RESEARCH

Ongoing work 


From Jobs to Careers: Lifting Constraints to Women's Career Advancement in South Asia
(with Farzana Afridi, Raymond Robertson and Danila Serra; supported by G2LM|LIC)


Supporting the transition from jobs to careers is a critical step in the full realization of the potential of women’s contribution to labor markets. In this project, we aim to understand what are the most important demand-side and supply-side constraints on women‘s job-to-career transition in garment factories in Bangladesh, India and Pakistan? Can interventions targeting either managerial decision-making (demand-side), female workers‘ information about career possibilities and own skills and potential (supply-side), or female workers‘ support within the household, lift some of these constraints and promote women’s career advancement in South Asia? We will conduct a comprehensive manager and worker survey in about 400 garment factories in Bangladesh, India and Pakistan. This will allow to identify and quantify the most pressing constraints on women’s career advancement within factories in three South Asian countries characterized by the lowest rates of female labor force participation. We will then implement a series of interventions in Bangladesh and India, through randomized experiments, with the aim of assessing whether lifting (which) important demand-side or supply-side barriers to women’s career job-to-career transition could facilitate women’s progression on the career ladder. 


Tackling Household Decision Making Inefficiences for Young Women's Skills Investment in Pakistan
(with Zunia Tirmazee, Rebecca Wu and Emma Zhang; in collaboration with Punjab Skills Development Fund)

We study household decisions to invest in young women's digital skills through a short-term online training program in urban Pakistan. We randomized the split of a fixed, cash incentive for program completion between daughters and parents. We informed daughters about the incentive allocation, and cross-randomized whether parents received information about daughters' incentive. Under information asymmetry, assigning the entire incentive to parents increased program completion by 95 percent compared to assigning it to daughters. Once parents learnt about daughters' incentive, the incentive allocation had no impact on program completion. We reject the unitary household model in this parent-daughter context and provide evidence on bargaining behavior supporting the efficient collective model.


Incentivizing NGOs: A Field Experiment in Pakistan
(with Kate Vyborny and Simon Quinn; supported by PPAF,  IGC and NSF)

Donors and developing country governments have experimented with alternative ways to deliver services and assistance to communities and to individuals.  One such approach is to deliver funding for basic services through non-governmental organisations.  Incentive issues have been studied extensively in government bureaucracies.  However, similar issues also arise when public spending is channelled through the non-government sector, which may reduce state effectiveness in policy delivery; yet there is very little research on these issues.  In addition, we know very little about how public spending through non-government organisations affects service delivery through the traditional bureaucracy.  Under what circumstances does it complement or bolster mainstream public service delivery, providing information or exerting citizen pressure on the government?  Under what circumstances does it “let government off the hook,” substituting for services that would have been provided by the state?  In this project, we are collaborating with the Pakistan Poverty Alleviation Fund to study these issues.  PPAF receives support from both donor and Pakistani government sources, and funds local volunteer-run NGOs across Pakistan to provide public services in a wide range of sectors.  We are collaborating with PPAF on a Randomized Controlled Trial with 836 volunteer local NGOs across Pakistan.  As a part of the trial, PPAF is randomly varying the reporting obligations and incentives for those NGOs.  The results of the RCT and related analysis on a rich panel dataset on these NGOs, their communities and local government offices will help shed light on how monitoring and incentives can be improved in the NGO sector; how the staff of a complex organization (PPAF and its partners, who disburse the funds and support the local NGOs) respond to and manage new information; and on the relationship between publicly-funded NGO sector and traditional state institutions.


