My research examines how early-life conditions, social norms, labor market institutions, and public policy shape health, human capital, and inequality over the life course in low- and middle-income countries. Much of my work studies how shocks during pregnancy and childhood affect later-life outcomes, and how families, markets, institutions, and belief systems respond to or amplify those shocks. Across projects, I typically combine quasi-experimental methods with large-scale household and demographic data to address questions at the intersection of development economics, health economics, labor economics, and social policy.
A first strand of my research focuses on early-life shocks and life-course inequality. This work examines how prenatal and early-childhood exposures shape cognition, health, labor supply, and long-run socioeconomic outcomes. In my work on Ramadan exposure in utero, I study the persistent effects of prenatal nutritional shocks over the life course, while related research explores how parental investments, beliefs, and household responses can reinforce or mitigate those early inequalities. I have also examined the distributional consequences of fasting during pregnancy and broader questions about the role of parents in shaping inequality across the life course. Ongoing work in this area seeks to better unpack the mechanisms underlying Ramadan exposure and to explore interventions that may reduce avoidable harms.
A second strand examines institutions, labor markets, and family well-being. In this work, I study how policies not traditionally viewed as health interventions—such as minimum wages, food regulation, and cash transfers—affect nutrition, fertility, and intergenerational well-being. This includes research on minimum wages and child health in Indonesia, the nutritional and long-term human capital consequences of beef bans in India, and the effects of conditional cash transfers on women’s reproductive choices in Peru. Together, these projects ask how formal institutions interact with household behavior, gender norms, and local social contexts to shape family health and demographic outcomes, especially among vulnerable populations.
A third strand of my work focuses on policy evaluation and global health systems. More recent projects extend my academic research into applied policy settings, including cost-effectiveness analysis, health financing, program evaluation, and evidence-based decision-making in low- and middle-income countries. This work includes maternal, child health, and nutrition costing initiatives, impact evaluation and costing support for global health programs, and analyses of aid effectiveness, service delivery, and health system performance. An emerging part of my research agenda also examines how kinship systems, religion, gender norms, and state capacity shape fertility, schooling, and women’s empowerment
Parental Responses to Fetal Shocks and Macroeconomic Volatility (with Rakesh Banerjee). Forthcoming , Review of Economics and Statistics (ReStat).
Current projects extend these themes to intergenerational health, climate and health, childhood immunization, macroeconomic shocks, and the long-run consequences of institutional change. Ongoing work includes research on minimum wages and intergenerational health, the cognitive costs of beef bans in India, climate and childhood immunization, the macroeconomic effects of Ramadan, and the impact of U.S. aid on mortality and population health, among others.