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

Climate change has increased rainfall uncertainty, leading to greater production risks in agriculture. We examine the gender-differentiated labor impacts of droughts using unique individual-level panel data for agricultural households in India over half a decade. Accounting for unobserved heterogeneity across individuals, we find that women’s workdays are 19% lower than men’s when a drought occurs, driven by the former’s lack of diversification to the non-farm sector. Women are less likely to work outside their village and migrate relative to men in response to droughts and are consequently unable to cope fully with the adverse agricultural productivity shock. We find suggestive evidence in support of social costs emanating from gender norms that constrain women’s access to non-farm work opportunities. The results highlight the gendered impact of climate shocks, potentially exacerbating extant gender gaps in the labor market.

Department of Economics

Labour Economics

The gendered effects of droughts: Production shocks and labor response in agriculture

This paper examines if in-home access to toilets reduces the risk of violent crimes against women. We use the roll out of the Swachh Bharat Mission, a flagship toilet construction program in India, to ascertain if assaults and rapes of women reduce when access to in-home toilets increases. We bolster our findings through an <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/economics-econometrics-and-finance/instrumental-variables">instrumental variable</a> strategy using political alignment of locally elected representatives in close elections with the national government&rsquo;s political party, post the launch of the program, as an instrument. We find that construction of toilets reduces sexual assaults on women, but do not discern consistent changes in rapes. Our findings for sexual assaults are robust to a variety of controls, specifications, and identification approaches. We address reporting changes as a plausible alternative explanation and present evidence to support the exclusion restriction in our IV strategy.

World University root node

Journal of Environmental Economics and Management

Access to toilets and violence against women

Technological change in production processes with gendered division of labor across tasks, such as agriculture, can have a differential impact on women's and men's labor. Using exogenous variation in the extent of loamy soil, which is more amenable to deep tillage than clayey soil and therefore more likely to see adoption of tractor-driven equipment for primary tilling, we show that mechanization led to significantly greater decline in women's than men's labor on Indian farms during 1999–2011. Reduced demand for labor in weeding, a task often undertaken by women, explains our findings. The estimates suggest that a 10% increase in mechanized tilling led to a 5% fall in women's farm labor use, with no accompanying increase in their non-farm sector employment. Our results highlight the gendered impact of technological change in contexts where there is task based gender division of labor with limited opportunities for women to diversify their workforce participation.

American Journal of Agricultural Economics

Gender and mechanization: Evidence from Indian agriculture

This paper examines the impact of reduced availability of hard liquor in bars on sexual crimes against women outside their homes. We construct a district level panel dataset on reported crimes and use an identification strategy that exploits a natural experiment that led to a complete crackdown on bars selling hard liquor in a state of India. Using a difference-in-differences strategy, we show that placing restrictions on alcohol sale through closure of on-premise drinking outlets that serve hard liquor reduces reported incidence of sexual assault and harassment against women but has no effect on reported rapes. We conduct placebo tests and show that the result is not driven by existing pre-trends. The result is also robust to an alternative estimation strategy using a synthetic control construction and the most conservative estimate shows a reduction in sexual assaults by 10%. These results have policy implications for regulating social drinking spaces due to their impact on women's public safety.

Fulltext

Journal of Development Studies

Public Safety for Women: Is Regulation of Social Drinking Spaces Effective?

In India, role of women as farm managers has been veiled behind image of men as primary decision makers on farms. Data shows that approximately 8% farm households had women farm managers in India in 2004 and this number increased to 11% in 2011. This rising phenomenon of farm management by women begets an in depth understanding about these farms, including, differentials in productivity levels across men and women managers. This paper uses three measures to capture productivity – production value, profit value and crop specific yields. Results show that total farm production and profits are lower by approximately 11% in households where women manage farms. This falls to 7% when controls for crop choice, input usage, location and farmer characteristics are included. The main mediating factors in explaining the productivity gap are crop choice and input usage, explaining almost 45% of the productivity gap. Further, the paper provides suggestive evidence on mechanisms contributing to the remaining productivity difference that cannot be explained by differences in observed characteristics. It shows that inadequate experience of women farm managers in agricultural production processes can be an important factor behind the remaining gap. The study makes two contributions to the literature – one, it is the first quantitative study in the Indian context on gender differentials in farm productivity and second, it applies semi-parametric decomposition techniques to look at the productivity differentials along the entire distribution.

World Development

Back to the plough: Women managers and farm productivity in India

In contrast with global trends, India has witnessed a secular decline in women's employment rates over the past few decades. We investigate this decline in rural areas, where the majority of Indian women reside. Using parametric and semi-parametric decomposition techniques, we show that changes in individual and household attributes fully account for the fall in women's labor force participation in 1987–1999 and account for more than half of the decline in 1999–2011. Our findings underscore increasing education levels among rural married women and the men in their households as the most prominent attributes contributing to this decline. We provide suggestive evidence that changes in more educated women's relative returns to home production compared with market production may have adversely affected female labor force participation in rural India.

Journal of Population Economics

Why are fewer married women joining the work force in rural India? A decomposition analysis over two decades

Amid (near) jobless economic growth during 2000-12, construction employment boomed at over 9% annually. It was part of a 10 percentage point rise in fixed capital formation rate in 13 years, to 35% of gross domestic product. The boom was rural, growing 2.5 times (at over 12%) as fast as in urban areas (at a mere 5%). National Sample Survey Office primary data reveals that a rise in rural private residential construction is the principal factor explaining the boom. This suggests improvements in rural housing status: conversion of kutcha houses into pucca houses. Decline in price-to-income ratio-of cement to rural wages-expanded rural construction demand. The popular perception (or explanation) for the rural construction employment boom in terms of rural-urban migration-of short-term, circular or seasonal-does not hold water.