Disparity based on income, socio-economic status, gender, race, and ethnicity results in a lack of opportunities and restrains equitable distribution of economic growth and development. In my dissertation, I aim to understand the factors that act as barriers for disadvantaged groups, restricting them from realizing their full potential.

In the education domain, I develop a novel school choice model to study the determinants of parental preference ordering in centralized school assignment systems and evaluated the impact of this national reform on school segregation. Further, on gender disparity, I examine how cultural norms and preferences can impact fertility decisions, which affect human capital through a critical channel, namely health.

In chapter 2, I study parental preferences in Deferred Acceptance with partial school rankings. The Deferred Acceptance algorithm is a popular school allocation mechanism thanks to its strategy proofness. However, with application costs, strategy proofness fails, leading to an identification problem. In this chapter, I address this identification problem by developing a new Threshold Rank setting that models the entire rank order list as a one-step utility maximization problem allowing for both ranked and non-ranked alternatives. I apply this framework to study student assignments in Chile. There are three critical contributions of the chapter. I develop a recursive algorithm to compute the likelihood of my one-step decision model. Partial identification is addressed by incorporating the outside value and the expected probability of admission into an additive cost framework. The empirical application reveals that although school proximity is a vital variable in school choice, student ability is critical for ranking high academic score schools. The results suggest that policy interventions such as tutoring aimed at improving student ability can help increase the representation of low-income low-ability students in better quality schools in Chile.

In chapter 3, which grew out of a co-authored work investigates whether adopting a centralized school admission system can alter within-school socio-economic diversity. We assess the importance of two factors: residential segregation and outside options. In theory, both have the potential to increase school segregation under centralized systems. We provide evidence confirming this premise. We take advantage of the largest school-admission reform implemented to date: Chile's SAS, which in 2016 replaced the country's decentralized system with a Deferred Acceptance algorithm. We exploit its sequential introduction across regions to quantify its heterogeneous impact on segregation. The empirical analysis is carried out using administrative data and a Difference-in-Difference strategy. SAS increased within-school segregation in areas with high levels of pre-existing residential segregation. School districts with a higher provision of private education experienced an uptick in school segregation as well. The migration of high-SES students to private schools emerges as a driver.

In the final chapter, I examine the implications of parental son preference on birth spacing. Son preference is a well-established phenomenon for India. This preference gets reflected in multiple dimensions of the childbearing process, such as the size of the family and birth spacing. I use the sibling sex composition of the first two children to capture its impact on the third birth interval, induced by a preference for a son. Sibling sex composition provides a credible source of exogenous variation in the Indian context for births before 1990 as gender screening became widespread only after the economic reforms in 1990. My analysis shows that, on average, families with two sons face a 9% lower hazard of third birth relative to families with two daughters. This hazard ratio translates into a gap of roughly one month in the average third birth interval. I also show that sibling composition affects the proportion of third births spaced below 18 months, a critical cut-off for neonatal, post-neonatal, and child mortality. Inter-birth intervals of less than 18 months increase the chances of the third child's mortality by 10% in my sample. A back-of-the-envelope calculation based on these estimates suggests that about 1,500 infant deaths every year in India can be attributed to a higher proportion of daughters among the first two births.