low-income Indian state of Jharkhand for the purpose of our analysis. It is a well-known fact that like many other outcomes, education and employment outcomes of women lag those of men in India – in part due to unequal access of women to such opportunities, but also due to gender attitudes that often dampen women’s aspirations in these domains. This is particularly true in the northern states of India, including Jharkhand, where patriarchal norms are strong and deeply entrenched. Thus, this survey provides a unique opportunity to explore the role played by individual social-emotional resources in determining adolescent girls’ aspirations and assessing whether they may potentially outweigh negative social attitudes to ultimately boost female outcomes.

In this paper, we also examine the key correlates of socio-emotional capital among adolescent girls and young women. In other words, we focus on understanding the individual, household, and community level determinants of such socio-emotional resources, thereby providing insight into the strategies or interventions that could be designed to effectively target these in order to improve female education and labor market outcomes.

Our key findings are that self-efficacy appears to be one of the key determinants of aspiration among adolescent girls and young women (ages 15-24) in Jharkhand, both for education and employment. A one standard deviation increase in the self-efficacy score is associated with a 0.73 increase in number of years an adolescent girl desires to study, and a 0.07 percentage point increase in the likelihood that an adolescent aspires to be engaged in paid employment outside home as an adult. In terms of key correlates of self-efficacy, individual and household-level factors like age, previous training experience, and an “enabling” environment i.e. one where girls enjoy family/social support, feel connected and have empowered parents and other successful role models to look up to, appear to be important.

As mentioned earlier, evidence on the importance of socio-emotional skills in determining an individual’s life outcomes in a developing country context is scarce. Recent work in psychology has lamented the lack of rigorous evidence on what kind of psychological interventions are effective (Wilson, 2011), while Haushofer and Fehr (2014) point out the great need for such evaluations, especially in the context of developing countries. To the best of our knowledge, only two papers have recently made a foray in this regard: Ghosal _et al_ (2015) that studies the impact of mitigating psychological constraints on investment behavior of sex workers in India using a randomized field experiment, and Blattman _et al_ . (2015) that combines psychological and cash-based interventions in Liberia. Our paper fits into this nascent literature by providing further evidence on the importance of psychological factors for a specific group of individuals, i.e. adolescent girls and young women. Unlike the other two studies, however, the findings of our paper do not lay any claims to causality.

The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 describes the survey design and data collection of the World Bank Adolescent Survey in Jharkhand. Section 3 presents the descriptive statistics from the survey, while Section 4 outlines the empirical methodology used in this paper. Section 5 presents the main findings and discusses their implication. Section 6 concludes.

# **2. Survey Design and Data**

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