Publications

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

Climate Shocks, Intimate Partner Violence, and the Protective Role of Climate-Resilience Projects   with  James Ji and Nidhiya Menon (R&R)

This study investigates the impact of climate change on intimate partner violence attitudes in Bangladesh and shows that policy can mitigate much, if not all, of the harmful consequences of climate shocks on women. Utilizing a novel dataset linking geo-referenced meteorological data with information on women’s attitudes, we find that dry shocks increase tolerance for intimate partner violence among women in poor and agriculture-dependent communities, with suggestive evidence that this happens due to the erosion of women’s outside options. Distributed-lag estimates show that these effects persist beyond the immediate period of exposure, consistent with a gradual weakening of women’s fallback positions rather than a purely short-run stress-induced or backlash response. Climate resilience projects funded by the Bangladesh Climate Change Trust (BCCT), a domestic climate fund, mitigate the negative impacts of dry shocks, highlighting the significant role of such initiatives in generating positive ameliorative spillover effects. Remotely sensed data on land use and crop-yield indicators reveal that these projects protect agriculture during dry shocks, especially in the rainfed Aman season, thus providing a credible test of the importance of the agricultural transmission channel and the pathway through which such projects buffer climate shocks. Our findings underline the crucial role of targeted policies in fostering climate adaptation.

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 studies whether advanced paternal age at conception contributes to the intergenerational transmission of early-life disadvantage in a setting where credible causal evidence is scarce. Using pooled nationally representative Demographic and Health Survey data from Ethiopia, we examine whether advanced parental age increases the risk of low birth weight (LBW), a key predictor of neonatal survival and later-life human capital. Our design combines a carefully motivated primary sample of births to mothers aged 20-35, validated measurement of LBW using maternal reports of birth size, rich parental and household controls, geographic and cohort fixed effects, formal sensitivity analysis, and falsification tests. Across linear probability, logit, and probit specifications, advanced paternal age is associated with a statistically significant increase in the probability of LBW. The estimates are stable across samples and more robust in the primary sample. Cinelli-Hazlett sensitivity analysis indicates that the result is robust to implausibly strong omitted confounding, especially relative to maternal age. Placebo tests show no corresponding association with child sex or with paternal age below conventional thresholds.  

Mangroves, Mental Health, and Cognitive Functions 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 4.7 percentage points, and buffers against declines in episodic memory for older adults. These effects operate through channels of enhanced economic security and reduced flood exposure. We find that cash transfers and social capital are less influential in the mangroves-mental-health relationship with ecological restoration potential mattering more. Our results establish an important link between ecosystem degradation and human capital decline, making a compelling case for integrating mangrove conservation and restoration in development strategies.

Labor Scarcity and Colonial Agrarian Institutions: Agricultural Adjustment in India after the 1918 Influenza Pandemic with Arpita Khanna, Nidhiya Menon, and Vidushi Poddar* *Undergraduate student

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.