Selected working papers
Deepening Intrahousehold Inequalities? Evidence from Floods in Bangladesh.
(Job market paper) - Click here for latest draft
This study demonstrates how the negative effects of a climate shock are unevenly distributed within the household by examining its impact on individual-level consumption among men, women, and children. I specify a structural model of collective households to estimate the share of the total household budget allocated to members over time and leverage exogenous variation in flood exposure to study how these resource shares respond to the shock. Results show that women's share of household resources decreases by 6.9-8.5 percentage points (22-30%), while men's share increases by 11.2-11.5 percentage points (36-38%), on average, among households exposed to at least one flood. Children also experience a decrease, though to a lesser extent. Although the overall household budget contracts by 14%, men's individual-level budget increases, while women and children become poorer. 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.
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.
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.
Analyzing female employment trends in South Asia. (with Mathias Morales and Gladys Lopez-Acevedo)
Draft here.
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.