UC San Diego

In Chapter 1, we study the intergenerational persistence of inequality by estimating grandmother-mother associations in the loss of a child, using pooled data from 119 Demographic and Health Surveys in 44 developing countries. Compared with compatriots of the same age, women with at least one sibling who died in childhood face 39% higher odds of having experienced at least one own-child death, or 7 percentage points at age 49. Place fixed effects reduce estimated mortality persistence by 47%; socioeconomic covariates explain far less. Within countries over time, persistence falls with aggregate child mortality, so that mortality decline disproportionately benefits high-mortality lineages.

In Chapter 2, we examine the marriage market outcomes of forcibly displaced women. Using data from 12 representative surveys in 7 countries, we document that women who are adolescents at the time of displacement are more likely to be married. This pattern is robust to the choice of control group and across countries. We do not find this pattern for displaced adolescent men. We provide additional evidence of this relationship by using unique features of the partition of India in 1947, an event that resulted in large-scale bilateral displacement between India and the newly formed Pakistan. Using a representative household survey collected in 1973, we find that women who were adolescents when they were displaced by partition were significantly more likely to marry earlier, in line with the descriptive cross-country evidence.

In Chapter 3, we estimate mother-daughter associations in IPV victimization using representative survey data from 16 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, a region of the world with particularly high IPV rates. We find that persistence is large in both levels and relative magnitudes. Women who report that their mother was physically abused by their father are 26 percentage points (1.9x) more likely to report physical or sexual violence from their current spouse. We then explore the role of cultural transmission. We find robust evidence for parental socialization, where daughters’ exposure to interparental violence increases their reported acceptability of IPV, and mixed evidence for the role of assortative matching in the marriage market on these attitudes.