Essays in Labor and Development Economics
type: CreativeWork
description: This dissertation is comprised of two chapters that investigate the long-term effects of a quota policy for women in local government in India. In the first chapter, "Political Inclusion and Educational Investment," I investigate whether political empowerment can affect the human capital investment decisions of children. By using exogenous variation in the implementation of the policy, nationally-representative survey data allow me to estimate effects on educational enrollment in a geographic discontinuity design using adjacent areas on either side of a state border as counterfactuals receiving different levels of exposure to the quota policy. In this paper, I find a sizable increase in the enrollment rates of both female and male school-age children resulting from additional exposure to local female leaders. I find that the effects are particularly concentrated among poorer households and those with less-educated proximate role models, and were commensurate with reductions in idle time and employment in household enterprises. There is no evidence for enrollment increases being facilitated by changes in school infrastructure, the labor market, or indicators related to intra-household dynamics. Overall, this paper makes a broader contribution to the literature in taking seriously the need to evaluate the external validity of experimental studies. Earlier work on this topic has focused on evaluating the same quota policy in a geographically restricted setting, with the added benefit of high internal validity but at the risk of the findings potentially being limited in their generalizability to the country as a whole. This chapter seeks to understand whether these earlier results do generalize, and if so, where and among which populations. While I find similar effects on enrollment among young women, I also find that the increase in scope reveals increases in enrollment among young men. This opens the potential for future work investigating the reasons for this respons…
abstract: This dissertation is comprised of two chapters that investigate the long-term effects of a quota policy for women in local government in India. In the first chapter, "Political Inclusion and Educational Investment," I investigate whether political empowerment can affect the human capital investment decisions of children. By using exogenous variation in the implementation of the policy, nationally-representative survey data allow me to estimate effects on educational enrollment in a geographic discontinuity design using adjacent areas on either side of a state border as counterfactuals receiving different levels of exposure to the quota policy. In this paper, I find a sizable increase in the enrollment rates of both female and male school-age children resulting from additional exposure to local female leaders. I find that the effects are particularly concentrated among poorer households and those with less-educated proximate role models, and were commensurate with reductions in idle time and employment in household enterprises. There is no evidence for enrollment increases being facilitated by changes in school infrastructure, the labor market, or indicators related to intra-household dynamics. Overall, this paper makes a broader contribution to the literature in taking seriously the need to evaluate the external validity of experimental studies. Earlier work on this topic has focused on evaluating the same quota policy in a geographically restricted setting, with the added benefit of high internal validity but at the risk of the findings potentially being limited in their generalizability to the country as a whole. This chapter seeks to understand whether these earlier results do generalize, and if so, where and among which populations. While I find similar effects on enrollment among young women, I also find that the increase in scope reveals increases in enrollment among young men. This opens the potential for future work investigating the reasons for this respons…
author: O'Connell, Stephen Daniel
keywords: Labor Economics, quota policies, affirmative action, education, politics, seat reservations
date published: 2016-06-03T07:00:00Z
date modified: 2026-07-24T01:59:30Z
provider: City University of New York - Graduate Center
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: The Graduate School and University Center of The City University of New York