Thirdly, the paper will contribute to the large body of work across economics, demography and sociology on the problem of female disadvantage in South Asia. Girls' low child survival rates have been linked to the neglect of daughters, either in food allocation (Behrman, 1988; Chen, Huq and D’Souza, 1981), or health care (Rahaman et al, 1982, Das Gupta, 1987) within the household. Such differences in the care of sons and daughters may stem from parents’ perception of daughters as liabilities and sons as assets (Schultz, 1997, Mayer, 1999), which in turn could arise from differences in the net returns from raising boys and girls. For one, expected (private) returns to investing in sons may be higher if males earn higher wages in the labor market or if female labor force participation is low, which is consistent with the finding that Indian districts with higher female labor force participation display less bias against girls (Rosenzweig and Schultz, 1982, Murthi, Guio and Dreze, 1995). Parents might also expect higher returns to investing in boys because the practices of dowry and exogamous marriage effectively reduce girls’ expected contribution to their natal homes while placing sons in the role of providers in old age. Finally, inherent preferences may play an independent role: parents may prefer boys not just for their economic contribution but also because of customary practices that place a higher value on sons. The results in this paper represent new evidence on the impact of an innovative policy tool on female disadvantage, as well as the extent to which such economic incentive programs can change such fundamental social and cultural preferences.

Using household survey data on fertility and child health, we estimate the impact of the program on mothers (sex ratio among live children, fertility preferences) and children (mother’s use of antenatal care, survival, nutritional status, immunization, schooling), focusing on gender differences in child impacts.<sup>2</sup> Although the very long-term nature of these incentives means that a full-impact analysis will not be possible for several years to come, we are able to estimate intermediate program effects using data collected at intervals of up to 10 years after the program was first introduced. This data allows the estimation and analysis of differences between the short and medium-term program effects. Our results imply that _Apni Beti Apna Dhan_ had positive effects on the sex ratio of total living children, and inconclusive effects on mothers’ preferences for female children as well as total desired fertility. Families made greater post-natal health investments in girls after the program, with some mixed evidence of improving health status in the short and medium term. Further evidence also suggests that the early cohort of eligible school-age girls are not significantly more likely to attend school, however, conditional on first attending any school, they may be more likely to continue their education.

The paper proceeds as follows. Section 2 presents background information on the program. Section 3 describes in detail our empirical strategy and presents a brief description of the data. Section 4 describes the empirical analysis. Section 5 presents a series of robustness checks. Section 6 provides conclusions and areas for future research.

# **2. Background and Program Description**

> 2 We do not measure the impact of the program on girls’ age at marriage because girls exposed to the program were relatively young at the time of  the most recent survey data available. .

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