Research

Utilizing the quasi-random allocation of the Transmigration Program in Indonesia and the variation in productivity among transmigrant villages, I show that cities proximate to more productive villages experience higher population and employment growth, with growth primarily observed in the service industries. The higher growth rates are observed concurrently with higher in-migration to cities, with migrants coming from other both rural and urban districts, which is not driven by transmigrants abandoning their destination villages. As migrants are likely to stay in more productive villages, it provides suggestive evidence for positive indirect spillover effects of rural productivity on regional urban markets.

with Alisher Batmanov, Bruno Calderon-Hernandez, Roberto Gonzalez-Tellez, Alejandro Guardiola [SSRN working paper]

We study how beliefs about the prevalence of mental distress and psychotherapy and its relationship with academic  performance affect stigma and treatment seeking among students. First, we conduct a representative survey in a large university in Mexico to establish the baseline facts about the current state of student mental health. Our preliminary results indicate that nearly a third of students report moderate or severe depression and anxiety symptoms, yet the majority do not seek or receive adequate support, with only 40% of students in distress receiving professional help for their mental health issues. Students also believe that those with poor mental health have lower grades while the data do not provide support for this. We are using the survey results to inform our intervention in the lab-in-the-field experiment where we combine an information intervention with peer-group discussions to update student beliefs related to stigma and psychotherapy use.

with Vinicius Peçanha

In many slums, especially in Latin American cities like Rio de Janeiro, crime rates are particularly high, which results in many negative outcomes, including educational disruptions and acute stress. I find that the neighborhood shootings close to the school shortly before the exam have a robust negative effect on students’ exam performance on the language and math university entrance exam tests. The effects are robust to the inclusion of school and year fixed effects, as exposed students perform significantly worse (by 0.1-0.3 st. dev.) than non-exposed students.

with Sam Asher, Juan Pablo Chauvin, and Paul Novosad

We examine the links between urban and rural economic performance in India, the country with the largest rural population in the world, using geo-spatial socio-economic data on 1,000 cities and 500,000 villages. Rural measures of development fall almost universally with distance from towns; the gradients are shallow and the urban-rural gaps are very large even at very short distances from town centers. A Bartik estimation of the effects of urban demand shocks reveals a clear pattern of urban-to-rural spillovers. Spillovers are larger and wider for manufacturing than for service-sector jobs, and extend further along major highway networks. Surprisingly, urban demand raises population in proximate rural areas but not in the urban areas themselves, perhaps suggesting constraints on densification.

The most urbanized continent, Latin America is lagging in economic development expected of its high urbanization rates. Such ‘urbanization without growth’ has been linked in some contexts to upper classes benefitting from natural resource extraction while having a preference for urban living. Across Latin America, I find that while industrialization and resource rents do explain some variation, they are insufficient to explain the exceptionally high urbanization rates. I present suggestive evidence that the colonial past may have created an urban system that was later conducive to speeding up urbanization without growth.