Research

Publications

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

Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, 2024

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, December 2024 (submitted).

Paper presented at:

IEA-World Bank Conference, Virtual (October 2024) • HEDGE Conference, Pisa, Italy (September 2024) • International Conference on Empirical Economics at Pennsylvania State University Altoona, Virtual (August 2024) • 10th Canadian PhD and Early Career Workshop in Environmental and Resource Economics, Toronto (June 2024) • Canadian Economics Association (CEA), Toronto (June 2024) • Société canadienne de science économique, HEC (May 2024) • Au-delà de l’H2O: Perspectives Économiques, Sociales et Environnementales sur le Bien-Être, ENS, Paris-Saclay (April 2024) • Montreal Workshops on Environmental and Resource Economics (April 2024) • Centre for the Study of African Economics (CSAE) at Oxford University (March 2024).

This study investigates the impact of climate change on intimate partner violence 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 remote-sensed data with information on women’s agency from the Bangladesh Demographic and Health Surveys, we find that dry shocks increase tolerance for intimate partner violence among women in poor and agriculture-dependent communities, amplifying existing social and environmental vulnerabilities. Climate resilience projects funded by the Bangladesh Climate Change Trust (BCCT), a domestic climate fund, mitigate the negative impacts of dry shocks, highlighting the important role of such initiatives in ameliorating the negative social impacts of changing climate. We show that impacts are mitigated as these projects enhance resilience in agriculture by reducing the effects of droughts on acreage and yield in rainfed areas. Our findings underline the role of targeted policy interventions in fostering climate adaptation and wellbeing.

Pensions and Depression: Gender-Disaggregated Evidence from the Elderly Poor in India with Nidhiya Menon, December 2024 (submitted).

We leverage the expansion of the National Social Assistance Program (NSAP) in India in 2006 to estimate the impact of access to public pensions on three measures of depression for 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. We find that becoming eligible for public pensions reduces the likelihood that the elderly poor are depressed. In particular, the intent-to-treat estimate is a 10.1 percentage point decline in the broadest measure of depression. Our gender-specific analyses reveal heterogeneous impacts across demographic groups. More specifically, widowed populations, the majority of whom are elderly poor women, gain the most. Our investigation into the underlying mechanisms reveals that pension eligibility improves mental health through decreased labor market participation, increased healthcare utilization, improved lifestyle choices, enhanced life satisfaction and greater control over resources. Our results offer insights for shaping effective social assistance policies aimed at raising the welfare of the most at-risk populations in resource-constrained contexts.

Settling Prosperity: Historical Immigration and its Long-Term Institutional Legacies (updated version), January 2025 (submitted).

This paper leverages a distinctive experiment from the Age of Mass Migration in Brazil to estimate the institutional legacies of immigration on long-term development. By integrating a newly assembled dataset that combines historical and contemporary administrative records, I quantify the long-term consequences of settlements and uncover the mechanisms that sustain these effects. The findings reveal that municipalities closer to these settlements today enjoy better public goods provision, and more well-defined property rights (evidenced by structured contractual arrangements, fewer land invasions, and increased investments in high-stakes agricultural practices). Intermediate data from the years following the settlements show that the presence of immigrants increased local public spending and led to the establishment of more equitable legal institutions. These early shifts towards locally financed public institutions continue to significantly influence modern institutional indicators. Overall, these findings highlight the lasting influence of historical immigration patterns on the economic and institutional development of regions, underscoring the importance of immigration policies and their implementation in shaping regional growth trajectories.