Advancement to Candidacy Presentation: “Workfare and Women's Fertility”, Akanksha Arora
Speaker
Akanksha Arora, University of California, Santa Barbara
Event Details
Akanksha will be presenting her Advancement to Candidacy paper, Workfare, Marriage and Women’s Fertility: Evidence from India".
To access the Advancement paper, you must have an active UCSB NetID and password.
Abstract and JEL Codes
I estimate the effect of an expansion in employment opportunities available to women in India on their marriage and fertility choices. While overall female labour force participation in India has stagnated at very low levels, women’s participation in the workfare program, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, is fairly high. Using the staggered adoption of this workfare program across Indian districts for identification, I estimate whether the program had an effect on rates of marriage, fertility and sex ratio at birth. In my analysis, conditional on district covariates interacted with time in an age-adjusted model, the introduction of the workfare program led to 7.6 fewer marriages per 1000 women. Conceptions ending in live births per 1000 women in the 20-24 age group were also reduced by 19.1 but increased in the 25-29 age group by 15.5, indicating later childbearing which may potentially reduce overall fertility in the long-run.
JEL Codes: J1, J2
