BACKGROUNDTheories of human capital would suggest that with more education, women acquire greater skills and their earnings increase, resulting in higher labor force participation. However, it has been long known that in India, women's education has a U-shaped relationship with labor force participation. Part of the decline at moderate levels of education may be due to an income effect whereby women with more education marry into richer families that enable them to withdraw from the labor force. OBJECTIVEThe paper uses the first comprehensive Indian income data to evaluate whether the other family income effect explains the negative relationship between moderate women's education and their labor force participation. METHODSUsing two waves of the India Human Development Survey, a comprehensive measure of labor force participation is regressed on educational levels for currently married women aged 25-59. RESULTSWe find a strong other family income effect that explains some but not all of the Ushape education relationship. Further analyses suggest the importance of a lack of suitable employment opportunities for moderately educated women. CONCLUSIONOther factors need to be identified to explain the paradoxical U-shape relationship. We suggest the importance of occupational sex segregation, which excludes moderately educated Indian women from clerical and sales jobs.

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India has about 400 million internal migrants (UNESCO 2013). The proportion of permanent internal migrants in India has risen between 1983 and 2007-08, and much of this increase is attributed to female marriage migrants. However, there is limited literature analyzing the wellbeing of female marriage migrants in India. This paper seeks to examine whether women's autonomy in the public sphere is a function of: a) the geographical community where the woman resides, or b) imagined communities (the mindset of the communities to which the woman's family belongs), using multilevel mixed-effects logistic and ordered logistic regression. Analyzing data from the India Human Development Survey (IHDS), 2012, for more than 34,000 ever-married women aged 15-49 years, the study finds that the communities in the mind (norms about marriage migration in the caste/sub-caste to which the woman's family belongs) are more important than the physical communities to which the women have migrated, in relation to certain aspects of women's physical autonomy and autonomy to participate in civic activities. In contrast, a woman's economic autonomy is a function of both 'imagined' and 'physical' communities. Thus, the opportunities available to women who migrate for marriage are shaped by both geographical communities, and more importantly, by the norms in her community about marriage migration.

This study examines the relationship between women’s prospective fertility intentions and child health, measured via access to healthcare facilities for children and postpartum maternal behaviors that are indicative of future child health. We analyze two waves of nationally representative data (2005 and 2012) from the India Human Development Survey (IHDS). The analytic sample includes 3,442 non-pregnant, currently married women aged 18–40 in 2005 who participated in both rounds of the IHDS, and had at least one birth between 2005 and 2012. We investigate the influence of women’s prospective fertility intentions on access to benefits from the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS), indicators of breastfeeding as recommended by the World Health Organization, and official documentation of births via birth certificates or registration. We find that 58 percent of births among women in the sample were labeled as unwanted. We use an adaptation of propensity score matching—the inverse-probability-weighted regression adjustment (IPWRA) estimator—and show that, after accounting for maternal and household characteristics that are known to be associated with maternal and child health, children who resulted from unwanted births were less likely to obtain any benefits or immunizations from the ICDS, to be breastfed within one hour of birth, and to have an official birth certificate. Results from this study have direct policy significance given the evidence that women’s fertility intentions can have negative implications for child health and wellbeing in the short and longer term.

Indian women's labor force participation rates have long demonstrated a U‐shaped relationship with their education, rather than a more conventional positive linear relationship. The low rates of employment for moderately educated women are usually explained either as a result of the cultural stigma of women's employment in a patriarchal society or because of the lack of demand from white‐collar and light manufacturing jobs for women with middle levels of education. Using especially well‐suited data from two waves of the India Human Development Survey, we test these explanations by examining the education–employment relationship in districts with low cultural stigma (low observance of purdah) and high proportions of (salaried) employment considered “suitable” for women. We find little support for either the cultural or structural explanations: the education–employment relationship remains U‐shaped in districts with low stigma or with more “suitable” salaried employment. Instead, we suggest a better explanation lies in the high levels of gender segregation where most white‐collar jobs are reserved for men. We simulate what the education–employment relationship would look like if these white‐collar occupations were female‐dominated as they are in most places in the world and find a more conventional linear relationship.