Department of Economics

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;

&nbsp;

&nbsp;

Ashoka University

One of the most egregious manifestations of gender bias is the phenomenon of “missing women.” The number of missing women is projected to increase to 150 million by 2035, as a result of prenatal sex selection and excess female mortality relative to men, and is reflected in male-biased sex ratios at all ages. The economics literature identifies several proximate causes of the deficit of females, including the widespread use of prenatal sex selection in many Asian countries, which has been fueled by the diffusion of ultrasound and other fetal sex-detection technology. The use of prenatal sex selection has become even more expansive with a decline in fertility, as parents with a preference for sons are less likely to achieve their desired sex composition of children at lower levels of fertility. Gender discrimination in investments in health and nutrition also leads to excess female mortality among children through multiple channels.The deeper causes of son preference lie in the socioeconomic and cultural norms embedded in patriarchal societies, and recent literature in economics seeks to quantify the impact of these norms and customs on the sex ratio. Particularly important are the norms of patrilineality, in which property and assets are passed through the male line, and patrilocality, in which elderly parents coreside with their sons, whereas their daughters move to live with their husbands’ families after marriage. Another strand of the literature explores the hypothesis that the devaluing of women has roots in historical agricultural systems: Societies that have made little use of women’s labor are today the ones with the largest female deficits. Finally, economic development is often associated with a decline in son preference, but, in practice, many correlates of development, such as women’s education, income, and work status, have little impact on the sex ratio unless accompanied by more extensive social transformations.A number of policies have been implemented by governments throughout the world to tackle this issue, including legislative bans on different forms of gender discrimination, financial incentives for families to compensate them for the perceived additional costs of having a daughter, and media and advocacy campaigns that seek to increase the inherent demand for daughters by shifting the norm of son preference. Quantitative evaluations of some of these policies find mixed results. Where policies are unable to address the root causes of son preference, they often simply deflect discrimination from the targeted margin to another margin, and in some cases, they even fail in their core objectives. On the other hand, the expansion of social safety nets has had a considerable impact in reducing the reliance of parents on their sons. Similarly, media and advocacy campaigns that aim to increase the perceived value of women have also shown promise, even if their progress appears slow. Analysis of the welfare consequences of such interventions suggests that governments must pay close attention to underlying sociocultural norms when designing policy.

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Economics and Finance

Missing Women: A Review of Underlying Causes and Policy Responses

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.

World University root node

American Journal of Agricultural Economics

Gender and mechanization: Evidence from Indian agriculture

We study whether legal restrictions on prenatal discrimination against females leads to a shift by parents towards postnatal discrimination, focusing on the impact on educational attainment. We exploit the differentially timed introduction of a ban on sex-selective abortions across states in India. We find that a legal restriction on abortions led to an increase in the number of females born, as well as a widening in the gender gap in educational attainment. Females born in states affected by the ban are 2.3, 3.5, and 3.2 percentage points less likely to complete grade 10, complete grade 12, and enter university, respectively, relative to males. These effects are concentrated among non-wealthy households that lacked the resources to evade the ban. Investigating mechanisms, we find that the relative reduction in investments in female education was not driven by family size but because surviving females became relatively unwanted, whereas surviving males became relatively more valued, leading to an increasing concentration of household resources on them. Discrimination is amplified among higher-order births and among females with relatively few sisters. Finally, these negative effects exist despite the existence of a marriage market channel through which parents increase investments in their daughters’ education to increase the probability that they make a high-quality match. This suggests that policymakers need to address the unintended welfare consequences of interventions aimed at promoting gender equity.

Fulltext

Journal of Population Economics

Unwanted daughters: the unintended consequences of a ban on sex-selective abortions on the educational attainment of women

This paper examines the unintended consequences of a policy aimed at improving the groundwater level on crop residue burning in India. The Preservation of Subsoil Water Act, 2009 implemented in two Indian states bans the transplantation of paddy before mid-June to preserve groundwater. Theoretically, this leaves a short window of time for clearing the field before the next crop and thus increases the likelihood of farmers adopting time-saving methods like crop residue burning. Using a difference-in-difference framework we find that the ban results in both delay and an increase in crop residue burning in the winter months.

Department of Environmental Studies

Economics Letters

Unintended consequences of Indian groundwater preservation law on crop residue burning

Farmers in developing countries have little voice in influencing agricultural research. However, they are not without political influence. The tension between these understandings is examined by investigating the importance of farmers in the political economy of genetically modified crop approvals in India. The evidence shows that while farmers may not be important in shaping policy, they have the clout to defeat it.