Institutional capacity as an organizational challenge: a field experiment in Pakistan
(with Kate Vyborny and Simon Quinn; supported by PPAF, IGC and NSF)

Large organizations, such as firms or bureaucracies, are often structured as complex hierarchies.  Theory suggests two features of an organizational hierarchy may matter for its performance: information flow within the hierarchy; and divergent preferences of the members of the hierarchy.  However, we have limited empirical evidence on how either affects organizational capacity and performance.   In this study, we shed light on these issues through a novel field experiment involving a large donor organization and over 800 recipient community organizations across Pakistan.  The design allows us to test how each part of a large, complex organization (the donor) responds to new information on performance (of recipient organizations) on key performance indicators, and how the responses of both donor and recipients to new information and incentives relate to organizational characteristics of theoretical importance, including divergence of preferences between members of the organization; communication costs between parts of the organization; and decentralization of decision making authority. 


 Encouraging female graduates to enter the labour force: Do role model interventions work?
(with Farah Said  , Mahreen Mahmud  and Zunia Tirmazee; supported by PEDL  and GLM|LIC 

In this randomised controlled trial we test the impact of a low-cost intervention to overcome psychological constraints to female labour force participation (FLFP). We focus on final year undergraduate students enrolled in women-only colleges in urban Lahore. We motivate students through a documentary of educated women who are successfully employed in the labour market. We evaluate the impact of this intervention on whether the respondent applies for a job, reports a subjective improvement in aspirations, self-belief and sense of control; and an improvement in measures of effort exerted in order to secure employment. Our study is particularly relevant in the context of Pakistan, which suffers from chronically low female labour force participation: between 1992 and 2014, urban female labour force participation increased from 7.3 to 11.4% only and this rate is less than half compared to Bangladesh (Pakistan Jobs Diagnostic, 2017). decentralization of decision making authority. 


 The unintended consequences of political accountability: Quasi-experimental evidence from policing in Pakistan

(with Kate Vyborny and Dareen Latif)

The accountability relationship between a principal and agent (such as a politician and a bureaucrat) may lead to suboptimal outcomes if the principal either has limited ability to exert consequences on the agent or imperfectly observes the agent's performance.  With limited observability, an increased threat of consequences may backfire, leading to multitasking or manipulation of data.  We use rich administrative microdata on crime in Pakistan to investigate how police respond to (1) changes in the politician's ability to exert pressure on them for performance, using variation in political alignment of neighborhoods to the governing party over time; (2) an increase in the politician's ability to observe the agent's activity, using the rollout of a new complaints tracking database; and (3) how the two interact.  We find that police are robustly less likely to record and process citizen complaints in areas that supported the governing party.   We rule out the possibility that our results are explained by better crime prevention or reduced crime: logged complaints are less likely to be pursued, staffing levels and response times do not change, and criminal property crime reports appear to be ``downgraded" to non-criminal loss reports.  Instead, results are consistent with a mechanism of officials under-reporting crime statistics under pressure to keep crime levels low.  As a new complaints tracking database is rolled out, improving observability of police handling of citizen complaints, the effect of political alignment attenuates.  

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Working Papers

Breaking intergenerational violence: The role of government policy (Click here)

(with Hijab Waheed)

The Pakistan fares poorly on indicators of women empowerment and gender equality. In this paper, we study the impact of childhood exposure to violence, of the woman or her partner and the effectiveness of province-wise legislative changes aimed at greater protection of women against violence on well-being as measured by exposure to intimate partner violence (IPV). Using a difference-in-differences (DiD) estimation technique, we estimate the causal impact of childhood exposure to violence on well-being of women married before and after the roll-out of a government introduced policy package in Punjab. For this purpose, we use the Women’s Social and Economic Wellbeing in Pakistan (ESW) Survey data (2017 – 18). We find that women’s (men’s) early life exposure to violence has long run and persistent effects on the likelihood of accepting (engaging) in IPV during adulthood. Further, we show that government’s protection initiatives were partially successful in safeguarding women, especially in metropolitan cities of Punjab; on average, psychological violence victimization is less prevalent among women who got married after the introduction of government initiatives relative to those married before. We find suggestive evidence that the effectiveness of the protection initiatives on exposure to IPV may be due to greater inclusion of women in household decisions. 


