Research

My research focus is applied microeconomics, mainly on developing countries. I am interested in child development over the life-course in particular nutrition, time-use, cognitive and socio-emotional skills development. I am also concerned about the negative consequences of shocks in the long and the short-term, and how or whether social programmes can remediate those. I have a particular interest in the Productive Safety Net Programme in Ethiopia and the school-day-extension programme (JEC) in Peru. My Researchgate and Academia websites have pdfs of non-peer-reviewed working papers and book chapters, see the links page.

See the link to the ESRC/GCRF project which I led on "Inequality of opportunity in Peru: How can young people develop skills?" with Oxford University, GRADE Peru and collaborators from Universities of Connecticut, Edinburgh and Minnesota.

Peer-reviewed journal articles:

"Young Lives, Interrupted" Journal Of Development Studies, 2022. With Marta Favara, Richard Freund, Alan Sanchez and Douglas Scott.

“Cohort Profile Update: The Young Lives study.” International Journal of Epidemiology, 2021. With the Young Lives team.

“Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on anxiety and depression symptoms of young people in the global south: evidence from a four country cohort study.” BMJ open, 11(4), e049653. With the Young Lives team, Michelle Craske & Alan Stein.

The impact of COVID-19 lockdowns on physical domestic violence: Evidence from a list randomization experiment. SSM-Population Health, 14, 100792. With Marta Favara, Alan Sánchez, & Douglas Scott.

Gender Differences in the Choice of Major: The Importance of Female Role Models with Danila Serra, Texas A &M. Accepted at American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 12(3), July 2020 . PDF ungated Here

Reinforcement or Compensation? Parental Responses to Children's Revealed Human Capital Levels in Ethiopia” with Wei Fan, Heriot-Watt University. Accepted at Journal of Population Economics, June 2019

“From rural to urban, but not through migration: Household livelihood responses to urbanization in Northern Ethiopia” with Tsega Mezgebo. Journal of African Economies, Volume 29, Issue 2, March 2020 . https://doi.org/10.1093/jae/ejz020

Shocks, Safety Nets and Vulnerability to Poverty in Ethiopia with Ruth Vargas Hill from the World Bank. World Development (2017).

Fuzzy Chronic Poverty: A proposed response to measurement error for chronic poverty measurement with Gaston Yalonetzky, University of Leeds. Review of Income and Wealth (2017)

Charitable Dictators? Determinants of giving to NGOs in Uganda with Kim Lehrer, Universite de Sherbrooke. Accepted at Journal of International Development.

Smarter Social Protection? Impacts of the PSNP on child cognition. With Marta Favara, University of Oxford and Tassew Woldehanna, University of Addis Ababa. Oxford Development Studies, 2018.

IZA working paper 2017

Social Protection for all Ages? Impacts of Ethiopia's Productive Safety Net Scheme on Child Nutrition (with Radhika Goyal) Social Science and Medicine (2016)

Live aid revisited: long-term impacts of the 1984 Ethiopian famine on children (with Stefan Dercon), Journal of the European Economic Association (2014)

Shocks, Consumption and Income Diversification in rural Ethiopia, Journal of Development Studies (2012) honourable mention for the 2012 Dudley-Seers Memorial prize...

Catching up from early nutritional deficits? Evidence from rural Ethiopia, With Ingo Outes, Economics and Human Biology (2012)

Quite possibly my least catchy title:

The Development of Vulnerability Functions Relating Household Poverty Outcomes to Crop Failures in Ethiopia with the Prospect of Developing a Probabilistic Catastrophe Risk Model

with Emily White, World Bank. Geneva papers on Risk and Insurance (2017)

Work in progress

Ongoing Projects (contact me for the latest versions/updates)

Somalia Role model Project with Elijah Kiptech, Danila Serra and Munshi Sulaiman

South Sudan Psychosocial support to children in post conflict education with Saurabh Singhal and Munshi Sulaiman