Research
Job market paper
Weaker Typhoons, Not Weak Effects: Local Economic Impacts of Low-Intensity Storms
This paper quantifies the short-run economic impacts of low-intensity typhoons on local economic activity. We construct a commune-by-month panel data of energy con- sumption and merge it with detailed typhoon-track data across three coastal provinces in Vietnam from 2012 to 2022. By exploiting fine spatial variation in typhoon ex- posure, we estimate dynamic responses of energy consumption using an event-study difference-in-differences design and a stacked difference-in-differences estimator. Our results indicate that communes within 15 kilometers of a tropical storm experience an immediate decline of about 30 percent energy consumption in the month of the land- fall, with waning effects persisting for up to six months. The losses are highly localized, concentrated in rural and coastal communes, and larger for non-household customers outside of urban areas. Furthermore, we estimate that a typical tropical storm in our study region reduces annual provincial GDP by roughly 0.2 to 0.3 percent, correspond- ing to about USD 45 to 65 million in 2022 terms. However, night-time lights data from remote-sensing based measures, a commonly used proxy for local economic activity, fails to detect the disruptions caused by low-intensity typhoons. While remotely sensed data may fairly estimate losses of high-intensity storms, they likely miss a meaningful share of the economic costs imposed by lower intensity, albeit frequent, events.
Working papers
A Gendered Approach to Economic Impacts of Refugee Aid in Kenya
This paper evaluates the local economy impacts of hosting refugees using a structural general equilibrium model of refugees and host populations around a refugee camp in Kenya. The model is calibrated with primary micro-household data on refugee households and secondary data on host-country households to examine impacts through a gender lens. We distinguish between female- and male-headed refugee households and trace how refugee assistance, both cash and in-kind, affects total inflation-adjusted incomes, local production, and employment for refugees and hosts. Our simulations quantify the direct and indirect effects of refugee aid on the surrounding economy and estimate the resulting income multipliers. We find slightly larger local economy impacts of transfers directed to female-headed households. We also show that cash assistance generates higher income multipliers than in-kind aid, in line with previous evidence. The study complements evidence based on nighttime lights, which can provide causal identification that is not possible with general equilibrium modelling, while this paper is the first to estimate the impact of refugees on host populations through a gendered lens using a structural general equilibrium model, which is not possible with nighttime lights data.
Strangers to Neighbors: Does Refugee Host Integration Improve Local Economic Development
Refugee settlements can either isolate displaced populations from host communities or foster local integration. This paper examines whether refugee–host integration promotes local economic development, using evidence from Kenya’s transition from traditional camps to integrated settlements. The study exploits the establishment of the Kalobeyei Integrated Settlement in 2016, designed to promote refugee self-reliance and closer interaction with host communities, as a natural experiment. Using most advanced nighttime lights (NTL) data and an event-study difference-indifferences framework, we estimate the temporal and spatial effects of Kalobeyei’s opening on surrounding economic activity. Results show that integrated settlements generate stronger and more sustained growth in local economic activity than traditional camps. We further combine household survey data with a CGE model to estimate how each dollar of aid received translates into gains for the host economy. The results indicate that integrated refugee settlements yield larger economic multipliers compared to traditional camps. Overall, the paper contributes to the growing literature on the economic impacts of refugee integration and the design of inclusive settlement policies.
Adoption of Agricultural Technologies by Smallholder Farmers: A Synthesis of Empirical Evidence
This paper synthesizes recent empirical evidence on the adoption of agricultural technologies by smallholder farmers in low and middle income countries. It brings together findings from randomized evaluations and large scale programs in Africa and Asia to explain why promising tools for higher productivity and climate smart agriculture remain underused. The review documents intertwined constraints related to liquidity, risk, information, market access, and local institutions, and shows how these constraints are often more severe for poorer, more remote, and female farmers. It argues that climate smart practices can raise yields, income, and resilience to climate shocks, but that their returns are uncertain, context specific, and often realized only over long horizons, which discourages take up. The paper concludes that isolated interventions such as stand alone credit, subsidies, or extension are usually insufficient, and that bundled approaches which combine financial services, risk management, tailored advice, and stronger links to output markets offer more promise for inclusive and climate resilient rural transformation.
Covariate Shocks, Women’s Bargaining Power, and Household Vulnerability
Can increased women’s relative bargaining power within households improve household-level resilience to large scale covariate shocks? Evidence from a recent pandemic suggests that enabling women to access market-linked-value-chains significantly increases their relative bargaining power within households. In this paper we estimate the extent to which a given stock of market-enabled-relative bargaining power of women influenced the resilience of rural households to the covariate shock. We utilize a unique data-generating process that combines data from two rounds of household surveys with the data from a laboratory experiment that was conducted with both the spouses in rural dairy households. Evidence from the shift-share instrumental variable approach shows that a unit improvement in women’s bargaining power led to a 3.82 per cent reduction in the vulnerability of households to food poverty during the pandemic. The paper also models the role of food and nutrition decisions as pathways to reducing household vulnerability to food poverty during the shock.
