Zakir Husain Centre for Educational Studies
School of Social Sciences
ZHCES Seminar Series
Female Leaders and Intrahousehold Dynamics: Evidence from State Elections in India
Priya Mukherjee
Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA
Abstract: We study the impact of women’s political representation on the wellbeing of their female constituents, specifically in the domain of health. Increasing women’s political representation leads to greater public provision of reproductive healthcare services in rural areas. Consequently, rural women can exercise greater control over their reproductive choices through the adoption of modern contraception and increased birth spacing. However, these positive impacts are accompanied by an increase in intimate partner violence against women. The increase in spousal abuse is particularly pronounced among women whose husbands prefer to have additional sons, suggesting that the wife’s greater contraceptive use triggers marital conflict.
Bio: Priya Mukherjee is an assistant professor at the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and is a research fellow at IZA-Institute of Labor Economics, and an affiliate at the Center for South Asia. She was previously an assistant professor at William & Mary (Williamsburg, VA), and a Visiting Scholar at Boston University's Institute for Economic Development. Prof. Mukherjee’s primary research interests include development economics, with an emphasis on the role of human capital and political economy. She utilizes both field experiments and non-experimental methods in her work. Her current research projects are based in India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Nepal, and include studies on the impact of democratization and decentralization, improving state capacity, understanding education markets, and more recently, investigating the effects of the pandemic on the wellbeing of children and women.