This paper assesses the evidence for a fertility equilibrium point or rebound from low levels.

R&R at Journal of Population Economics. Our findings demonstrate that survey-reported ideal fertility is not altogether causally prior to realized fertility outcomes.

R&R at Journal of Development Economics. This paper studies the consequences of policy change for social desirability bias in survey responses in the context of a large-scale and highly-salient sanitation program in India.

The Indian Government created the National Clean Air Programme (NCAP) with an ambitious aim to reduce air pollution in 131 cities by 40% by 2026. If successful, NCAP would be one of the most important environmental policies in history. We evaluate the effect of NCAP, and find a precisely estimated zero effect.

Forthcoming in Demography. This study is the first to describe and decompose inequalities in maternal mortality across social group in India.

R&R at JPE Macro. A smaller human population would produce less carbon emissions, other things equal. This fact has led to the view that an important benefit of the ongoing, global decline in fertility will be reductions in long-run temperatures. Here we assess the magnitude and economic significance of this relationship.

Published in Economics and Human Biology. This paper studies the extent to which the dramatic reduction in open defecation exposure in India between 2015 and 2019 can statistically account for the increase in child height over this period of time.

Published in Economic Letters. In this paper, we update Pritchett (1994) by examining the relationship between ideal fertility in early adulthood and completed fertility for the same cohort of women in later adulthood. We find that the prior result replicates: The relationship between fertility preferences and completed cohort fertility is, if anything, even stronger in our data.

Published in Science Advances. This study is the first to examine declines and disparities in life expectancy by age, sex, and social group, in India during the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper has been published in Science Advances.

Published in Plos One. We show that any stable, long-run size of the world population would persistently depend on when an increase towards replacement fertility begins. Without such an increase, the 400-year span when more than 2 billion people were alive would be a brief spike in history.

Published in Journal of Human Resources. What are the child health and human capital consequences of India’s large coal power expansion? Using variation in local coal capacity within place across cohorts, I find that exposure to a median-sized coal plant at birth is associated with a 0.1 standard deviation child height deficit.

Published in Demographic Research. This study documents India's transition to low fertility despite high marriage rates, and consistently low age at first birth.

Published in Demography. In this research note, we show that heritable fertility is not sufficient for positive long-term population growth, for empirical and theoretical reasons.

Published in PNAS. This study estimates and decomposes life expectancy differentials along lines of caste, religion, and indigenous identity in India, home to some of the largest populations of marginalized social groups in the world.

Published in World Development. We examine why households are slow to adopt clean fuels in rural north India, and find that patriarchal gender norms and attitudes encourage the use of solid fuels in this region.

Published in Economic & Political Weekly. Although rural latrine ownership increased considerably over this period, open defecation remains very common.

Published in Economic & Political Weekly. We present survey evidence from rural north India showing persistent solid fuel use despite increases in liquefied petroleum gas ownership.

Published in BMJ Open. We provide the first evidence that individual-level questions find more open defecation than household-level questions.

Published in Environmental Health. After controlling for potential confounders, we find that children born in a month with higher ambient air pollution are shorter.

Published in Journal of Development Studies. This paper estimates how much the rate of open defecation would be reduced if rural households in regions that have a higher fraction of Hindus, where open defecation is still common, altered their behaviour to reflect that of non-Hindu households in regions that are predominantly non-Hindu, where the rate of open defecation is much lower.

Published in Social Science and Medicine. We find that households that are richer or better educated, that have certain demographic properties, or that improved their homes between 2005 and 2012 were more likely to switch to using a latrine or toilet. However, each of these effect sizes is small.

Published in Economic & Political Weekly. We link widespread open defecation in rural north India to beliefs, values, and norms about purity, pollution, caste, and untouchability that cause people to reject affordable latrines.

Published in Plos One. We find that indoor air quality while using an air purifier in New Delhi is frequently worse than in cities with moderate pollution, and often worse than levels observed even in polluted cities.

Published in Economics and Human Biology. The reduction in children’s exposure to open defecation over this period can statistically account for much or all of the increase in average child height between 2005 and 2010.

Published in Economic & Political Weekly. Based on new survey data collected in Bihar, Haryana, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh, we find that over 40% of households with a working latrine have at least one member who defecates in the open.