NOMAN AHMAD

This paper studies the effect of dowries on women’s mental health within marriage by using international gold price fluctuations at the time of marriage as a source of exogenous variation. In South Asia, gold jewelry is a central part of dowry, and changes in gold prices directly influence the value of the dowry under a woman's control. Using data from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) in Nepal, I find that higher gold prices at the time of marriage are associated with significantly lower anxiety (GAD-7) and depression (PHQ-9) scores later in life. A 10% increase in gold prices at the time of marriage leads to a 0.134 point drop in anxiety and a 0.197 point drop in depression, amounting to 3.9% and 7.2% declines relative to their respective sample means. These results are robust to the inclusion of a battery of controls and also hold qualitatively across different specifications. While exploring mechanisms, I provide evidence that higher gold prices at the time of marriage lead to reduced domestic violence, better treatment at home, marginal improvements in women's decision-making power, and no discernible changes in match quality. The effects are marginally stronger among older women, those with secondary education, and those living in nuclear households. As a robustness check, I find similar results in other South Asian countries where dowries are common. As a placebo, I find no effect of gold prices in African countries, which do not typically have a dowry tradition. Taken together, the findings suggest that marital endowments have lasting consequences for women’s mental well-being.

This paper examines the relationship between post-marital living arrangements and female mental health in developing economies. Using nationally representative data from Mozambique, we show that patrilocal residence is associated with a lower likelihood of reporting symptoms of anxiety and depression, while matrilocal residence exhibits no systematic relationship with mental health outcomes. The results remain robust across multiple empirical strategies, including an instrumental variables approach that exploits historical kinship traditions and regional variation in the transatlantic slave trade, as well as sensitivity analyses that assess the role of selection on unobservables. We explore potential mechanisms and find that the protective effects of patrilocality are driven by improved self-reported health, lower exposure to domestic violence, and reduced psychological distress among male spouses. Extending the analysis to Nepal and Bangladesh, we find important heterogeneity: while the protective effects of patrilocality persist in Bangladesh with smaller magnitudes, they are not statistically significant in Nepal, where greater constraints on female autonomy may offset the benefits of extended family co-residence. Taken together, these findings highlight the role of cultural norms in shaping psychological well-being and underscore the broader importance of family structures in influencing social and economic outcomes in low-income settings.

Women’s enrollment in higher education in developing countries remains low due to cultural norms restricting mobility and concerns about safety. This paper examines whether expanding local educational opportunities can mitigate these barriers. I study an unusual policy in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province that opened previously male-only public colleges to female students through the introduction of a four-year BS program. Combining administrative data on the rollout of the BS program with the Pakistan Social and Living Standards Measurement (PSLM) survey, I use a difference-in-differences design to show that increased geographic access to higher education raises female schooling and the likelihood of completing a four-year degree. I also document positive spillover effects for younger girls at the primary, secondary, and post-secondary levels, consistent with dynamic complementarities in human capital investment. Finally, I find suggestive evidence of improvements in marriage-market outcomes for post-college-aged women.
[Draft Coming Soon]

This article estimates the intergenerational effect of a conditional cash transfer program for education on child immunization and child human capital development in Punjab, Pakistan. The program began in 2004 in 15 districts in Punjab with literacy below 40 percent. Leveraging the two latest rounds of a cross-sectional MICS survey, I ask whether maternal exposure to this program has intergenerational spillovers on child outcomes. Using an empirical strategy that takes advantage of both the timing of the program's introduction and the geographical variation across districts where it was implemented, I find that the mother's exposure to the program has intergenerational spillovers on children. Children of mothers who are exposed to this program are more likely to be immunized and they are also more likely to be developmentally on track. I show that these findings are robust to a battery of robustness checks. My results suggest that school availability neither has direct effects on maternal education nor has an intergenerational impact on child outcomes in the sample of this study.

[Draft Coming Soon]

[Draft in Preparation]