Economic and Political Weekly

The Political Economy of Plant Biotechnology: Farmers, Media, and Opinion in India

Outsourcing of research is commonly observed in knowledge-intensive industries such as biotech. We model innovation as an ambiguous stochastic process with dynamically consistent updating. We assume that the research labs are less ambiguity averse than the commercial firms. We characterize the optimal sequence of short-term contracts governing innovation, and show how it facilitates ambiguity-sharing. This ambiguity sharing agreement mitigates the dynamic moral hazard problem, resulting in monotonically decreasing investment and preventing equilibrium delay. Compared to an ambiguity-neutral policymaker's benchmark, the research alliances stop experimenting too early, and may liquidate the project even after being patented. The problems are structural, redesigned patent laws cannot solve both of these problems.

Games and Economic Behavior

Dynamic contracting for innovation under ambiguity

We introduce the concept of an Arrowian social equilibrium that inverts the schemata of the famous impossibility theorem of Arrow (1950. "A Difficulty in the Concept of Social Welfare."Journal of Political Economy 58 (4): 328-46) and captures the possibility of aggregating non-rational individual preferences into rational social preferences while respecting the Arrowian desiderata. Specifically, we consider individuals whose preferences may not be complete and who, accordingly, may be indecisive when faced with an issue. Breaking with tradition, we consider the possibility of such individuals drawing on their beliefs about society's preferences that result from the aggregation process to resolve their indecisiveness. Formally, individual choices are modeled as a rational shortlist method (Manzini and Mariotti 2007. "Sequentially Rationalizable Choice."The American Economic Review 97 (5): 1824-39), with own preferences followed by society's as the pair of ordered rationales. This results in a mutual interaction between individual and social choices. We study this interaction using majority rule as the aggregator, with an Arrowian social equilibrium specifying how individual and social choices are co-determined, while requiring the latter to be rational. Our main result identifies minimal levels of societal indecisiveness needed to guarantee the existence of such equilibrium.

The B.E. Journal of Theoretical Economics

Arrowian Social Equilibrium: Indecisiveness, Influence and Rational Social Choices under Majority Rule

Many school children in ethnically diverse countries live in multilingual environments where the medium of instruction in school differs from their mother tongue. We conduct a field experiment in a multiethnic village in northern India to study the relative importance of linguistic distance and neighborhood isolation in the acquisition of language and mathematics skills in elementary school. The village has two sizable ethnic groups speaking languages very different from the medium of school instruction. Students attempt a set of mazes and take tests in reading and mathematics. We find that performance in language-dependent tasks relative to mazes is lower for children whose mother tongue is different from the medium of instruction only if their ethnic group is also residentially segregated. Language policy in most countries has traditionally favored either mother-tongue instruction or assimilation into mainstream language and culture. Our results suggest that there may be value in a more nuanced approach that flexibly combines some instructional support in a mother tongue for those who need it, with policies that encourage contact with speakers of dominant languages to benefit from peers and social networks.

Review of Development Economics

Language and learning in ethnically mixed communities

How do students decide what major to study and what explains the low enrolment of women in science and economics? Using data on the subjective expectations of undergraduate students who are in the process of selecting a major, we model major choice as a function of major-specific and job-specific attributes. We identify significant gender differences in the preferences for different attributes as well as in the expectations of future outcomes, especially of grades. Women are willing to pay twice as much as men for course enjoyment and higher grades, even as they expect lower grades in science and economics. This suggests that in addition to gender differences in preferences being shaped by pervasive norms about which subjects are considered more suitable for women, women also suffer from a relative confidence gap in their major-specific abilities.

Oxford Economic Papers

Preferences or expectations: understanding the gender gap in major choice

How do students decide what major to study and what explains the low enrolment of women in science and economics? Using data on the subjective expectations of undergraduate students who are in the process of selecting a major, we model major choice as a function of major-specific and job-specific attributes. We identify significant gender differences in the preferences for different attributes as well as in the expectations of future outcomes, especially of grades. Women are willing to pay twice as much as men for course enjoyment and higher grades, even as they expect lower grades in science and economics. This suggests that in addition to gender differences in preferences being shaped by pervasive norms about which subjects are considered more suitable for women, women also suffer from a relative confidence gap in their major-specific abilities.&nbsp;