"In chapter one I use a large nationally representative data set from India to analyze the causal effect of age at marriage of a woman on her post marriage health and fertility outcomes. To look at this effect I propose a new instrumental variable in the sparse causal literature. The instrumental variable strategy stems from two social practices within the Indian society; minimum age targeting at marriage and seasonality of marriage dates. I find that delaying marriage causally decreases the probability of a women being diabetic and having elevated blood pressure post marriage, increases her age at first birth and has a zero effect on the number of children she has. I also find that delayed marriage causally increases the women's educational attainment, improves her bargaining power within the household and improves her spousal quality. The paper also contrasts its findings with the existing causal literature by producing results using both the new and the existing instrumental variable in the literature. I find that both the IV's produce similar estimates in terms of health, education and spousal quality but the estimates differ for fertility outcomes. In the absence of universal social security, parents in India depend heavily on their off springs for post-retirement consumption. The patriarchal nature of the Indian society combined with low labor market returns for women skews this dependency towards sons. This skewedness in dependency for old age support, towards the son, might be a potential reason for gender gap in human capital investments of the children. In chapter two I use the 2004 New Pension Scheme reform in India as a quasi-experiment in a Difference in Difference in Difference framework to identify the causal effect of post retirement security on gender gap in human capital investment. I find that with the decrease in post-retirement security for the parents the gender gap against the female child increases. Compared to the male child, a girl child is less likely to be enrolled in a private school or a school where the medium of instruction is English, both these effects are statistically significant. I also find that the gender gap in test scores is larger post reform for the children of parents whose retirement security decreases, however these results are not statistically significant. Chapter three looks at the relationship between risk correlation in borrower outcomes and micro finance tools such as monitoring and audit. To look at these relationships I introduce risk correlation in existing theoretical models of moral hazard and costly state verification. I find that as risk correlation in borrower outcomes increases auditing by the lender increases whereas the relation with monitoring is conditional on the probability of success of the borrower and the monitor. I use the Townsend Thai data base to check whether the empirical findings are consistent with the theoretical predictions. I find that the relationship between risk correlation and monitoring depends on the measure of risk correlation I use and for auditing I find that the empirical findings are opposite to the theoretical prediction."--Pages ii-iii.
Read
