Publications

Climate Shocks, Attitudes Towards Intimate Partner Violence, and the Protective Role of Climate-Resilience Projects   with  James Ji and Nidhiya Menon 

Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, forthcoming

Settling Prosperity: Historical Immigration and its Long-Term Institutional Legacies  

Journal of Comparative Economics, forthcoming

Ocean Salinity, Early-Life Health, and Adaptation   with James Ji,  Zi Long, and Nidhiya Menon.

Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, 2024

Coverage: Nature Climate Change

Mining and Women's Agency: Evidence on Acceptance of Domestic Violence and Shared Decision-Making in India  with  James Ji, Nidhiya Menon, and Yana Rodgers. 

World Development, 2023

Award:  2024 APEC Healthy women, Healthy Economies Research Prize, runner-up

 Short and Medium-Run Health and Literacy Impacts of the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic in Brazil with Nidhiya Menon and Aldo Musacchio.

The Economic History Review, 2022

Coverage:  VOX LACEA, Medical Xpress, BrandeisNow, Folha de Sao Paulo

Working Papers

Pensions and Depression: Gender-Disaggregated Evidence from the Elderly Poor in India with Nidhiya Menon (submitted)

We leverage the expansion of the National Social Assistance Program (NSAP) in India to estimate the impact of access to public pensions on measures of depression among the elderly in below poverty line households, using a regression discontinuity design based on age-eligibility cutoffs. We focus on India given that it is the largest lower-middle-income country in terms of population, has limited welfare safety nets, and relatively large proportions of disadvantaged people with mental health vulnerabilities. Evaluating the CESD-10 measure, which is a validated depression scale, we find that pension eligibility lowers the likelihood of experiencing more severe depression, with measurable gender differences. We uncover gender-specific shifts in labor supply, healthcare utilization, social engagement, sleep patterns, and broader indicators of well-being related to hopefulness about the future and life satisfaction, which we offer as explanations for why pension eligibility improves mental health, especially for women. Our results provide insights into shaping effective social assistance policies aimed at raising the welfare of the most at-risk populations in resource-constrained contexts.

Advanced Paternal Age and the Intergenerational Transmission of Early-Life Disadvantage: Evidence from Ethiopia with Charif-Dine Alassani*, Sylvain Dessy, and Tatiana Dessy (submitted)

*PhD candidate

This paper examines whether advanced paternal age at conception is associated with worse health at birth in Ethiopia and whether this gradient varies with marriage-market institutions. Using pooled Demographic and Health Survey data, we estimate the effect of paternal age on low birth weight (LBW) in a primary sample of births to mothers aged 20-35. The design combines validated LBW measurement, rich parental and household controls, geographic and conception-year fixed effects, falsification tests, and Cinelli–Hazlett sensitivity analysis. Fathers aged 40 or older are associated with a statistically significant increase in LBW probability across linear probability, logit, and probit specifications. Eliminating the restricted-sample estimate would require an omitted confounder explaining at least 2.50% of the residual variation in both paternal age and LBW, while placebo tests detect no association with child sex or sub-threshold paternal age. The gradient is concentrated in ethnic groups with an ancestral bride-price tradition, where APA is associated with a 6.1 percentage-point increase in LBW risk, compared with a near-zero estimate elsewhere. These findings are consistent with more adverse selection into delayed fatherhood where marriage formation historically depended on groom-side wealth transfers. 

Mangroves, Mental Health, and Cognition with James Ji, Nidhiya Menon, and Firman Witoelar

Mangroves provide vital ecosystem services, including fisheries support, carbon sequestration, and natural protection against coastal erosion and flooding, but their health consequences are less well understood. We study their impacts on mental health and cognitive functioning in Indonesia, which has the most extensive and biodiverse mangroves in the world. Decades of deforestation, fueled by climate pressures, oil palm expansion, and aquaculture, have led to widespread mangrove loss in the country, disproportionately affecting vulnerable coastal communities. By merging high-resolution satellite data on coastal land use change with individual-level panel data from the Indonesian Family Life Survey (IFLS), we find that a one-standard-deviation increase in local mangrove cover reduces the likelihood of clinical depression by 4.5 percentage points, highlighting that benefits are concentrated in areas where mangrove stocks persist or where aquaculture ponds are restored to mangroves. These effects operate partly through reduced flood exposure, higher household income, and improved food consumption. We also find that restoration potential matters more than blue carbon potential, cash transfers, or social capital in shaping the mangrove-mental health relationship. Our results show that mangrove conservation and restoration can generate important local human capital and welfare benefits beyond their more widely acknowledged ecological and climate mitigation roles.

Labor Scarcity and Colonial Agrarian Institutions: Agricultural Adjustment in India after the 1918 Influenza Pandemic with Arpita Khanna and Nidhiya Menon

We examine how the 1918 influenza pandemic affected agricultural production and rural labor markets in colonial India, with particular attention to the role of colonial agrarian institutions in mediating these effects. We combine newly digitized district-level data on cultivation, crop acreage, wages, occupations, prices, and land revenue with information on influenza mortality to study how pandemic intensity altered agricultural adjustment across districts and over time. We show that higher-mortality districts experienced labor scarcity, but the response was uneven across labor market margins. Wages rose mainly outside agriculture and among skilled workers. Agricultural adjustment occurred instead through labor reallocation, cultivation intensity, and crop composition. Higher-mortality districts saw short-run declines in cropped area and multiple cropping, while longer-run effects were concentrated in specific crop margins, especially cotton. We find little evidence of immediate substitution toward irrigation, livestock, or agricultural implements. The institutional results show that land tenure and revenue systems shaped the margins through which the burden appeared. Directly assessed cultivators registered the shock more visibly through reduced cultivation within the assessed land base. In settings mediated by village or landlord institutions, the burden appeared more through fiscal incidence, assessment margins, or less visible redistribution within the agrarian hierarchy. Our findings show that the economic consequences of pandemic mortality depended not only on labor scarcity, but also on the colonial institutional structure, which in turn determined how production losses and fiscal pressures were absorbed in rural India.