Research

Journal Publications

Bos J, Shonchoy A, Ravindran S, Khan A. Early Childhood Human Capital Formation at Scale. Journal of Public Economics 231 (2024) (open access). (SSRN; VoxDev; Ekonomisk Debatt (in Swedish); author ordering randomized using the Author Randomisation Tool of the AEA)

Can governments leverage existing service-delivery platforms to scale early childhood development (ECD) interventions? We experimentally study a large-scale, low-cost home-visiting intervention --- providing materials and counseling --- integrated into Bangladesh's national nutrition program without extra financial incentives for service providers (SPs). We find SPs partially substitute away from nutritional to ECD counseling. Intent-to-treat estimates show positive impacts on child's cognition (0.17 SD), language (0.23 SD), and socio-emotional scores (0.12-0.14 SD). Wasting and underweight rates decline. Older siblings' primary school attendance increases as well. Improved maternal agency, complementary parental investments, and higher take-up of the pre-existing nutrition program are important mechanisms. We estimate a sizeable internal rate-of-return of 18.9%.

Hammar O, Karadja M, Khan A. Social Networks and Immigrant Integration: Experimental Evidence from Sweden. Journal of Development Economics (Accepted, Pre-Results Review), May 12, 2022. (Registered report; AEARCTR-0006714)

Immigrant integration is key to realizing the potential of immigration in promoting international development. Immigrants’ limited social networks are often seen as a reason for the group’s relatively weak social and economic outcomes. We propose one of the ﬁrst ﬁeld experiments to study how contact with natives aﬀects immigrants’ social and economic integration. We have partnered with the largest NGO of its kind in Sweden that annually matches thousands of pairs of native Swedes and immigrants – predominantly from developing countries – to promote new social connections and facilitate integration. We will study how such matches with native Swedes inﬂuence immigrants’ social relations and values, and whether they lead to better labor and housing market outcomes via access to information or referrals.

Ashton L, Friedman J, Goldemberg D, Hussain MZ, Kenyon T, Khan A, Zhou M. A puzzle with missing pieces: Explaining the effectiveness of World Bank development projects. The World Bank Research Observer 38, no. 1 (2023): 115-146. [The World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 9884]

The identification of key determinants of aid effectiveness is a long-standing question in the development community. This paper reviews the literature on aid effectiveness at the project level and then extends the inquiry in a variety of dimensions with new data on World Bank investment project financing. It confirms that the country institutional setting and quality of project supervision are associated with project success, as identified previously. However, many aspects of the development project cycle, especially project design, have been difficult to measure and therefore under-investigated. The paper finds that project design, as proxied by the estimated value added of design staff, the presence of prior analytic work, and other specially collected measures, is a significant predictor of ultimate project success. These factors generally grow in predictive importance as the income level of the country rises. The results also indicate that a key determinant of the staff's contribution is their experience with previous World Bank projects, but not other characteristics such as age, education, or country location. Key inputs to the project production process associated with subsequent performance are not captured in routine data systems, although it is feasible to do so. Further, the conceptualization and measurement of the success of project-based aid should be revisited by evaluative bodies to reflect a project's theorized contribution to development outcomes.

Work in Progress

Permanent residency policy and skilled immigration: Evidence from a Swedish reform (with Erik Lundberg [Uppsala U]) Draft submitted for the Final Seminar (pre-defense).

Aging populations and labor shortages in skill-intensive sectors have led many countries to pursue targeted policies to attract international talent. We study a migration reform in Sweden that offered international doctoral students from outside the EU an easier path to permanent residency. Implemented in 2014, the reform shortened the required period of residence from eight to four years, allowed these students to obtain permanent residency immediately after graduation, and granted their spouses a work permit during their doctoral studies. Using the European students as a comparison group in a difference-in-differences design, we find that the treated international students are 13.5 pp (23%) more likely to stay in Sweden three years after graduation. Higher settlement prospects also increase their language investments and marriage rates during the PhD. These effects are larger for cohorts that have longer exposure to the reform and for those who carry out their doctoral research in STEM. In addition, the reform raises both employment and language investments among the partners of the treated international students. Taken together, the policy increases permanent residency among international graduates as well as leads them and their families to make long-term choices conducive to integration.

