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Abstract:
Boys and girls in India experience large differences in survival and health outcomes. For example, the 2001 Census reports that the sex ratio for children under six years of age is 927 girls per thousand boys, an outcome that has been attributed to differences in parents' behavior towards their sons and daughters. Most studies rely primarily on cultural factors or biases in economic returns to explain these differences. In this paper, I propose an explanation where bequest motives drive fertility behavior that generates sex-based differences in outcomes even when parents do not explicitly prefer boys over girls. In India's patrilocal rural society, women do not inherit property and heads of joint families aim to retain assets within the family lineage for future generations. I hypothesize that this leads heads to bequeath more land to claimants with more sons, in turn generating a race for sons among adult brothers seeking to maximize their inheritance of agricultural land. I confirm this theoretical prediction using panel data from rural households in India. This strategic fertility behavior implies that girls have systematically more siblings compared to boys, and hence receive smaller shares of household resources, offering an explanation for sex-based differences in outcomes.

Strategic bequests, Joint family, Fertility choice, Gender discrimination, Sex ratio

Abstract:
This paper uses laboratory experiments to address the challenge of effectively designing incentive schemes for school teachers where pay is a function of student performance in a society with pervasive prejudice. We consider an environment where different teachers, each specializing in a different subject, teach a single set of students in an environment of caste and religion based prejudice. We show that in such an environment, a performance based incentive scheme where a teacher's salary depends on the average performance of students in the class causes teachers to coordinate their investments in high status students at the expense of low status students. We propose and test a remedy that alleviates the shortcomings of the proposed design. In a laboratory experiment with future teachers as subjects, we show that teachers decrease investment in low caste Hindu students compared to upper caste Hindu or Muslim students when coordination is salient. We verify fewer students are completely ignored by teachers under a simple remedy where teachers are penalized if students receive zero investment and scores.

Teacher incentives, Laboratory experiments, Coordination games, Discrimination