Akanksha Arora

Using staggered school construction across Indian districts, I estimate the effects of increased school access on women’s educational attainment and marriage outcomes. An additional school per 1,000 school-age children, equivalent to about an 11 percent increase over the sample mean, raises women’s years of schooling by nearly 2 percent and increases primary school completion by about 3 percent, with no significant effect on secondary education. Improved access to schooling also delays marriage, narrows the spousal age gap, and reduces child marriage: a comparable expansion raises the age at marriage by roughly 0.2 percent, decreases the spousal age gap by about 0.5 percent, and increases the probability of remaining unmarried by age 18 by approximately 0.5 percent. Beyond individual outcomes, school expansion reshaped marriage markets by strengthening educational sorting between spouses. Assortative matching increased among the least educated groups, while remaining comparatively stable or declining modestly at higher education levels, suggesting increased stratification at the lower end of the education distribution. Each additional school raises the assortative mating index by about 1.6 percent, and back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that school expansion accounts for roughly 43 percent of the observed rise in assortative mating across marriage cohorts. However, I find little evidence that increased schooling improves women’s intra-household outcomes: decision-making power remains unchanged, domestic violence exhibits strong intergenerational persistence, and there is no evidence of backlash driven by changes in relative spousal education. These findings indicate that large-scale investments in schooling improved women’s human capital and delayed marriage while reshaping patterns of marital sorting, without substantially altering intra-household dynamics.

Using staggered school construction across Indian districts, I estimate the effects of increased school access on women's fertility behavior and the educational and health outcomes of the next generation. An additional school per 1,000 school-age children, equivalent to roughly an 11 percent increase relative to the sample mean exposure, delays age at first birth for women by approximately 0.03 years and reduces completed fertility by nearly 6 percent over the life cycle. Increased school access also generated significant intergenerational improvements in children’s educational attainment, increasing years of schooling by 8.6 percent and reducing the probability of falling behind grade level by nearly 19 percent. School construction additionally improves child height-for-age and increases the likelihood of institutional delivery. Overall, the findings suggest that large-scale investments in schooling generated persistent intergenerational benefits extending beyond directly exposed cohorts. School construction increased parental educational attainment and altered the distribution of education across households, but I find limited evidence that educational expansion substantially strengthened complementarities between parents in the production of child human capital.

I estimate the effect of an expansion in employment opportunities available to women in India on their marriage and fertility choices. While overall female labour force participation in India has stagnated at very low levels, women’s participation in the workfare program, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, is fairly high. Using the staggered adoption of this workfare program across Indian districts for identification, I estimate whether the program had an effect on rates of marriage, fertility and sex ratio at birth. In my analysis, conditional on district covariates interacted with time in an age-adjusted model, the introduction of the workfare program led to 7.6 fewer marriages per 1000 women (3.6 fewer marriages based on the heterogeneity-robust estimator). Conceptions ending in live births per 1000 women fell by 19.1 in the 20-24 age group but rose by 15.5 in the 25-29 age group, indicating a shift towards later childbearing which may potentially reduce overall fertility in the long-run.