Job Market Paper
The Female Labor Supply Constraints of Spousal Jealousy: Experimental Evidence from India
NEUDC Distinguished Paper Award 2025
This study presents evidence from two field experiments studying the role of spousal jealousy in constraining married women’s employment. In a first experiment (N=1,400), I randomize married women in India to receive a two-week job in either a mixed or women-only workplace. Women randomized to the women-only workplace are 46 percent more likely to spontaneously apply for a job (13 percentage points) and 31 percent more likely to attend the workplace (6 percentage points). A cross-randomized safety treatment suggests that workplace safety is not the main mechanism. Instead, the treatment effects are significantly stronger among women who report having more jealous and controlling husbands. In a second experiment (N=210), I directly test for a spousal jealousy mechanism by measuring whether women are more willing to interact with a male colleague if their husbands can monitor the interaction. I offer women a job that comes with a compulsory online peer support program and give them the option to forgo 20-35% of their salary to guarantee that the peer they are matched with will be a woman rather than a man. Fifty-three percent of women pay for the female peer when these remote interactions are one-on-one, but this drops to 34 percent once their husbands have the option of joining and can therefore monitor the conversations. One-third of households still pay for a female peer even if the mentoring simply involves watching pre-recorded videos of the peer, suggesting even the most innocuous interactions are enough to raise jealousy concerns.
Publications and Working Papers
Children’s Arithmetic Skills Do Not Transfer Between Applied and Academic Mathematics (with Abhijit Banerjee, Swati Bhattacharjee, Raghabendra Chattopadhyay, Esther Duflo, Alejandro Ganimian and Elizabeth Spelke)
Nature. February 2025
Many children from low-income backgrounds worldwide fail to master school mathematics; however, some children extensively use mental arithmetic outside school. Here we surveyed children in Kolkata and Delhi, India, who work in markets (N = 1,436), to investigate whether maths skills acquired in real-world settings transfer to the classroom and vice versa. Nearly all these children used complex arithmetic calculations effectively at work. They were also proficient in solving hypothetical market maths problems and verbal maths problems that were anchored to concrete contexts. However, they were unable to solve arithmetic problems of equal or lesser complexity when presented in the abstract format typically used in school. The children’s performance in market maths problems was not explained by memorization, access to help, reduced stress with more familiar formats or high incentives for correct performance. By contrast, children with no market-selling experience (N = 471), enrolled in nearby schools, showed the opposite pattern. These children performed more accurately on simple abstract problems, but only 1% could correctly answer an applied market maths problem that more than one third of working children solved. School children used highly inefficient written calculations, could not combine different operations and arrived at answers too slowly to be useful in real-life or in higher maths. These findings highlight the importance of educational curricula that bridge the gap between intuitive and formal maths.
Breadwinning Norms: Experimental Evidence from India (with Ishaana Talesara)
How important are social norms in shaping women’s labor supply relative to neo-classical economic forces? The widely studied “breadwinner norm” holds that it is socially undesirable for married women to earn more than their husbands. We test this prediction using a field experiment in India (N = 4,834). We randomly vary wage offers for salaried jobs among married women. If the norm binds, labor supply should be discontinuous or flatten when women are offered wages above their husband’s income. We find no evidence that women withdraw from the labor force when offered wages that exceed their husbands’ incomes and can reject negative discontinuities as small as 1.5 percentage points. Instead, labor supply is highly responsive to wages, consistent with standard economic models. These findings hold even in the most conservative households.
Financial Incentives, Health Screening, and Selecting Into Mental Health Care: Experimental Evidence from College Students in India (with Emily Breza, Kevin Carney, Vijaya Raghavan, Thara Rangaswamy, Gautam Rao, Frank Schilbach, Sobia Shadbar and James Stratton)
Young adults worldwide experience high rates of depression and anxiety, but few seek treatment. While financial incentives may increase uptake, they might misallocate scarce resources to individuals with low clinical need. We conducted a randomized controlled trial in Chennai, India (N = 340) to test how modest financial incentives and personalized mental health feedback affect the uptake of free therapy among college students. Despite 56% of students screening positive for at least mild depression or anxiety, only 3% in the control group attended therapy. A small cash incentive (~$6 USD) increased appointments by 9 pp (p = 0.06) and slightly improved targeting. Personalized recommendations increased appointments by 10 pp (p = 0.08) among symptomatic students while reducing them among asymptomatic students, thus improving targeting. Combining cash incentives with personalized recommendations increased appointments by 23 pp (p < 0.01) among symptomatic individuals, without generating take-up by asymptomatic individuals. These findings suggest that low-cost incentives coupled with screening information can effectively increase uptake while targeting limited mental health care resources to those with greater need.