Selected working papers
Deepening inequalities? Evidence from floods in Bangladesh.
This paper investigates whether flood shocks in rural Bangladesh can change the way household members share household resources amongst one another, and increase intra-household inequalities. I find that exposure to floods is associated with a reallocation of resources away from women and children in favor of men of the household. Furthermore, by exploiting the randomness in timing of floods, I dig deeper into mechanisms and the consequences of the reallocation of household resources away from women.
Updated preliminary draft will be added soon.
Impact of In-utero Exposure to Heatwaves on Child Health Outcomes.
This study investigates whether hot temperatures during pregnancy affect the health of children up to five years after birth. I study this question in the Bangladeshi context, using exogenous variation in prenatal temperature experienced by cohorts of pregnant mothers who give birth in the same district and month but in different calendar years. Contrary to the existing literature in developed countries, I find that short-lived spikes in temperature during the pregnancy do not significantly impact child health in early years of life. However, more prolonged exposure to hot temperatures decreases their height-for-age z-score, a measure of long-term undernourishment, by 0.186 and increases their probability of stunted growth, a signal of chronic undernourishment, by 0.069. These effects are driven by heat stress in the third trimester.
Updated preliminary draft will be added soon.
Effects Over the Life of a Program: Evidence from an Education Conditional Cash Transfer Program for Girls. (with Dhushyanth Raju and Esha Chhabra)
While most evaluations of education programs in developing countries examine effects one or two years after a program has been introduced, this study does so over an extended duration of a program. Administered in Punjab, Pakistan, the program offers cash benefits to households conditional on girls' regular attendance in secondary grades in government schools. The study evaluates the evolution of the program's effects on girls' secondary school enrollment numbers over roughly a decade of its existence. The program was targeted to districts with low adult literacy rates, a targeting mechanism that provides an observed, numerical program assignment variable and results in a cutoff value. Recent advances in regression discontinuity designs allow the study to appropriately fit key features of the data. The study finds that the program had positive effects on girls' secondary school enrollment numbers throughout the period and that these effects were stable. This pattern is observed despite a loss of more than 60 percent in the real value of the cash benefit over the period. The findings are consistent with potential behavioral explanations, such as the program making girls' education salient to households or catalyzing a shift in social norms around girls' education.
Preliminary draft here.
Analyzing female employment trends in South Asia. (with Mathias Morales and Gladys Lopez-Acevedo)
This paper studies employment patterns and trends in South Asia to shed light on determinants of extremely low female employment rates in the region. After a comprehensive literature review, the authors use employment data from about one hundred censuses and surveys from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka to compare employment trends across countries over time. They work through data inconsistencies to standardize definitions of variables to compare demographic and labor market determinants: age, sector, contract type, location, and education. The paper finds that (i) overall since 2001, women's employment participation across South Asian countries has been low and broadly unchanged;(ii) the gender employment gap emerges more clearly in middle age brackets;(iii) rural female employment is higher than urban;(iv) agriculture is the economic sector accounting for the greatest share of female employment, although this is slowly changing in some countries, and;(v) women with mid-level education tend to have lower employment rates than those with both lower and higher education.
Preliminary draft here.