July 2016

IZA DP No. 10048: Searching for Religious Discrimination among Anganwadi Workers in India: An Experimental Investigation

published as 'Searching for religious discrimination among childcare workers' in: Review of Development Economics, first published 29 January 2020

This paper examines whether, in India, discriminatory practices by government-employed child caregivers along religious lines, lead to differential health outcomes among the care receiving children. Child caregivers participate in a novel allocation game where we incorporate treatments to disentangle statistical and taste-based discrimination. Our findings find no evidence of taste-based discrimination or statistical discrimination among the child caregivers. We also weigh-in on the usefulness of non-incentivized experiments in discrimination experiments.