premises same as household’s residence, and premises independent of household’s residence. Household-based establishments are defined using the second group above.<sup>8</sup> Our analysis primarily considers recent women entrepreneurs, who are a subset of women establishment owners. We identify entrepreneurs using a survey field which asks about the growth status of the enterprise over the past three years: expanding, stagnant, contracting, or operated for less than three years. Those owners who answer as having operated their business for less than three years constitute our subset of recent entrepreneurs. We also describe in the next section how the survey collects age information for older establishments.

It is important to note that the NSSO sampling frame is primarily built off India’s periodic Economic Censuses, and is enumerated across households. The core sample is comprised of unregistered (unorganized) plants. Unorganized sector firms in India are not required to register or pay taxes, and thus the sampling of the NSSO does not depend upon these types of data. As we discuss later, this data collection and sampling approach provides confidence that the economic patterns we observe are real and not the artificial consequence of changes in reporting behavior (e.g., switching tax status).<sup>9</sup> We supplement our investigation into women’s labor market dynamics using data from the Annual Survey of Industries (ASI). The ASI provides microdata on the organized manufacturing sector of the economy, which is not covered by NSSO. The two surveys are designed to be perfect complements in joint coverage of the entire manufacturing sector. We use ASI surveys from the same fiscal years as the NSSO data described above to investigate 8 The categories listed for the ownership and premises fields are taken from the 1994 survey instrument. Later surveys expanded the listed categories to include additional ownership categories that do not overlap with the primary male/female proprietary categories used in this work. There have been recent efforts to better measure and classify home-based work (Chen 2012), and it is possible that some household-based workers previously considered business owners may be reclassified as wage workers in future surveys. Adjustments during our sample period are very small, if present at all, and would apply uniformly to states in a way that would not bias a differences-indifferences strategy.

9 The sampling frame for the NSSO is comprised of two frames: the list frame and the area frame. The list frame is used only among urban areas, and is comprised of approximately 8,000 larger unorganized manufacturing units on the basis of census data for manufacturing enterprises. These plants meet one of three detailed size criteria (available from the authors). All units in the list frame are surveyed, and these units are excluded from the list of enterprises in the area frame. The area frame is applied to both urban and rural areas. Village lists from the census form the frame for rural areas, and the frame for urban areas is taken from the latest Urban Frame Survey blocks. The ultimate stage units are households/unorganized-manufacturing enterprises in both areas, as available from the most recent economic census.

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