Research: Works in Progress
Working Papers
1. Managing to Learn (with Sabrin Beg and Adrienne M. Lucas) Under Review
To improve public services, public sector managers must encourage reticent civil servants to enact effective reforms. We show through a randomized controlled trial that school principals, i.e., school mangers, can act as leaders to improve InstructionalManagement (0.3SD) and student learning (0.11SD) with existing systems and personnel. Additional management training improved People Management but not student test scores. Managerial enhancements and student test score gains persisted. Our findings resolve conicting results regarding the role of management in public sector productivity and demonstrate how public sector managers can signal reform effectiveness through personal commitment, acting as leaders.
Impact analysis available here
Link to NBER Working Paper #31757
2. Sticky Constraints: Business Location, Competition, and the Gender Profit Gap (with Solène Delecourt, Anya Marchenko, and Layna Lowe) Under Review
Women entrepreneurs earn less than men entrepreneurs worldwide. Estimates and explanations of this gender profit gap vary by sample and context. We pair a detailed survey of operations with a fertility module to understand the drivers of the gap. Using a representative survey of 3,077 businesses in rural Kenya, we find that the unconditional profit gap is 47%, and remains at 30% including controls. We conclude the profit gap is largely attributable to “sticky” constraints such as sector and location. These barriers to profitability are more binding for women with greater childcare responsibilities than for men or other women.
3. Teacher Flexibility and School Productivity: Remedial Secondary Education in India (with Sabrin Beg, Jason Kerwin, Adrienne M. Lucas, and Wahed Rahman)
Public education in developing countries is often deficient, leading to increasing learning deficits as students age. A trade-off exists between ensuring uniformly high standards and introducing reforms that allow teachers flexibility. Through a 300 school RCT in rural Odisha, India, we compare the effects on Class 9 students of T1) rigidly defined remedial lessons that take time away from the curriculum, T2) teacher determined remedial lessons, or T3) control. Both interventions increased students test scores 0.11SD, about 60 percent of a year of learning, with gains throughout the learning distribution. The quality of implementation was high in both arms. Few teachers took advantage of the flexibility offered and defaulted into the regimented version.
4. Learning Beyond School: Another Chance for Out of School Adolescent Girls in Rural Pakistan (with Sabrin Beg and Adrienne M. Lucas)
Out of school adolescents have few opportunities to engage with formal or informal schooling even if the reason for their lack of engagement with schooling was temporary. Through a 134- village randomized controlled trial in rural Punjab, Pakistan, we find that an alternative, more intense and more culturally palatable out of school learning bootcamp increased literacy and numeracy among adolescent girls who had either never attended or dropped out of school. The program increased the amount of socializing that the girls did with friends but did not affect their, their household heads’, or their village leaders’ beliefs about female empowerment, gender equality, or the proper education amount or labor market roles for women.
5. Does the Minimum Wage Reduce the Gender Wage Gap in the United States? (with Marlene Kim and Jie Chen) Revision Requested, Industrial Relations
6. Health Insurance and High Cost Borrowing: The Effect of Medicaid on Pawn Loans, Payday Loans, and other Non-Bank Financial Products (with Katie Fitzpatrick)
Pawn loans, payday loans, check cashers, and other non-bank financial products provide a crucial credit source to lower income households, although empirical literature on how these “fringe banks” affect well-being is mixed. We test whether health insurance reduces demand for these controversial products by assisting households with medical expenditure risk. We use plausibly exogenous variation in state choices to expand Medicaid to determine if newly eligible households change their use of fringe bank products. Our synthetic control methodology accounts for differential trends in potentially confounding variables correlated with the Medicaid expansion. We show that reductions in use of fringe banks are accompanied by increases in insurance and large reductions in overall medical expenditures. We find that Medicaid eligibility decreases use of any fringe bank by 3.0 percentage points (30 percent) on average, driven by reductions in fringe credit products. However, this mean treatment effect masks substantial heterogeneity by state. We show that the mean effect of Medicaid expansion on fringe bank use varies substantially by state, ranging from a 16 percentage point reduction in Delaware to a 10 percentage point increase in Nevada. Using detailed information on state Medicaid expansion decisions, and other variables characterizing the policy environment, we find that Section 1115 waivers, setting up a state exchange, and other regulatory characteristics of the private insurance market are significant predictors of the effect of Medicaid on fringe bank use. These estimates suggest that how states expanded Medicaid is crucial to whether individuals in that state report improved financial outcomes as a result of the Medicaid expansion.
7. Uninsured, Unbanked, and Unconnected: Health Insurance, Financial Exclusion, and the Digital Divide (with Katie Fitzpatrick)
We test whether financial exclusion and digital exclusion are potential barriers to health insurance coverage after the Affordable Care Act (ACA). We define financial exclusion as whether a household lacks a bank account, a credit card, or relies on “fringe banks” such as pawn shops, payday lenders, and other non-bank financial service providers. We define digital inclusion as those without home internet access. We link three years of individual responses from two supplements of the nationally representative Current Population Survey from the period after the ACA was enacted (2015, 2017, 2019). Using a sample of non-elderly households we assess the relationship between health insurance coverage and financial exclusion stratified by income (below 138% of the FPL or between 138-400% of the FPL), digital exclusion, and health status using a multivariate regression analysis. Individuals who remain without health insurance coverage after the ACA are those most likely to experience financial exclusion, and this financial exclusion may create additional difficulties to obtain coverage through online portals. Low-income, uninsured adults are 11.5 percentage points (34.8%) more likely to live in a household without a bank account and less likely to have a credit card and emergency savings than low-income, insured adults; they are 5.0 percentage points (9.9%) more reliant on fringe banks. Similar correlations exist between financial inclusion and health insurance coverage among moderate-income households. This work suggests that policies to improve internet, particularly in rural areas, as well as policies to increase bank account ownership may have important spillover effects.
Works in Progress
Barriers to Enrolling in Health Insurance: Estimates on the Value of Time (with Rebecca Thornton)
Differentiated Learning Experimentation (with Adrienne M. Lucas, Sabrin Beg, and Stephanie Bonds) Fieldwork completed
Improving Childcare Quality Through Social Franchising (with Emily Beam) Fieldwork planning
Medicycles: Sustainable, Integrated Outreach Clinics in Remote Communities of Uganda (with Aggrey Semeere) Fieldwork planning