Tarana Chauhan - Research

Job Market Paper

Agricultural Credit and Women's Agency: Experimental Evidence from India

(with Berber Kramer, Patrick Ward and Subhransu Pattnaik)

Abstract: Women in rural agrarian households are constrained in their ownership of individual assets and their access to financial resources. We test the effects of relaxing households' liquidity constraints through the randomized provision of collateral-free loans to 1,429 farming households across 80 villages. Since Indian farming households rely on joint contributions from men and women, a loan for agricultural production can benefit household members through consumption and changes in their residual income. The loan product enhanced women's financial autonomy and uptake of digital financial services, accompanied by an expansion of women's access to resources. Women in loan-receiving households allocated more hours to leisure and fewer to farm and non-farm work on the busiest day of the agricultural season than the control group, although women's labor supply across the agricultural season and household farm income did not differ between treatment and control villages. The loan did not change women's intrahousehold bargaining power but amplified pre-existing cooperative household arrangements. The results suggest that credit to households with joint production can improve women's outcomes, such as access to resources and financial inclusion, that are often difficult to affect through targeted resource provision.

Blog Posts:

Invited talk

Economics Seminar Series, Providence College, 2026
Plaksha University, 2026
Management Development Institute, 2026

Conferences:

21st Annual Conference on Economic Growth and Development, Indian Statistical Institute, December 2026.
Webinar Series in Finance & Development (WEFIDEV), October 26 2026.
Global Labor Organization JOPE Bonn 2025, December 3 2025.

Publication

Learning together: Experimental evidence on the impact of group-based nutrition interventions in rural Bihar

(with Kalyani Raghunathan, Neha Kumar, Shivani Gupta, Ashi Kohli Kathuria and Purnima Menon). World

Development, August 2023, 168: 106267.

Working Papers

Accounting for Empowerment? Examining Women's Financial Inclusion in India [Under review]

Abstract: Bank accounts are an essential first step towards formal savings and credit in most countries, yet their impact on women’s control over resources remains underexplored. I investigate the effects of 2014 policy in India that provided free bank accounts and led to an unprecedented increase in women's account ownership. This paper shows that bank account ownership improves households' financial access, and in certain cases increases women's decision making on household spending. Using a difference-in-difference estimation that exploits the sharp timing of the policy and a high-frequency household panel data, I find that women’s account ownership increased household's likelihood to save in formal instruments and switch to formal sources of borrowing but did not affect consumption patterns consistent with women's preferences. Exploiting regional variation in pre-policy bank infrastructure, I further analyze the effects on women’s self-reported decision-making. While districts with faster account expansion did not exhibit overall improvement of women’s participation in household purchase decisions or spending autonomy, there were significant gains in districts where women had greater ex-ante mobility and households trusted banking institutions.

Invited Talks:

Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore, 2025
Kania School of Management, University of Scranton, 2024
Economics Department Research Seminar, Lafayette College, 2023
Colgate Hamilton Economics Seminar, Colgate University, 2023

Conferences:

19th Annual Conference on Economic Growth and Development, Indian Statistical Institute, Dec 19-21 2024.
North East Universities Development Consortium (NEUDC) 2024 Conference, Nov 2-3 2024.
Eastern Economic Association (Organizer and presenter, CSWEP sponsored session on Financial Inclusion of Socially Vulnerable Groups in India), February 29-March 3 2024.
European Winter Meeting of the Econometric Society (EWMES2023), University of Manchester, December 17-19 2023.
Researcher Gathering, Innovations for Poverty Action and the Global Poverty Research Lab at Northwestern University, October 12-14 2023.

When Women Defer: Agency, Resource Control, and Intimate Partner Violence. [Under Review]

(with Carolina Castilla and David Murphy)

Abstract: We present results from an experiment with married couples in Western Kenya, who play five rounds of a voluntary contributions game. Spouses allocate an endowment between a private account and a household account earning 50 percent interest. We add a randomized first stage where women either allocate the endowment or choose whether to defer the decision to their husbands. Thirty-five percent defer in at least one round. These women receive smaller endowments and contribute less to the household account. Efficiency is higher when women exert agency. Deference is also associated with higher exposure to intimate partner violence.

