Research Papers and Briefs
RECENT RESEARCH PAPERS
(Note that the full list of my publications is in my CV. This page lists my more recently published papers, forthcoming papers and working papers.)
Leveraging Women's Views to Influence Gender Norms around Women Working: Evidence from an Online Intervention in Indonesia (with D. Contreras Suarez and D. Setyonaluri).
How to influence social norms that drive behavior in relation to women’s participation in employment is not well understood. We provide randomly selected participants with information on the extent of i) women’s support for women with children working; ii) husband’s support for sharing day-to-day childcare with wives; and iii) mothers’ and mother-in-law’s support for working women. As a result, the probability of choosing an online career mentoring course for women over a shopping voucher of equal value increased by 25%. Information beyond women’s support for working women further increased support for women working for some groups, although not strongly so.
Information, Intermediaries and International Migration (with S. Bazzi, S. Schaner and F. Witoelar). Working paper, updated version May, 2022.
Job seekers face substantial information frictions, especially in international labor markets where intermediaries match prospective migrants with overseas employers. We conducted a randomized trial in Indonesia to explore how information about intermediary quality shapes migration outcomes. Holding access to information about the return to choosing a high-quality intermediary constant, intermediary-specific quality disclosure reduces the migration rate, cutting use of low-quality providers. Workers who do migrate receive better pre-departure preparation and have improved experiences abroad, despite no change in occupation or destination. These results are not driven by changes in
beliefs about average provider quality or the return to migration. Nor does selection explain improved outcomes for those who migrate with quality disclosure. Together, our findings are consistent with an increase in the option value of search: with better ability to differentiate offer quality, workers search longer, select higher-quality intermediaries, and ultimately have better migration experiences.
Behavioural adaptation to improved environmental quality: Evidence from a sanitation intervention in Lao PDR (with A. Huang, P. Santos and M. Thomas). Working paper, version Sept, 2023.
This paper investigates behavioural adaptation to local improvements in environmental quality. Using exogenous variation in the availability of improved sanitation generated by the randomised allocation of financial incentives in Lao PDR, we find that improvements in village sanitation coverage led to significant reductions in boiling water for drinking. Our analysis suggests that this change is likely a rational response to a reduction in the health benefits associated with treating water, which decline and eventually become negligible as local adoption of improved sanitation increases. Estimates of the value of time savings associated with the reduction in water boiling suggest that this adaptation is an additional important benefit of sanitation investments, most of which accrues to girls and women.
Women's Transition in the Labor Market and Childbearing: The Challenge of Formal Sector Employment in Indonesia (with D. Contreras Suarez and Y. Tseng). Working paper, version Dec, 2023.
It is well established that women’s labor force participation drops markedly with marriage and childbearing, however, little is known about women’s labor market transitions, especially in developing countries. This paper uses the Indonesian Family Life Survey to track the employment histories of over 9,000 women for more than 20 years, observing women as they get married and have children. The data show that large numbers of Indonesian women drop out of the labor market as a result of marriage and childbearing. Formal sector employment emerges as a key problem. Having worked in the formal sector prior to the birth of a first child reduces the probability of working in the year following the birth by 20 percentage points and reduces the probability of returning to the labor market thereafter by 3.6 percentage points. If women do return to work, formal sector employment is associated with greater delays in returning. There is little evidence of women switching from the formal to the informal sector. Formal sector labor market policies such as flexible work hours; part-time work; the ability to work from home; and work-based childcare are likely to boost women’s labor force participation, with consequent boosts to economic productivity and prosperity.
The Dirty Business of Eliminating Open Defecation: The Effect of Village Sanitation on Child Height from Field Experiments in Four Countries (with P. Gertler, M. Shah, M. L. Alzua, S. Martinez ns S. Patil). Journal of Development Economics, 159, Nov 2022, 102990.
