Ashoka University is a private university located in Sonipat, Haryana, India, focusing on liberal arts and sciences. It was established in 2014.&nbsp;It is guided by an academic council of academics and scholars from around the world. The council sets the university&#39;s academic standard, advising on matters of curriculum, faculty hiring and research.&nbsp;

Ashoka University offers a full-time 3 (+ 1) year undergraduate programme. The University comprises of&nbsp;2500 plus students, with a mix of both national and international students.&nbsp; &nbsp;

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Ashoka University

We study the association between the ritual of menstrual restrictions and maternal healthcare access in Nepal as similar restrictions are also practised around the time of childbirth. These restrictions are based on the assumption that women are ritually impure during both menstruation and childbirth. Our outcomes of interest include the likelihood of giving birth at home and receiving no trained medical assistance at childbirth. We use a rich set of controls as well as assess the sensitivity of our results to alternative estimation methods. We find that women who face any menstrual restriction are also more likely to give birth at home and receive assistance only from untrained individuals during childbirth, which potentially increases the risk of maternal mortality. These findings indicate that menstrual restriction related rituals can have persistent negative implications on women’s physical health that is not just limited to the time of menstruation.

Department of Economics

World Development Perspectives

Cultural norms and women’s health: Implications of the practice of menstrual restrictions in Nepal

We analyse the impact of work-life balance policies enacted by the government of Japan on the share of time allocated by Japanese women to paid employment, home production and leisure on a typical working day. Using panel data and employing fixed effects to control for unobserved individual heterogeneity, we find that these policies have had some success in increasing married women's share of time spent in paid employment. However, the increase in the share of time spent in paid employment is not largely compensated by cutting down the share of time spent in home production. This necessitates the need to cut down the share of time spent for leisure, implying a “double burden” of work for women. Further, work-life balance policies in married men's firms do not appear to significantly influence their time allocation between various activities on a typical working day. We find that although work-life balance policies do not appear to influence the desirability of having a child for all women, they help women with children younger than six years raise the share of time spent in paid employment by largely cutting down their time allocation to home production.

World University root node

Journal of the Japanese and International Economies

The Impact of Work-Life Balance Policies on the Time Allocation and Fertility Preference of Japanese Women

This paper examines the effects of the number of days worked by households under India’s National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) on expenditure patterns, food security, and individual time use. I use plausible exogenous variation in administrative bottlenecks regarding the timing of work provision as an instrument for the number of days worked. The paper finds that a greater number of days worked increases household food expenditure and especially spending on dairy, proteins, and vegetables that are likely to raise children’s nutritional status. Household food security is also found to improve. These effects seem to be because of the greater participation of women relative to men in the program. Greater adult participation in NREGA raises the time spent in school for younger girls. Importantly, women’s engagement in domestic chores as their major activity is found to fall. However, older boys are found to substitute for adults in agricultural work. Although girls are unlikely to substitute for adults in performing domestic tasks due to greater adult participation in NREGA, the increased engagement of boys in agricultural work is a plausible unintended consequence of the program.

Fulltext

Economic Development and Cultural Change

Consumption and Time-Use Effects of India’s Employment Guarantee and Women’s Participation

The Scheduled Tribes and Castes (STs and SCs) are the two most disadvantaged social groups in India. Previous studies have usually grouped the STs and SCs together as one disadvantaged group and have compared their educational and occupational mobility with the higher castes. We instead seek to compare health outcomes of the STs with not only the upper castes but also especially the SCs. We find that STs consistently perform poorly even relative to the SCs in terms of knowledge and usage of modern contraceptives, antenatal and postnatal healthcare, incidence of anemia and child immunization. However, female infant mortality is significantly higher among SCs than among STs, with no significant difference in male infant mortality between these groups. We find that ST women enjoy high social status and thus are unlikely to face impediments in accessing healthcare due to social norms that restrict women's autonomy. Oaxaca–Blinder decomposition methodology reveals that the health disparity between the STs and SCs for some key outcomes cannot be fully explained by differences in attributes between them. Suggestive evidence indicates that the health disparity can be likely attributed to the potentially greater marginalization that STs face even relative to SCs when accessing healthcare. This indicates the necessity to study STs in isolation from SCs so that policy can be designed to specifically target and mitigate health inequalities prevalent even among the most disadvantaged social groups.