Leveraging technology to promote women's health: Evidence from a pilot program (Click here)

(with Sadia Hussain and Muhammad Ahmad Nazif)

We investigate the causal impact of offering telehealth services to female microfinance borrowers on their health and bargaining power in the household. Using a balanced panel of 1218 female borrowers, we observe a positive impact of offering telehealth services on self-reported physical and mental health of treated relative to control women. Treated women seek healthcare more proactively; they are more likely to consult a doctor and they do so sooner, as compared to control women. In addition, treated women report greater inclusion in household decision-making. We also find positive spillover effects of offering telehealth services within the household, where we observe a greater likelihood of the spouse and children (of treated women) to seek health care.


Group decision-making: Evidence from a framed field experiment with community organisations in Pakistan (Click here)

The aim of this paper is to understand the process of collective decision-making within community development organisations in rural Pakistan. We investigate how individual preferences of members running community organisations aggregate into group preferences. We examine the role of intrinsic characteristics in determining whether member’s individual preferences are represented or ignored in group preferences. We conducted a framed field experiment with members of community organisations in which members made organisational budget choices first individually, and then collectively after a process of face-to-face deliberation. We find that group preferences are predicted by individual preferences of the median member, and that this relationship is not sensitive to intrinsic characteristics of the median. While median member’s individual preferences exert a dominant influence on the group decision, this effect is not exclusive; presence in a group setting and the process of deliberation amongst members shifts the group decision in the direction of conservatism in both experiments, so that groups, collectively make less risky and less patient choices compared to individuals. Finally, over and above member’s relative position in the preference distribution, intrinsic characteristics, (like gender, age, wealth, education, occupation, experience, religious background etc.) hardly explain how well individual preferences are represented in group choices. In sum, we find that group decision-making within community organisations in rural Pakistan, follows a simple majority voting rule with a shift towards conservatism and that these organisations provide an inclusive mechanism for giving voice to disadvantaged groups in rural settings.


Rainfall shocks and child health in rural Pakistan (Click here)

I examine the direct reduced form effect of fluctuations in rainfall during agricultural periods preceding pregnancy, during pregnancy and the first year of life on child height in rural areas of Pakistan. I investigate both the short and the long run impact of pre-pregnancy, prenatal and early life exposure to rainfall, when a child is 4 and 13 years of age, on average. Given the widespread canal irrigation system prevalent in the country, I also investigate how fluctuations in river water flows affect child health. The model is estimated using ordinary least squares. Rainfall data is provided by Pakistan Meteorological Department (PMD), while child level data is from Pakistan Panel Household Survey (2001, 2010). I find that fluctuations in rainfall during the pre-pregnancy period have the most lasting effects on stature of children in the short and long run. A mother who was exposed to a 1 standard deviation reduction in rainfall during the pre-pregnancy period, her child grew up to be 0.17 standard deviations (0.53 cms) shorter by age four. With time, the adverse impact of pre-pregnancy rainfall on height, was only partially compensated. By 13 years of age, the child continued to be 0.12 standard deviations (0.83 cms) shorter, on average. I also find that the average effect of fluctuations in pre-pregnancy rainfall on height of children was smaller in districts that had access to irrigation facilities. 


Rainfall shocks and children’s well-being in India  (Click here)

Using a continuous variable to capture deviations in rainfall, we analyze the direct reduced form effect of a drought during a child’s critical period of development on indicators of physical growth and cognition. We use the Young Lives Dataset on Andhra Pradesh, India and find that in the short run, exposure to the drought decreases weight-for-age without having any effect on children’s height-for-age. While stature is unaffected in the short run, we find that children who experienced the drought during early life, grow up to be shorter and exhibit a lower score on numeracy and language tests compared to children who did not experience the drought. But, by the time children have reached 8 years of age, the negative effect of the drought on cognition disappears showing that the adverse impact of the drought on stature is more persistent compared to its impact on cognitive development. We also find that presence of a government assistance program in the child’s community during the drought period is helpful in partially offsetting the negative effects of the drought.

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Publications

Journal articles:


Book Chapters