We examine the impacts of a sanitation program designed to eliminate open defecation in at-scale randomized field experiments in four countries: India, Indonesia, Mali, and Tanzania. The programs – all variants of the widely-used Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) approach - increase village private sanitation coverage in all four locations by 7 to 39 percentage points. We use the experimentally-induced variation in access to sanitation to identify the causal relationship between village sanitation coverage and child height. We find evidence of threshold effects where increases in child health of 0.3 standard deviations are realized once village sanitation coverage reaches 50 to 75%. There do not appear to be further gains beyond this threshold. These results suggest that there are large health benefits to achieving coverage levels well below the 100% coverage pushed by the CLTS movement. Open defecation decreased in all countries through improved access to private sanitation facilities, and additionally through increased use of sanitation facilities in Mali who implemented the most intensive behavior change intervention.
Does being "left-behind" in childhood lead to criminality in adulthood? Evidence from data on rural-urban migrants and prison inmates in China (with X. Meng and D. Zhang). Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 20, Oct 2022:675-693.
Large scale rural-to-urban migration and China’s household registration system have resulted in about 61 million children being left-behind in rural villages when their parents migrate to the cities. This paper uses survey and experimental data from male rural-urban migrants – prison inmates and comparable non-inmates – to examine whether parental absence in childhood as a result of migration is associated with increased criminality in adulthood. Control functions and sibling fixed effects are used to identify causal impacts. Parental absence due to migration is found to increase the propensity of adult males to commit crimes. Being left-behind decreases educational attainment and increases risk-loving behavior, both of which increase criminality.
Child Marriage: Using the Indonesian Family Life Survey to Examine the Lives of Women and Men who Married at an Early Age (with D. Contreras Suarez and S. Wieczkiewicz). Review of Economics of the Household, 2022, DOI: 10.1007/s11150-022-09616-8 .
An understanding of the experiences of men and women who marry before adulthood is important in motivating social change. Using fixed effects estimation (the inclusion of geographic fixed effects at diminishing levels of aggregation and sister fixed effects where possible) on panel data from the Indonesian Family Life Survey (IFLS), we follow the lives of a sample of 40,800 women and men for up to two decades and examine a wide range of factors associated with child marriage. We examine the lives of both girls and boys who marry early, and the differential experience of girls marrying older men versus young boys. Child marriage is found to be associated with lesser educational attainment, lower earnings and less say in household decision-making, for both men and women. Women are less likely to have a medically-supervised birth and their children are more likely to die, be stunted and perform worse on cognitive tests. Negative factors are mostly exacerbated when young girls marry similarly underage men.
Policy brief: In English; In Indonesian (Konsekuensi Perkawinan Anak di Indonesia).
Crimes Against Morality: Unintended Consequences of Criminalizing Sex Work (with J. Seager and M. Shah) Quarterly Journal of Economics, 136(1), Feb 2021:427-469.
We examine the impact of criminalizing sex work, exploiting an event in which local officials unexpectedly criminalized sex work in one district in East Java, Indonesia, but not in neighboring districts. We collect data from female sex workers and their clients before and after the change. We find that criminalization increases sexually transmitted infections among female sex workers by 58 percent, measured by biological tests. This is driven by decreased condom access and use. We also find evidence that criminalization decreases earnings among women who left sex work due to criminalization, and decreases their ability to meet their children's school expenses while increasing the likelihood that children begin working to supplement household income. While criminalization has the potential to improve population STI outcomes if the market shrinks permanently, we show that five years post-criminalization the market has rebounded and the probability of STI transmission within the general population is likely to have increased.
Media coverage: **The Economist; VoxDev; Atlantico.
Podcast Interview: Faculti
Selected for inclusion in the Harvard Kennedy School Gender Action Portal (Evidence on What Works to Advance Gender Equity.)
Sanitation, Financial Incentives and Health Spillovers: A Cluster Randomised Trial (with P. Santos, M. Thomas and J. Albert). Journal of Health Economics, 77 (2021).
