growth in the number of new schools in rural India. Using a regression discontinuity design, I find that constituencies, where a female leader is narrowly elected against a man, do not see any differences in school construction compared to constituencies where a female leader narrowly lost to a man. Using detailed community development project expenditure data by these leaders from two states in the country, I find descriptive evidence that, on average, female leaders get a lower number of community development projects sanctioned than male leaders. They also get less money approved for these projects. This may be suggestive of the lower political agency of women. These results extend the narrative on women’s performance in competitive and male-dominated environments.