Experiential and Social Learning (with Ali Akram [Mathematica], Gabriella Fleischman [HKS], and Reshmaan Hussam [HBS]; Funding from USAID-DIV & SIEF; AEARCTR-0003248). Please email for draft.

This study examines complementarities between experiential and social learning in health technology adoption. Our setting allows us to test the potential of within-treatment spillovers to confound the way in which we interpret estimates from cluster-randomized controlled trials. We engage 1800 households in peri-urban Pakistan in a field experiment on water chlorination. Our experiment has four arms: control households, who receive no intervention; households who receive free chlorine tablets; households who receive tablets and small daily financial incentives for chlorine use; and households who receive tablets and an experiential learning intervention. In the learning intervention, community health workers help caregivers observe salient signals about the efficacy of chlorine tablets by visually tracking child diarrhea rates relative to control households before and after chlorine distribution. While monetary incentives generate higher chlorination than experiential learning in the short run, these effects quickly dissipate while those in the learning arm remain. These sustained effects among learning households are driven entirely by those who also have a neighbor in the learning arm. Households not in the learning arm exhibit no difference in behavior by whether they have a neighbor in the learning arm. Our results suggest that experiential and social learning not only complement, but rely, on each other. This powerful interaction between individual treatment effects and within-treatment spillovers is obfuscated by cluster-randomized designs. Comparing our results with a cluster-randomized trial testing the experiential learning arm, we find that interpreting results from that intervention as individual treatment effects would lead to a six-fold overestimation of individual treatment effects. These results have direct implications for how public health information campaigns should be administered and scaled.

Economic Opportunities and Human Capital Investments: Evidence from Artisanal Gold Mining in Africa (with Avenia Ghazarian [Stockholm School of Economics]) (MISUM WP) Submitted.

How does human capital investment respond to local economic opportunities? Income gains can increase the demand for schooling while new jobs raise the opportunity costs. We investigate this question in the context of rapid growth in artisanal gold mining in Sub-Saharan Africa. We compile 45 waves of Demographic and Health Surveys covering 1.3 million individuals from 14 countries in this region. Identification comes from two sources of variation: one in the global gold price and the other in the exposure of households to places that are geologically suitable for artisanal gold mining. We find that a near-tripling of the global gold price -- reflecting changes between 2005 and 2010 -- leads to a decline in school attendance: by 3.1 pp for 11 to 15-year-olds and by 2.3 pp for 16 to 20-year-olds who live near gold-suitable areas. These reductions are higher for boys. Taken together, these results highlight the potential costs of economic development driven by natural resources.

Do Sibling Correlations in Skills, Schooling, and Earnings Vary by Socioeconomic Background? Insights from Sweden (with Erika Forsberg [IFAU] and Olof Rosenqvist [IFAU]). Submitted. Please email for draft.

Family background shapes individual outcomes across the life cycle. While the literature documents how the importance of family background, measured often by the degree of sibling correlation in socioeconomic outcomes, varies across countries, less is known about heterogeneities across social groups within a country. Using Swedish register data, we compare sibling correlations in skills, schooling, and earnings across fine-grained groups defined by parental socioeconomic status (SES). We find that sibling correlations generally decline in parental SES. This pattern holds for skills, schooling, and earnings, and is robust to alternative definitions of parental SES. This result is consistent with theories on reinforcing parental investments but other mechanisms such as complementarities between parental investments and child ability could also be at play. While the exact mechanisms behind the observed socioeconomic gradient in sibling similarity are hard to identify, the results suggest that life is more formed by individual endowments and considerations for children from high SES backgrounds as compared to their low SES counterparts.

Optimizing community-health-worker resources to scale promising child nutrition programs in rural Pakistan (with Uzma Afzal [LUMS], Ali Akram [Mathematica], Takashi Kurosaki [IER], and Abu Shonchoy [FIU]; Funding from The Agency Fund; AEARCTR-010313). In the field.

