Subject Area

Economics

Abstract

This dissertation contributes to intersection of applied microeconomics and economics of gender. Each chapter attempts to examine how natural experiments as well as endogenous selection processes impact overall outcomes in gender violence, women empowerment as well as mobility and work decisions. It also highlights the role of gender-specific attitudes and norms in shaping outcomes. The first chapter investigates the relationship between the rise in popularity of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in 2013 and reported crimes against women in India. The analysis utilizes state-panel data from 2009–2016, employing difference-in-differences and event study estimation strategies. The findings indicate that reported incidents of rape and kidnapping increased significantly between 2013 and 2016 in states where the BJP gained substantial popularity. Replacing the binary treatment of popularity with a continuous measure based on vote shares yields similar patterns. The robustness checks provide evidence on concentration of large numbers of reporting in Delhi, as well as presence of measurement error in overall crime numbers. Conversely, there is little-to-no evidence of a similar relationship between the party's popularity and gender-neutral crimes, such as murder, burglary, and robbery. While the results point to a strong correlation between the BJP's rising popularity and an increase in reported crimes against women, the findings are interpreted as correlational due to possibility of unobservables, and absence of any underlying mechanisms. The second chapter investigates the impact of education hypogamy—where wives have strictly higher educational attainment than their husbands—on intra-household gender relations in India. Because marriage sorting is endogenous and identification through instruments is difficult, I employ the non-parametric bounds approach to derive bounds on the estimates. Using data from the Indian Human Development Survey 2011–12, the results present that hypogamy increases the likelihood that women in hypogamous marriages are less likely to have a say in household and work decisions while they are more likely to seek permission for routine mobility. These effects are robust—and in some cases even stronger—when equally educated couples are included in the treatment group. The findings reveal a critical limitation of using education as a proxy for bargaining power: in settings with entrenched gender norms, higher female education relative to husbands does not always enhance women’s effective agency within marriage. The third chapter complements the second while trying to establish a relationship between education hypogamy and male attitudes towards wife's empowerment and intimate partner violence. I draw data from the National Family Health Survey 2014-15 and 2019-21. Using a similar methodology as in the previous chapter, I find that men in hypogamous marriages are more likely to report that only the husband should have a say within a couple about important household decisions. Similarly they are more likely to justify domestic violence for certain situations. Such results hold consistent with the results found in the second chapter and provides more evidence of strong gender norms standing in the way of improvement of women's' lives in hypogamous marriages.

Degree Date

Spring 5-16-2026

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Department

Economics

Advisor

Daniel Millimet

Second Advisor

Nathaniel Pattison

Third Advisor

Prasanthi Ramakrishnan

Fourth Advisor

Punarjit Roychowdhury

Number of Pages

113

Format

.pdf

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License

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