Work in Progress:
Marital Investment When Disaster Strikes: Evidence from Indonesia (Job Market Paper)
Abstract: Natural disasters are increasing in frequency and intensity globally, posing growing challenges for vulnerable households. In developing countries with limited formal credit markets and customary marriage payments, are informal institutions, such as marriage payments, used as insurance against these shocks? To explore this question, I combine geo-coded household survey data with satellite-based flood exposure measures to estimate the effects of flooding on household financial behaviour and marriage markets in Indonesia, where the bride price, paid from the groom to the bride, is customary. I document three main findings: (i) households reallocate resources, with reductions in asset-related income and educational expenditures offset by increased farming activity; (ii) flood exposure accelerates daughters' marriages to secure liquidity through bride-price transfers, while delaying sons' marriages to benefit from their financial support to the household; and (iii) responses vary by wealth and parental education, with poorer households expediting daughters' marriages and wealthier households preserving traditional timing, reinforcing preexisting inequalities in wealth and age at marriage. These results highlight the need for policies such as credit access and disaster support to reduce reliance on early marriage as a shock-coping strategy.
Local housing and the housing market: Evidence from Portuguese Metropolitan Areas (with Francisco Nobre and Ronize Cruz)
Revise and Resubmit, Portuguese Economic Journal (PEJ)
Abstract: In this paper, we make use of the rapid expansion of short-term rentals in Portugal, based on a policy change in 2014, to estimate the effects on house prices. Using a novel dataset consisting of property transaction data, from 2010 to 2017, for the metropolitan areas of Lisbon and Porto, we causally identify the impact of these reforms through a two-way fixed effects model, at the quarterly level, where we control for property-specific characteristics and location and time fixed effects. Our results suggest that a one-unit increment in the number of local lodging establishments results in a 0.142%-0.272% increase in the value of transactions, depending on the fixed effects employed, which is ensured by a set of robustness exercises. Stronger effects are found for properties with four bedrooms, in the municipality of Porto and at the upper quantiles. We also document a decrease in the number of transactions of new buildings and a positive effect on the value of stores.
Media: Portuguese Economic Journal Research Report, Population News
When the Ground Shakes: Earthquakes and the Transmission of Human Capital Across Generations (In progress)
Abstract: Do early-life shocks disrupt the intergenerational transmission of human capital? This paper examines this question using rich panel data from Indonesia combined with high-resolution earthquake intensity records across seven decades. I construct a sub-district-level measure of seismic exposure using Modified Mercalli Intensity (MMI) scores from ShakeMap data combined with multigenerational longitudinal data from the Indonesia Family Life Survey (IFLS) to examine this issue. Exploiting variation in earthquake exposure across cohorts and locations in a two-way fixed effects framework, I document four main findings: (i) severe earthquakes during childhood reduce parents' educational attainment, with stronger effects for fathers exposed in early childhood and mothers exposed in adolescence; (ii) these shocks lead to long-term declines in household asset accumulation and non-farm income, constraining financial resources; (iii) despite these setbacks, children of exposed parents attain significantly more schooling, particularly when parents were exposed later in childhood, consistent with compensatory investments in education; and (iv) these gains are concentrated amongst urban households, where greater baseline wealth allows for such responses. These findings suggest that while early-life disaster exposure reduces human capital and household wealth, it induces compensatory educational investments, particularly among households with greater socioeconomic resources.