*** Winner of the 2021 Australian Health Economics Society (AHES) Best Paper Prize
Poor sanitation and its consequent negative health outcomes continue to plague the developing world. Drawing on the finding that financial subsidies have changed behaviour in other health contexts, we conducted a clustered randomised trial in 160 villages in Lao PDR to evaluate the effectiveness of combining financial incentives with Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS), a widely-conducted behaviour change program. Villages were randomly allocated to four groups, all of which received CLTS but differed in the type of subsidy offered (none, household, village or both). Using data from a random sample of households with young children and village administrative data, we show that household incentives increased sanitation take-up among the poor, whereas a village incentive increased take-up primarily among the non-poor. Improved sanitation produced positive health spillovers - a 10 percentage point increase in village sanitation coverage decreased the probability of childhood stunting by 3 percentage points.
Relationship between Water and Sanitation and Maternal Health: Evidence from Indonesia (with C. Chase and D. Contreras Suarez). World Development, 147(2021), 105637.
Poor household water supply and sanitation can affect maternal and newborn health outcomes through several pathways, including the quality of drinking water consumed
by pregnant woman and exposure to harmful fecal pathogens in the environment due to poor quality sanitation. Using data on 14,098 pregnancies across four rounds of the
Indonesian Family Life Survey (IFLS), we investigate the relationship between water and sanitation and outcomes along the course of a pregnancy - health and
complications during pregnancy, probability of a miscarriage, complications during child birth, probability of live birth, and neonatal outcomes including birth weight and
newborn survival rates. After controlling for confounding factors, we find that access to at least basic household sanitation is strongly associated with substantially decreased
overall risk during pregnancy and birth. Whether or not a household has access to at least basic sanitation is strongly significantly associated with a lower probability of
miscarriage and is a strong predictor of high fever during labor (an indicator of infection). We find no systematic association between household access to basic water
and maternal and newborn outcomes. We also find no evidence of herd protection resulting from high levels of sanitation within the community.
Journal article available here.
Theoretical Underpinnings and Meta-analysis of the Effects of Cash Transfers on Intimate Partner Violence in Low- and Middle-Income Countries (with V. Baranov, D. Contreras Suarez and C. Thibout. Journal of Development Studies, 2020, 57:1, 1-25.
The number of studies examining the effects of cash transfer (CT) programs on Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) has rapidly grown over the last decade. Depending on how violence is modelled, CTs could either increase, decrease or have an ambiguous effect on violence. This paper provides a survey of the theoretical and quantitative empirical literature on the effects of CTs on IPV. We place the existing theories in the context of an overarching model of household bargaining. We then review the empirical evidence for low- and middle-income countries. The bulk of the empirical evidence suggests that CTs either are associated with a decrease in IPV or no effect on average. Some studies however report increases in IPV for some subgroups, for example for women with low levels of education whose husbands have even lower levels of education. A meta-analysis finds a significant reduction in physical and emotional violence and controlling behaviours – consistent with household resource and stress theory, possibly in conjunction with, but dominating, theories of status inconsistency and instrumental violence.
Links to copies of the published article here.
Childhood Stunting and Cognitive Effects of Water and Sanitation in Indonesia (with C. Chase, S. Haque, G. Joseph, R. Pinto and Q. Wang). Economics and Human Biology, 2021, 40.