Work in Progress
- The Local Economywide Effects of Reduced Refugee Assistance in Uganda, with Anubhab Gupta, Tao Qi, Heng Zhu, J. Edward Taylor, and Justin Kagin.
- Cost of Inaction: Impacts of Reduced Food Assistance on Welfare Outcomes in Somalia, with Anubhab Gupta, J. Edward Taylor, and Justin Kagin.
- Is AI a Substitute or Complement to Learning? A Randomized Controlled Trial Among College Students, with George Davis.
Published Papers
COVID-19, information management by local governments, and food consumption
Federal and state governments in developing countries have tasked local governments with managing COVID-19 on the ground. The bottom-up approach is critical to ensuring household food security, especially in rural areas. We have utilized data from a panel of Indian households that participated in two rounds of a livelihoods survey. While the first round was fielded before COVID-19, the second round was conducted telephonically after the COVID-19-lockdown. We developed an Information Management Response Index (IMRI) to measure the strength of local governments’ information management initiatives. The difference-in-difference estimates show that local governments could partially mitigate the pandemic’s adverse effects on (a) level and distribution (adult-equivalent per-capita) of food and nutrition expenditure and (b) household vulnerability to food and nutrition poverty. For landless households, IMRI led to statistically significant and additional welfare effects. Three channels explain our empirical findings: (a) maintenance of essential commodities through fair-price shops, (b) access to paid employment and cash (income effect), and (c) disease management (substitution effect). The estimates have been adjusted for sample attrition and multiple-hypothesis correction. We conducted robustness checks with respect to index construction, instrumental variable estimation, and sub-group analysis.
Impact of Gendered Participation in market-linked value-chains on Economic Outcomes: Evidence from India
We combine the results of a laboratory experiment and survey of agricultural households to estimate the welfareimpacts of a market-based intervention with links to value-chain. We investigate whether increased participationby women in such value-chains improves their relative bargaining power and therefore their ability to contributeto household welfare. We utilize the National Dairy Plan-I as an example to estimate pathways through whichsuch interventions may affect household decision-making. We find that the program design significantlyincreased women’s relative bargaining power within the household, which acts as an important channel forenhancing women’s ability to contribute to household welfare through decision-making processes related tofood, nutrition, branded food items, and child education. The instrumental variable estimates show that if value-chains are gender-neutral then direct program effects are significant but small. Participation in National DairyPlan-I, on the other hand, improved women’s relative bargaining power, allowing them to make substantialcontribution to welfare. We show that when women’s bargaining power mediates participation in value-chains,the nutrition elasticity rises from 0.26 to 0.94. While the impact on analytical ability (i.e., mathematics Z-score)is negligible in the absence of female agency, performance improves by 0.35σ when gendered element(s) of theprogram are allowed to act as a channel.
Governance response during COVID‐19 and political affirmative action: Evidence from local governments in India
A great deal of work argues that the entry of women into public spaces can promote political and institutional change. The COVID‐19 provides an opportunity to investigate whether and under what conditions women's political representation in rural local governments deliver effective local governance? Drawing from two rounds of data collected in 174 local governments and 1051 households in three Indian states, the paper shows that women Pradhans in the Gram Panchayats had no differential impact on the governance response to COVID‐19 compared to the unreserved ones. Analyzing the heterogeneity in these responses suggests that institutional factors like the proportion of women in village council and local entrepreneurship diversity can enhance women Pradhan's capacity to respond to the pandemic. We explore two channels that enable women Pradhan to govern effectively during the pandemic: improving women's participation in the labor force and reducing household's vulnerability to poverty in the pre‐COVID period.
Performance assessment of Dairy Cooperative Societies (DCSs): an AHP based composite index approach
Dairy Cooperative Societies (DCSs) maintain the availability and supply of clean processed milk in accordance with consumer needs, as well as the provision of essential milk products of the appropriate standard to consumers at competitive prices. In this study, numerous aspects responsible for the success of India’s Dairy Cooperative Society (DCS) have been taken into account before developing a composite index. The criteria addressed include milk union support, DCS support, governance and management support, allied support, and common support factors for DCS performance evaluation. The current study is projected to empower the dairy industry by offering a tool that can evaluate the relative success of DCSs and assist milk unions and dairy organizations in tailoring their assistance to their specific requirements. We deployed the Analytical Hierarchal Process (AHP) to determine the weights of specified criteria and sub-criteria impacting DCS performance; these weights were deployed to determine the relative performance of a DCS using the composite index developed in the study. Criteria such as governance and management support given to members, and support received from milk unions have significant weightage- 0.3002, 0.2854, and 0.2715, respectively. We also deployed the suggested technique to conduct a comparative analysis of 98 DCSs identified from six Indian provinces constituted under NDP I (National Dairy Plan, Phase-I). Finally, the results of the sensitivity analysis have been presented to validate our proposed method.