Working Papers
Deepening Intrahousehold Inequalities? Evidence from Floods in Bangladesh. (Job Market Paper)
Click here for latest draft. Online Appendix
This study shows that the costs of a climate shock fall unevenly on the members of a household. I examine whether a flood changes how resources are divided among men, women, and children, and whether that change persists. This division is not directly observable, so I specify a structural model of collective households to estimate each member’s share of the total household budget, and extend the model to a panel setting to follow these shares over time. I then use the as-good-as-random timing of floods across villages in rural Bangladesh with similar ex-ante flood risk to estimate how the shares respond to the shock. To my knowledge, this is the first paper to trace how a climate shock changes the division of resources within the household over several years. I find that a flood reduces women’s share by 8.5 percentage points (31%) six months later and by 6.9 points (22%) four years later, relative to unflooded households, while men’s share rises by 11.2 and 11.5 points (36–38%). Children’s share also decreases, though to a lesser extent. Although the total household budget contracts by 14%, men in flooded households end up with a larger individual-level budget than men in unflooded households, while women and children become poorer. For women, this hidden cost amounts to an average loss in consumption of $1.95 a day (2017 PPP) six months after the flood and $1.61 a day four years later, which is substantial given an international extreme poverty line of $2.15 a day. This redistribution of resources is driven by a decline in women’s earnings relative to men’s after the flood.
Covered in Cornell’s Econ That Matters blog series.
Menopause, HRT and Women’s Well-being: Evidence from the UK. (with Gabriella Conti, Nancy Daza-Báez, and Emilia Del Bono)
Draft: to be posted soon.
Every woman goes through perimenopause and menopause, most of them while in work, yet very little is known about what these transitions cost women and the economy. This paper estimates the causal effects of the transitions to perimenopause and menopause on women’s use of hormone replacement therapy, employment, earnings, and physical and mental health in the UK. We use the 1970 British Cohort Study, classify each woman as premenopausal, perimenopausal, or menopausal using clinically grounded definitions, and exploit the staggered timing of these transitions across women in a difference-in-differences design. To our knowledge, this is the first causal evidence on the effects of perimenopause as a distinct transition, and the first causal evidence in the UK on menopause at normal onset. We find that both transitions raise HRT use and lower annual earnings, with the earnings loss building over several years. We also use the 2021 Channel 4 documentary presented by Davina McCall as an information shock and find that it raised HRT use and women’s awareness of menopause-related symptoms.
Impact of Exposure to Hot Temperatures In-Utero on Child Health Outcomes.
Click here for the latest draft.
Early-life health disparities are a key driver of long-term economic and social inequalities. With rising global temperatures, understanding how heat exposure affects early-life health is increasingly important. 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. Combining household- and child-level survey data with reanalysis temperature data, I find that short-lived spikes in temperature during pregnancy do not significantly impact child health in early childhood. 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 6.9 percentage points. These effects are driven by heat stress in the third trimester.
Covered in IEA Gender & Climate Proceedings.
Effects Over the Life of a Program: Evidence from an Education Conditional Cash Transfer Program for Girls. (with Dhushyanth Raju and Esha Chhabra)
Draft here. World Bank Policy Research Working Paper No. 9094.
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.
Publications
Analyzing Female Employment Trends in South Asia. (with Gladys Lopez-Acevedo and Matias Morales)
Forthcoming, Journal of Economics, Race, and Policy. Earlier version: IZA Discussion Paper No. 12956.
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 sixty 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.