Essays in Gender and Development Economics

Abstract

This dissertation examines the impact of policy interventions aimed at reducing barriers to women's economic participation, with a focus on the role of social norms, networks, and intra-household responses in shaping women's decisions. This work highlights how efforts to improve women's access to resources and legal rights must often contend with entrenched gender norms, which can result in such efforts having unintended effects for women. My research employs a combination of econometric methods, including a quasi-experimental triple-differences design, a randomized field experiment, and network analysis using socio-centric network data from a randomized field experiment. The first chapter evaluates a state-led mobile phone distribution program in Chhattisgarh, India, providing some of the first evidence of the labor effects of such large-scale programs on urban households. I find that while the program may have increased women's phone ownership, it also led to an increase in male phone ownership. Further, households responded to increased phone ownership by decreasing female labor supply on the extensive margin while increasing male labor supply on the intensive margin. The second chapter investigates how a legal reform granting Saudi women the right to drive affects employment outcomes, using an experimental design that varied de facto access via enrollment in a driver's training course. Our findings indicate a significant increase in employment among women who received driver's training, but conversely a reduction in financial autonomy. The third chapter examines the role of women's social networks in response to a community engagement intervention in Uttar Pradesh, India. We leverage data on maternal and child health outcomes and socio-centric network data to explore how treatment effects differ based on how central women within the household are in their social network. Together these findings underscore the need to carefully consider how norms and networks shape household responses to policy reform.