Conference:

21st Annual Conference on Economic Growth and Development, Indian Statistical Institute, December 2026.

Do political motivations affect recovery from natural hazards? Analysis of floods in India

Abstract: The state plays a central role in managing risk and responding to natural hazards and climate change, as well as enabling private sector involvement in these areas. However, political processes can potentially undermine recovery if they influence the state's relief efforts. This paper examines whether the following political incentives influence governments’ resource allocation in the aftermath of floods in India: targeting loyal supporters, voters at the margin, or staunch opposition. The paper uses fixed effects linear regression models to analyze differences in the recovery of economic activity of constituencies exposed to a flood shock by election outcomes between 2008 and 2013. It uses a regression discontinuity on the vote share of the ruling party candidate to test the causal effect of a flooded constituency's affiliation with the state ruling party on post-flood economic activity. Economic activity is defined as monthly aggregates of the nighttime luminosity of a constituency. The ruling parties in the sample were more likely to prioritize their staunch opposition in post-flood relief and restoration than their loyal supporters. Increasing vote margin of loss for the ruling party candidate corresponded with faster recovery in the first two months after a flood. A consecutive second term of state governments and the proximity of a flood to an upcoming election were associated with faster recovery. With rising temperatures and climate change, the global incidence of floods is expected to intensify. The results of this paper help understand the political factors that may affect a local community’s recovery and inform the mitigation efforts of state and non-state institutions.

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Conferences:

100 Years of Economic Development, Cornell University, September 15-17 2022.
Jobs, innovation and rural value chains in the context of climate transition: Bridging the gap between research and policy, International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), June 21-24 2022.
Centre for the Study of African Economies (CSAE) Conference on Economic Development in Africa, 14-18 March 2022.
Pacific Conference for Development Economics (PacDev) 2022, University of San Francisco, March 5 2022.
European Economic Association (EEA)-ESEM Virtual, August 23-27 2021.
AAEA & WAEA Joint Annual Meeting, August 1-3 2021.
International Conference in Development Economics, DIAL, GREThA and LAREFI, June 30- July 2 2021.

Extreme temperature and intimate partner violence (IPV): Evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract: This paper tests the effect of extreme high and low temperatures on women’s experience of intimate partner violence (IPV) through temperature-induced aggression in Sub-Saharan Africa. Related papers find that drought is likely to increase the incidence of IPV. I find a higher prevalence of physical forms of IPV for women who experienced higher maximum temperatures than the historical average. The prevalence of emotional and sexual violence is lower in this context. A test for the correspondence between the days of temperature-and-humidity-based discomfort and severity of violence reveals the same pattern for the three categories of violence. A woman experiencing extreme heat and cold is more likely to report physical, sexual and emotional violence if her partner drinks and if she is employed. These results highlight the distributional effects of climate change and the need for public policy measures, training of law enforcement agents and amendment of laws to reflect them.

Conferences:

Third Biennial Conference on Development, Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research, Dec 16-19 2024
Agricultural & Applied Economics Association Annual Meeting, Washington D.C., July 23-25 2023.

Works in progress

Worker sorting and retention in Indian manufacturing with Natasha Jha
- Lab-in-Field experiments with 100 hiring managers and 600 workers to study worker evaluation during hiring, measure misallocation and explain high attrition in Haryana, India
- Funding: BIG Lab Mezzanine Grant (University of Notre Dame)
- IRB: University of Notre Dame; DAI Research & Advisory Services
- Data collection: February - April 2026

Fieldwork

Manesar, Haryana (India), 2025
Thimmapuram and Uppada, Andhra Pradesh (India), 2024
Tirupathur, Tamil Nadu (India), 2021
Saharsa, Bihar (India), 2016-18

Photo credit: Siva, Location: Andhra Pradesh, India