UC San Diego

Chapter 1 studies the effect of reducing class-size, by hiring more tenured teachers, on students’ scholastic performance. Using a maimonides’ rule-kind of instrumental variable strategy and a longitudinal panel data from India, I find that a 10% reduction in pupil-teacher ratio (PTR) results in 0.02 improvement in value-added scores. However, a cost effectiveness calculation suggests that reduction in PTR, by hiring more regular teachers, entails cost-benefit ratio of 2.8, meaning that for every INR 100 spent on hiring a regular teacher, the student gains only INR 35 in future income. Thus, despite of positive impact on student learning, it is an economically costly program.Chapter 2 examines the long-term health and educational effects of the Bhopal Gas Disaster (BGD), one of the most serious industrial accidents in history, using geolocated data from India’s National Family Health Survey-4 (NFHS-4) and the 1999 Indian Socio-Economic Survey [NSSO-1999]. A spatial difference-in-differences strategy estimated the relative effect of being in utero near Bhopal relative to other cohorts and to those further from Bhopal. We find that men who were in utero at the time were more likely to have a disability that affected their employment 15 years later, and had higher rates of cancer and lower educational attainment over 30 years later. These results indicate social costs stemming from the BGD that extend far beyond the mortality and morbidity experienced in the immediate aftermath. In Chapter 3, I combine a novel dataset of >1 million patent applications from India with the firm level R&D expenditures to study the impact of weak Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) on innovation activities. With the announcement of TRIPS, the technology classes that were allowed to patent only the process innovations (a weak form of IPR) before, started showing uptick in innovation activities both in terms of patent counts and industry-level R&D expenditures, compared to technology groups that were already enjoying more secured product patenting provisions. Decomposing the industry-level impact reveals that the incremental innovations by smaller firms that require modest sums of R&D have been replaced by more expensive R&D projects by larger firms, following the adoption of TRIPS.