Job market paper:
Menstrual Norms: Experimental Evidence from Nepal
with Silvia Castro and Kristina Czura
Abstract: Cultural taboos and stigma severely limit menstrual health management in many low- and middle-income countries. Policies often target visible consequences but fail to address underlying cultural stigma and social norms perpetuating these harmful practices. We study underlying harmful norms that nurture cultural stigma and shed light on how these norms are perpetuated using a lab-in-the-field experiment with over 1800 school children in Nepal. We elicit social norms and measure support for abolishing menstrual stigma using a Donation Game where participants can show support for abolishing menstrual stigma by donating to a menstrual charity fighting menstrual restrictions. We vary the visibility of the decision among peers and the availability of third-party punishment. Sixty percent of the participants fully support ending menstrual restrictions. Social image concerns among peers and peer punishment crowd in support for removing menstrual restrictions, while social sanctions by the elderly, particularly elderly women, reduce this support. We conclude that the social expectations of elder generations maintain harmful practices and that any efforts to demolish menstrual restrictions and stigma needs to include multiple generations, in particular the elderly.
Publications:
Protected or exposed: the impact of rainfall shocks on children's nutritional vulnerability and the role of women's empowerment. World Development Perspectives (2026).
Abstract: This paper investigates the impact of rainfall shocks on children’s food resource shares in Bangladesh and examines the potential mediating role of women’s empowerment. Using panel data from 2,603 households across the 2011/12, 2015, and 2018/19 survey waves, I estimate a fixed-effects mediation analysis and employ double-lasso regressions for control variable selection, along with bootstrapped standard errors to test the significance of the direct, indirect, and total effects. Results indicate that the detrimental effects of rainfall shocks on children’s food resource shares are concentrated among boys. Rainfall shocks are associated with a reduction in the share of household calories allocated to boys. Boys’ calorie shares fall by 0.173 percentage points for every liter of rainfall above one standard deviation from the mean. Women’s empowerment is positively associated with children’s calorie shares. However, the analysis does not confirm a mediating effect of women’s empowerment. These findings highlight the need for targeted policy interventions to safeguard boys’ nutritional outcomes in the wake of climate-related shocks.
Work in progress:
Why do estimates of women’s land and dwelling ownership vary across survey programs? Insights into survey and questionnaire design
with Jessica Heckert and Kalyani Raghunathan
Prioritizing SDG 5 Indicators for Policy Action: A Data-Driven Analysis of Gender Equality Using Global Gender Indices
with Robert Lensink