Essays in development economics

Abstract

This thesis consists of three chapters which explore research questions pertaining to the welfare of children and women in India. In the first chapter, I study the effect of prenatal exposure to the low-intensity Naxalite conflict in India on neonatal mortality. Using a mother fixed-effects approach, I find that exposure to conflict in the second trimester of pregnancy increases the probability that a child will die in the first month of life by 0.09 percentage points, relative to his/her non-exposed siblings. In addition, I find suggestive evidence that an overall decline in the fetal health distribution ('scarring') and limited access to healthcare services at the time of delivery could explain the observed effect. The results are robust to a range of specifications but appear to be driven by districts with relatively higher levels of conflict activity. In the second chapter, I analyse panel data on a sample of Indian children using a mother fixed-effects approach and explore the relationship between birth order and height (height-for-age z-scores) as children age. The main estimates confirm that birth order is negatively associated with initial height-for-age z-scores. Further, I find that although second-born children exhibit some catch-up growth relative to their firstborn siblings as they age, the negative birth order gradient in height-for-age z-scores is persistent in nature. Heterogeneity analysis suggests that the main results are largely unaffected by differences in family size, son-preference and maternal education levels. In the third chapter, I examine the impact of India's large rural workfare programme, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS), on women’s empowerment. Using village-level availability of an active NREGS as an instrument, I find that household participation in the scheme is associated with a significant increase in the empowerment index that I construct. The effect appears to be driven by improvements in indicators capturing women’s access to resources and freedom of mobility. I do not, however, find evidence of an improvement in indicators reflecting women’s autonomy in the intra-household decision-making process.

Date of Award	9 May 2023
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bristol
Supervisor	Erlend Berg (Supervisor) & Zahra Siddique (Supervisor)