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Prevalence of open defecation is associated with adverse health effects, detrimental not only for the individual but also the community. Therefore, neighborhood characteristics can influence collective progressive behavior such as improved sanitation practices. This paper uses primary data collected from rural and urban areas of Bihar to study the relationship between jati (sub-castes) level fractionalization within the community and toilet ownership and its usage for defecation. The findings indicate a diversity dividend wherein jati fractionalization is found to improve toilet ownership and usage significantly. While exploring the channels, we find social expectations to play an important role, where individuals from diverse communities tend to believe that there is a higher prevalence of toilet usage within the community. To assess the reasons for the existence of these social expectations, we use data from an egocentric network survey on a sub-sample of the households. The findings reveal that in fractionalized communities, the neighbors with whom our respondents interacted are more likely to be from different jatis. They are also more likely to use toilets and approve of its usage due to health reasons. Discussions about toilets are more common among neighbors from fractionalized communities, which underscore the discernible role of social learning. The inferences drawn from the paper have significant implications for community level behavioral change interventions that aim at reducing open defecation.

Women agency defined as the ability to conceive of purposeful plan and to carry out action consistent with such a plan can play an important role in determining health status. Using data from female respondents conducted in a survey in the city of Dhaka in Bangladesh, this paper explores how women agency relates to their physical and mental health. The findings indicate women with high agency to experience significantly lesser mental distress on average. Counterintuitively, these women are more likely to report poor physical health. As an explanation, we propose purposeful action among women with high agency as a potential reason, wherein they conceive purpose in the future and formulate action that is feasible today. Hence, these women prefer to report illness and get the required treatment to ensure better future health. This illuminates our understanding of sustainable development and emphasises the critical role of women agency for sustainable human development.

Mathematical ability is among the most important determinants of prospering in the labour market. Using multiple representative datasets with learning outcomes of over 2 million children from rural India in the age group 8 to 16 years, the paper examines the prevalence of gender gap in performance in mathematics and its temporal variation from 2010 to 2018. Our findings from the regressions show significant gender gap in mathematics, which is not observable for reading skills. This difference in mathematics scores remains prevalent across households of different socio-economic and demographic groups. This gap is found to be persistent over time and it appears to increase as the children get older. We also find significant inter-state variation with the north Indian states lagging behind considerably and the south Indian states showing a reverse gender gap. As an explanation to this, we observe evidence of a robust association between pre-existing gender norms at the household and district level with higher gender gap. The findings, in light of other available evidence on the consequences of such gaps, call for the need to understand these gender specific differences more granularly and periodically to inform gender-specific interventions.

The study examines the effect of cooking fuel choice on educational outcomes of adolescent children in rural India. Using multiple large-scale nationally representative datasets, we observe household solid fuel usage to adversely impact school attendance, years of schooling and age-appropriate grade progression among children. This inference is robust to alternative ways of measuring educational outcomes, other datasets, specifications and estimation techniques. Importantly, the effect is found to be more pronounced for females in comparison to the males highlighting the gendered nature of the impact. On exploring possible pathways, we find that the direct time substitution on account of solid fuel collection and preparation can explain the detrimental educational outcomes that include learning outcomes as well, even though we are unable to reject the health channel. In the light of the micro and macro level vulnerabilities posed by the COVID-19 outbreak, the paper recommends interventions that have the potential to fasten the household energy transition towards clean fuel in the post-covid world.

One important dimension of Conditional Cash Transfer Programs apart from conditionality is the provision of continuous frequency of payouts. On the contrary, the Apni Beti Apna Dhan program, implemented in the state of Haryana in India from 1994 to 1998 offers a promised amount to female beneficiaries redeemable only after attaining 18 years of age if she remains unmarried. This paper assesses the impact of this long-term financial incentivization on outcomes, not directly associated with the conditionality. Using multiple datasets in a triple difference framework, the findings reveal a significant positive impact on years of education though it does not translate into gains in labor participation. While gauging the potential channels, we did not observe higher educational effects beyond secondary education. Additionally, impact on time allocation for leisure, socialization or self-care, age of marriage beyond 18 years, age at first birth, and post-marital empowerment indicators are found to be limited. These evidence indicate failure of the program in altering the prevailing gender norms despite improvements in educational outcomes. The paper recommends a set of complementary potential policy instruments that include altering gender norms through behavioral interventions skill development and incentives to encourage female work participation., Comment: Education; labor participation; early marriage; Haryana

Why do people engage in certain behavior. What are the effects of social expectations and perceptions of community behavior and beliefs on own behavior. Given that proper infant feeding practices are observable and have significant health impacts, we explore the relevance of these questions in the context of exclusive infant breastfeeding behavior using social norms theory. We make use of a primary survey of mothers of children below the age of two years in the Kayes and Sikasso region of Mali, which have a historically lower prevalence of exclusive breastfeeding. The findings from regression estimations, controlling for a host of potential confounding factors, indicate that expectations about the behavior of other community members can strongly predict individual exclusive breastfeeding. Beliefs about approval of the infant feeding behavior of the community though are found to be only modestly associated with it. In addition, mothers who hold false but positive beliefs about the community are found to exclusively breastfeed their kids. Further, using responses from randomly assigned vignettes where we experimentally manipulated the levels of social expectations, our data reveal a strong relationship between perceived prevalence of community level exclusive breastfeeding and individual behavior. This result indicates the existence of a potential causal relationship. We argue that our findings represent an important foundation for the design of policy interventions aimed at altering social expectations, and thus effecting a measurable change in individual behaviors. This type of intervention, by using social norm messaging to end negative behavior, avoids the use of coercive measures to effect behavior change in a cost-effective and efficient way.

