Through my dissertation, I aim to uncover the processes that govern the relationship between social or ethnic identity and economic outcomes such as employment and education. I focus in particular on studying outcomes for Muslim women in India who have remained on the fringes of economic enquiry. A majority of the literature on economic exclusion in India has focused on caste based discrimination, which is warranted given the acute poverty and deprivation faced by lower caste communities in the country. However, despite being comparable on measures of economic, social and educational deprivation, Indian Muslims have remained absent from the development discourse in the country. I hope my research will contribute to filling this lacuna in the literature.The first chapter examines the evolution of labor force participation rate (LFPR) differences between women from the Hindu, Schedule Caste/Schedule Tribe (SC/ST) and Muslim communities in India. I find that affirmative action policies have led to convergence in the education levels of Hindus and SC/ST which has consequently led to a narrowing of the LFPR gap of the two groups, however, the Hindu-Muslim gap in female labor participation remains persistently high. I find that part of the religious gap is explained due to Muslim women being trapped in enclaves of low economic development due to a combination of Muslim ghettoization and relatively localized marriage markets. Contrary to popular rhetoric, I find that culture does not play a big role in explaining the absence of Muslim women from the labor force. In the second chapter my coauthor Dr Maitreyi Bordia Das and I, study the causes for large differences in female labor force participation between West Bengal and Bangladesh. Despite historical and cultural commonalities, both regions exhibit very different levels of socio-economic development, one of which is the wide disparity in female labor force participation. We find that observable covariates do not play a major role in explaining the wide gap in female LFPR between the two regions. This is driven by the fact that in West Bengal, much like the rest of India, higher levels of education and improvements in social status leads to withdrawal of women from the labor force. On the other hand, we find the opposite to be true in Bangladesh. In comparing Muslims on either side of the border, our results remain qualitatively similar to the aggregate results. We conclude that the differing political trajectories followed by the two regions have created widely varying economic structures which have in turn led to divergent demands for female labor in the two countries- the most obvious of which is the decline of agriculture in West Bengal and the continued flourishing of both agriculture and manufacturing in Bangladesh. The third chapter aims to study the impact of communal violence in India on the schooling and education decisions of Muslims in India. The causes and consequences of violent conflict, particularly civil war, mass violence and ethnic conflict, has attracted considerable scholarly attention across disciplines. However, there is much less research on the how small isolated and geographically dispersed incidences of violence can lead to long term deficit in human capital accumulation for entire communities. This effect could be driven by the immediate loss of life and livelihood following conflict. However, repeated conflict also ingrains a culture of fear in the minds of the victimized community that implicitly determines economic behavior in the long-run. My paper deals with one such group, namely Indian Muslim. I use data on religious violence from 1950-2006 combined with data on education from several consecutive rounds of the National Sample Survey (NSS) on Employment and Unemployment (Schedule 10) and Participation in Education (Schedule 25.2) covering the period between 1983 and 2014. My results suggest that both contemporaneous and cumulative violence has no effect on the educational outcomes and dropout decision of Muslim girls and boys.
Read