Evidence from Pakistan and Zambia suggests that growth posters installed inside the household can be a cost-effective measure to improve nutritional outcomes by increasing salience, changing the parents’ reference for healthy norms, and/or helping them better understand the returns to better nutritional inputs. In this proposed policy pilot, we will use a cluster-randomized trial design in rural Sindh of Pakistan, which has an under-five stunting rate of over 60%. We plan to test the efficacy of the intervention in a rural setting with intervention variations utilizing light-touch (automated voice calls promoting poster use) against heavy-handed program delivery (community health workers visiting households) to facilitate frequent growth monitoring. We are teaming up with an NGO implementation partner Rural Support Programmes Network (RSPN), which is currently working closely with the Government of Sindh (GoS). Our research findings will help GoS improve the existing program design combating early childhood malnutrition.

The puzzle of declining adult heights in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa: Causes & Consequences Draft in Fall.

In sharp contrast to historical trends, average adult height has declined in many developing countries over the last two decades, a period characterized by robust socioeconomic development. Combining Demographic and Health Surveys, I assess potential causes such as (lower) selective mortality, socioeconomic gradients in fertility transition, and changes in diet quality. I also evaluate the consequences such as intergenerational transmission of nutritional poverty and adult disease burden. A particularly interesting case is that of India where, for the cohorts born since 1980, adult male height declined whereas female height stagnated. I explore the role of son preference in explaining this gender differential.

Community sponsorship for refugee integration: A randomized evaluation (with Olle Hammar [IFN] and Mounir Karadja [Uppsala U]) In the field.

We run an RCT to evaluate the effects of the UN refugee-agency UNHCR’s Community Sponsorship (CS) model in Sweden. The CS model matches newly arrived refugees with local contacts from the host municipality with the aim of improving language skills, cultural exchange, and new social networks. We have partnered with several municipalities that work closely with the local CSOs to create these matches. Our study will be the first randomized evaluation of this popular program, which has helped in resettling hundreds of thousands of refugees worldwide. As such, this project will contribute to the broad research and societal discussion on integration by studying an innovative and scalable intervention. We evaluate the intervention based on its effects on social and economic integration, as well as values, health, and well-being.

Identity and Human Capital Investment: Evidence from the Veiling Ban Removal in Türkiye (with Merve Demirel [SU/IIES] and Avenia Ghazarian [Stockholm School of Economics]) Data collection ongoing.

Urbanization and economic development: Evidence from the diffusion of dynamites (with Steve Berggreen [Lund U]) Data collection ongoing.

Introducing Tuition Fees for International Students in Sweden: Effects on Universities and Native Students. Please email for draft.

Age at crime, punishment, and human capital investments: Evidence from the removal of penalty discounts for young criminals in Sweden (with DC Byström [Gothenberg U] and Erik Lundberg [Uppsala U]). Data collection ongoing.

Pre-PhD Publications & Projects

Khan A, Rabbani A. Assessing the Spatial Accessibility of Microfinance in Northern Bangladesh: A GIS Analysis. Journal of Regional Science, Volume 55, Issue 5, pages 842–870, November 2015. (PDF)

Khan A, et al. Growth dynamics among adolescent girls in Bangladesh: Evidence from nationally representative data spanning 2011–2014. PloS one, 16, no. 7, July 2021: e0255273. (DOI)

Panciera R, Khan A, Ahmed T, Islam R, Raza SJ, Ahmed S, Adams AM. The Influence of Travel Time on EmOC Seeking Behavior in the Urban Poor of Bangladesh: A GIS Study in Sylhet. BMC Pregnancy & Childbirth, 16(1), August 2016. (PDF: paper; deck)

Portfolio at IDinsight

Analytical support to the social cash transfer programs in Zambia and Malawi (e.g., analysis of enumeration data, and national consumption and expenditure surveys to identify coverage gaps).
M&E support to the Ministry of Monitoring & Evaluation in Ghana:
- A nationwide survey of senior high schools in Ghana (268 schools across 5 regions) on implementation challenges concerning the Free Senior High School and Double-track policy.
- Exploratory analysis of administrative data on student scores from junior and senior high school exit exams (2011-17).
M&E design support for Noora Health [India].

Google Sites

Report abuse