Signalling social status through the consumption of visible goods has often been perceived as a way in which individuals seek to emulate or move up compared to others within the community. Using representative migration survey data from the Indian state of Kerala, this paper assesses the impact of transnational migration on consumption of visible goods. We utilize the plausibly exogenous variation in migration networks in the neighbourhood and religious communities to account for the potential endogeneity. The findings indicate a significantly positive and robust effect of migration on conspicuous consumption, even after controlling for household income. In terms of the mechanisms, while we are unable to rule out the associated taste-based changes in preferences and the peer group effects driving up the spending on status goods, we observe only limited effects of these channels. A potential channel that we propose is information gap among permanent residents about the income levels of an out-migrant, which is leveraged by them to signal higher status in society. We explore this channel through a theoretical model where we connect migration, information gap and status good consumption. We derive a set of conditions to test whether migrants exhibit snobbish or conformist behaviour. Empirical observations indicate predominance of a snobbish behaviour.

Compliance with the public health guidelines during a pandemic requires coordinated community actions which might be undermined in socially diverse areas. In this paper, we assess the relationship between caste-group diversity and the spread of COVID-19 infection during the nationwide lockdown and unlocking period in India. On the extensive margin, we find that caste-homogeneous districts systematically took more days to cross the concentration thresholds of 50 to 500 cases. Estimates on the intensive margin, using daily cases, further show that caste-homogeneous districts experienced slower growth in infection. Overall, the effects of caste-group homogeneity remained positive and statistically significant for 2.5 months (about 76 days) after the beginning of the lockdown and weakened with subsequent phases of the lockdown. The results hold even after accounting for the emergence of initial hotspots before lockdown, broader diffusion patterns through daily fixed effects, region fixed effects, and dynamic administrative response through time-variant lagged COVID-19 fatalities at the district level. These effects are not found to be confounded by differential levels of testing and underreporting of cases in some states. Consistent estimates from bias-adjusted treatment effects also ensure that our findings remain robust even after accounting for other unobservables. We find suggestive evidence of higher engagement of community health workers in caste-homogenous localities, which further increased after the lockdown. We posit this as one potential channel that can explain our results. Our findings reveal how caste-group diversity can be used to identify potential hotspots during public health emergencies and emphasize the importance of community health workers and decentralized policy response.

This paper documents the representation of women in Economics academia in India by analyzing the share of women in faculty positions, and their participation in a prestigious conference held annually. Data from the elite institutions shows that the presence of women as the Economics faculty members remains low. Of the authors of the papers which were in the final schedule of the prestigious research conference, the proportion of women authors is again found to be disproportionately low. Our findings from further analysis indicate that women are not under-represented at the post-graduate level. Further, the proportion of women in doctoral programmes has increased over time, and is now almost proportionate. Tendency of women who earn a doctorate abroad, to not return to India, time needed to complete a doctoral program, and responsibilities towards the family may explain lower presence of women in Economics academia in India.

Higher duration of programs that involve legal protection may entail gradual positive changes in social norms that can be leveraged by potential beneficiaries in their favor. This paper examines the heterogeneous impact of the duration of exposure to gender-neutral reforms in the inheritance law in India on two latent domains of women empowerment: intrinsic, which pertains to expansion of agency and instrumental which relates to ability to make decisions. The time lag between the year of the amendment in the respective states and the year of marriage generate exogenous variation in reform exposure across women. The findings indicate a significant non-linear increase in the instrumental as well as intrinsic empowerment. Importantly, improvements in education along with increase in the age of marriage and changes in family structure are found to be the potential channels that signal gradual relaxation of social norms and explain the higher returns to exposure on empowerment.

Compliance with measures like social distancing, hand-washing and wearing masks have emerged as the dominant strategy to combat health risk from the COVID-19 pandemic. These behaviors are often argued to be pro-social, where one must incur private cost to benefit or protect others. Using self-reported data across India (n=934) through online survey, we assess if changes in perceived community compliance can predict changes in individual compliance behavior, controlling for the potential confounders. We observe statistically significant and positive relationship between the two, even after accounting for omitted variable bias, plausibly allowing us to view the results from a plausible causal lens. Further, we find subsequent lockdowns such as the ones imposed in India, have a detrimental effect on individual compliance though the gains from higher perceived community compliance seems to offset this loss. We also find that sensitization through community can be particularly effective for people with pre-existing co-morbidities. Our findings underscore the need for multi-level behavioral interventions involving local actors and community institutions to sustain private compliance during the pandemic.