Research I Am Working On and Excited About

I am currently studying the impacts of extreme climatic events on agriculture with a focus on how weather shocks influence yields, farmer decision-making and rural livelihoods. I am also extending my research on the environmental consequences of agricultural intensification, focusing on the broader impacts of high-input farming and specialization. In addition, I am also interested in studying the welfare implications of trade frictions. I particularly enjoy developing and applying innovative empirical methods in my research.

Working Papers

Fire in the Fields, Crime in the Air with Hardeep Singh

We exploit seasonal crop residue burning as a source of pollution and use exogenous year-to-year variation in wind direction to estimate the impact of rural sources of air pollution on crime in India. We find that short-term pollution exposure leads to an increase in violent crime, public order offenses, and most worringly, violent crimes against women. Estimates suggest an unaccounted social cost of USD 600 million just from pollution exposure in the rice harvest season. We explore three channels: (i) pollution induced aggression and weakened impulse control, (ii) reduced visibility leading to poor deterrence, and (iii) income distress from reduced earnings. Heterogeneity by crime type and spatial variation in law enforcement capacity support these mechanisms. Our findings highlight the need to account for issues of public safety and social instability in environmental and agricultural policy in developing countries.

State-Mediated Trade, Distortions and Air Pollution

Can government imposed market integration and resultant specialization lead to a large-scale negative environmental externality? I compare agricultural fire activity and air pollution levels in districts where the government interferes in the local grain markets with districts without such interference to establish a robust link between food prices and air pollution in India. This link comes about due to higher prices leading to increased agricultural fire activity in districts where the government procures foodgrains from the local markets. Estimates suggest a 21 percent increase in morbidity and a 19 percent increase in out of pocket medical expenditure associated with procurement led air pollution. The mortality cost of resultant pollution is USD 1 billion larger than gains to producers from higher prices.

Agriculture, Electrification and Gendered Time Use in Rural Bangladesh with Tanu Gupta and Md Tajuddin Khan

We study the linkages between electrification, activity participation and time use of individuals in rural Bangladesh. We find that households' access to grid electricity positively correlates with the likelihood of males participating in non-farm work and females participating in agriculture. In electrified households, females reallocate time from domestic work and caregiving to more leisure and farming. Household access to electricity is positively associated with greater ownership of appliances like fans, refrigerators, televisions, and mobile phones. Moreover, we observe a greater likelihood of electrified households irrigating via electrical pumps and using female family labor on their farms. Electrification is also positively associated with women's involvement in decisions regarding farm-related activities and household expenses. The findings suggest that in farming communities, agriculture may play a critical role in the link between rural electrification, women's workforce participation, and household bargaining power.

Inefficiency in Agricultural Production: Do Information Frictions Matter? with Aranya Chakraborty and Rahul Rao

Does information and communication technology (ICT) based provision of agricultural extension services help improve agricultural productivity in poor or developing countries? We answer this question in the case of rice production in rural Bangladesh. We exploit the spatiotemporal variation in the availability of village-level phone services and the temporal variation in the timing of an ICT-based intervention to identify the differential impact by input use, network centrality, and geographic proximity. We observe that, in the villages with access to phone service, there is a 50 percent reduction in plot-level inefficiency after the intervention, driven by plots that used rainfed water for cultivation. We provide evidence suggesting that these effects are due to increased input use by the farmers using rainfed farming. Our results also document that the intervention benefits geographically remote farmers differentially more, whose information needs are otherwise unfulfilled by traditional extension services. However, the diffusion of information via networks remains relevant as we document significant cross-community spillovers through geographic ties.

Consumption Smoothing, Commodity Markets, and Informal Transfers with Christopher B. Barrett

How do low-income, rural households smooth consumption in the face of seasonal and stochastic variation in income when household access to formal financial services is limited? And how do consumption smoothing modes evolve in response to changes in transport infrastructure? We explore these questions by studying milk consumption smoothing for a panel of households from rural India. Household milk consumption is highly but incompletely smoothed relative to intertemporal variation in household milk production. Informal inter-household transfers provide only modest quasi-insurance. Mainly, households smooth consumption through milk market transactions. And as new roads reach villages, markets become even more important mechanisms for consumption smoothing, especially in high productivity seasons. These patterns underscore the central importance of product market participation for risk management in low-income rural communities.

Deadweight Losses or Gains from In-kind Transfers? Experimental Evidence from India with ‪Klaus Abbink‬, Gaurav Datt, Lata Gangadharan & Bharat Ramaswami

Are in-kind transfers associated with deadweight losses? To answer this question, we conducted an incentivized field experiment in India and offered low-income respondents the choice between a free quantity of rice and varying amounts of cash to elicit their willingness to pay for rice. Contrary to expectation, we find evidence of deadweight gain on average, though with a striking contrast between a deadweight loss among women from female-headed households and a deadweight gain among women from male-headed households. After investigating alternative mechanisms, our results highlight that greater bargaining power of women within households increases the propensity to choose cash over rice.

Risk-Sharing with Network Transaction Costs with Christian Cox  & Akanksha Negi

Transaction costs can impede transfers, causing consumption to co-vary with endowment. We extend the standard risk-sharing model to include transaction costs and show both theoretically and empirically that transaction costs can impede global risk-sharing. We illustrate the empirically relevant aspects of our model with production, consumption and trade network data for global trade in staple food commodities. We incorporate network robust inference and demonstrate how information from the bilateral transactions can be aggregated in a sufficient way to control for them in estimation. Our results indicate that transaction costs impede risk sharing in food commodities, particularly in maize and rice. We use the estimated model to perform counterfactual analysis, showing how changing transaction costs affect global risk-sharing and how a complete halt of wheat trade between Ukraine-Russia and major importers changes equilibrium networks.

Daughter vs. Daughter-in-Law: Kinship Roles and Women's Time Use in India with Tanu Gupta

The custom of patrilocal marriage shifts a woman from her natal family to being part of her husband’s household. This shift and the associated change in kinship role has implications for her participation and time use in paid and unpaid work. In this paper, we compare the participation decision and time use in different activities of married and unmarried women in India. Our comparison group for married women or the daughters-in-law within the household is the unmarried daughters of comparable age and educational qualification. We hypothesize that conditional on age, educational attainment and other observable characteristics, the differences in time devoted to domestic activities and caregiving of these women are due to differences in their status and hierarchy in the household. We find that compared to daughters, daughters-in-law spend more time in home production and less time in paid employment, learning, socializing, leisure and self-care. Moreover, they also spend more time on religious activities, which suggests that not all women may bear equal responsibility for producing status goods for the household and that this responsibility may invariably fall on the daughters-in-law.

Birth Order Effects in Maternal Health-Seeking Behavior: Evidence from India with Abhishek Dureja

Can maternal health-seeking behavior change with subsequent births? We find a 5 percentage point decline in the likelihood of a mother delivering her later born in an institutional facility compared to her first born. We also observe a 4 percentage point decline in medically supervised births for higher birth order children. These effects seem to be driven by changed risk perceptions associated with a complication free first child’s delivery and increased financial constraints. Improvements in roads and banking infrastructure attenuate this negative birth order gradient. Results highlight the importance of birth order as an important determinant of maternal health-seeking behavior.