More School, Fewer Chores? Girls’ Education and Unpaid Work in India.
I investigate whether an improvement in school accessibility for young girls decreases their share of unpaid care work. I work in collaboration with a local NGO in Jaisalmer, India, that opened a new girls’ school designed to reduce key barriers to attendance. I collect two rounds of household survey data, including detailed time-use measures for girls in schooling age and their household members. I find that girls offered access to the new school spend more time on education and less time on domestic duties, alongside increased commuting time and reduced leisure. I find no evidence of a reallocation of unpaid care work across household members.
Fostering Climate Resilience: Socio-Economic Effects of Improved Urban Drainage in Bangladesh (with Angelika Budjan, Khalid Imran, Robin Moellerherm and Jingke Pan)
We study drainage infrastructure upgrades in Barishal, Bangladesh, exploiting indirect effects that propagate through the drainage network as a natural experiment. Using high-resolution elevation data and a two-dimensional hydrodynamic flood model, we show that a large share of predicted reductions in flood duration arise through network spillovers rather than in the immediate vicinity of newly constructed drains. Combining these predictions with a spatially representative household survey of 2,649 households conducted after the 2025 rainy season, we measure the impact that reduced flood exposure has on health, labor markets, connectivity and assets.
On the Road to Female Empowerment? Evidence from the Free Public Transport Program in Delhi (with Girija Borker and Laura Montenbruck).
This project examines whether gender-targeted transportation policies can trigger male backlash. We focus on Delhi’s Pink Ticket Scheme, which allows women to travel for free on public buses in Delhi, India, and study whether the policy inadvertently reduces service quality or access for its intended beneficiaries. We first estimate whether the scheme leads to discriminatory behavior by bus drivers and conductors, making travel less accessible or more costly in practice. We then investigate the mechanisms underlying such behavior and test interventions designed to mitigate it.
The Price of Devotion: Collective Rituals, Pollution, and Child Mortality (with Stefan Klonner and Disha Tiwari).
We study the environmental impacts of large-scale religious gatherings, focusing on the Kumbh Mela in India, the largest human congregation in the world. Combining high-resolution satellite-based PM₂.₅ data with geocoded information on Kumbh locations and timing, we estimate the causal effect of the event on local air pollution. We find that Kumbh events lead to a statistically significant increase in PM₂.₅ concentrations in urban areas around the event site. Linking these environmental shocks to health outcomes, we find a short-run increase in child mortality in urban areas during Kumbh events, followed by a subsequent decline, suggesting a short-term mortality displacement mechanism.
Drought and Fertility in India.
I study how drought affects the timing of conceptions in India by combining high-resolution rainfall data with retrospective birth histories from the two most recent rounds of the Demographic and Health Surveys. Exploiting spatial and temporal variation in moisture shortfalls, I find that severe droughts during the main agricultural season are followed by a sharp decline in conceptions in the short run, with partial catch-up within the subsequent year.