Close to 100 million Indonesians lack access to improved sanitation, while 33 million live without improved drinking water. Indonesia is home to the second largest number of open defecators in the world, behind India. Repeated exposure to fecal pathogens, especially common in areas where open defecation is practiced, can cause poor absorption and nutrient loss through diarrhea and poor gut function, leading to undernutrition, growth stunting and irreversible impairment of health, development, learning and earnings – the effects of which outlast a lifetime. Using data from a sample of over six thousand children in the Indonesia Family Life Survey (IFLS), a household socioeconomic panel representative of over 80 percent of the Indonesian population, we examine the relationship between poor household and community water and sanitation services and childhood stunting and cognitive development. We find that children living in households that have access to improved sanitation when they are under 2 years of age are approximately 5 percentage points less likely to end up being stunted. Community rates of sanitation are also important. Children living in open defecation free communities during this critical development window are more than 10 percentage points less likely to be stunted, than children in communities where all other households defecate in the open. Further, cognitive test scores are adversely affected by open defecation. These findings suggest that owning a toilet and living in a community where most of one’s neighbors own a toilet are important drivers of child growth and development.
Link to copies of published article here.
Conditional Cash Transfers: Do They Change Time Preferences and Educational Aspirations? (with D. Contreras-Suarez). Economic Development and Cultural Change, 68(3) (April 2020):729-761.
Conditional Cash Transfer programs are designed to increase human capital in poorer families. They do this directly through incentives and conditions. A further way these programs may influence household decisions is through impacts on preferences. Preferences may change as a result of new habit formation, information received through the program or by the relaxation of budget constraints which gives households a greater ability to look beyond their daily needs to plan for the future. Using a regression discontinuity design we test whether a large CCT program in Colombia affects the time preferences of participating households and aspirations for their children’s education. We find that it does not. Thus, the positive impacts identified in previous studies appear to be driven by the ongoing receipt of the cash transfers and the associated conditions. Hence if the transfers were to stop,program benefits would likely be limited to those obtained during the program.
China's Sex Ratio and Crime: Behavioral Change or Financial Necessity?(with X. Meng and D. Zhang). Economic Journal, Vol. 129, Issue 618, Feb 2019: 790-820.
This paper uses survey and experimental data from prison inmates and comparable non-inmates to examine the drivers of rising criminality in China. Consistent with socio-biological research on other species, we find that China's high sex-ratios are associated with greater risk-taking and impatience amongst males. These underlying behavioral impacts explain some part of the increase in criminality. The primary avenue through which the sex-ratio increases crime, however, is the direct pressure on men to appear financially attractive in order to find a partner in the marriage market. These marriage market pressures result in a higher propensity to commit financially rewarding crimes. Research Briefs/Blogs: VoxDev, GlobalDev.
Scaling Up Sanitation: Evidence from an RCT in Indonesia (with S. Olivia and M. Shah). Journal of Development Economics 138 (2019):1-16.
We investigate the impacts of a widely used sanitation intervention, Community-Led Total Sanitation, which was implemented at scale across rural areas of Indonesia with a randomized controlled trial to evaluate its effectiveness. The program resulted in modest increases in toilet construction, decreased community tolerance of open defecation and reduced roundworm infestations in children. However, there was no impact on anemia, height or weight. We find important heterogeneity along three dimensions: (1) poverty—poorer households are limited in their ability to improve sanitation; (2) implementer identity—scale up involves local governments taking over implementation from World Bank contractors yet no sanitation and health benefits accrue in villages with local government implementation; and (3) initial levels of social capital—villages with high initial social capital built toilets whereas the community-led approach was counterproductive in low social capital villages with fewer toilets being built.
Research Briefs/Blogs: J-PAL Research Brief
Risk-Taking Behavior in the Wake of Natural Disasters (with M. Shah). Journal of Human Resources 2015, Spring 50(2):484-515.
We investigate whether experiencing a natural disaster affects risk-taking behavior. We conduct standard risk games (using real money) with randomly selected individuals in rural Indonesia. We find that individuals who recently suffered a flood or earthquake exhibit more risk aversion. Experiencing a natural disaster causes people to perceive that they now face a greater risk of a future disaster. We conclude that this change in perception of background risk causes people to take fewer risks. We provide evidence that experimental risk behavior is correlated with real life risk behavior, highlighting the importance of our results.
Media Coverage: The Huffington Post, 15 Mar, 2016.