Research

Publications

Maira Emy Reimão, Rachel Sabbadini*, and Eric Rego*. 2025. "Serial Position Bias Among Experts: Evidence From a Cooking Competition Show," Kyklos, 78(2):701-17.

Nathan Barker, C. Austin Davis, Paula López-Peña, Harrison Mitchell, A. Mushfiq Mobarak, Karim Naguib, Maira Emy Reimão, Ashish Shenoy, Corey Vernot. 2023. "Migration and Resilience during a Global Crisis", European Economic Review, 158:104524.

A. Mushfiq Mobarak and Maira Emy Reimão. 2020. "Seasonal Poverty and Seasonal Migration in Asia", Asian Development Review, 37(1):1-42.

Maira Emy Reimão and Emcet O. Taş. 2017. “Gender Education Gaps among Indigenous and Nonindigenous Groups in Bolivia”, Development and Change, 48(2):228-262.

Emcet O. Taş, Maira Emy Reimão, and Maria Beatriz Orlando. 2014. “Gender, Ethnicity, and Cumulative Disadvantage in Education Outcomes”, World Development, 64:538-553.

* undergraduate student

Working Papers

Does Migration Alter Beliefs and Attitudes with Respect to Gender and Social Norms? (with A. M. Mobarak, A. Shenoy, and T. Thachil)

Migration – cross-border and domestic, temporary and permanent – allows individuals to learn about living standards, conditions, and norms outside their community. A substantial amount of research has been dedicated to this topic with a focus on international migration, particularly on the assimilation of migrants to culturally distant host communities. But most migrants in the world do not cross international borders; around the world, there are over three times as many domestic migrants as international ones. Here, we investigate the social responses to seasonal domestic migration – a common pattern of movement in developing countries that is largely driven by agricultural cycles. Our analysis is based on two rounds of a randomized control trial (RCT) conducted in northern Bangladesh with a drastic treatment: households who took up conditional migration subsidy offers generally sent a male member in search of employment elsewhere in the country, and these men were usually away from their homes for 8-10 weeks of the lean season. We find that, during this seasonal migration period, decision-making responsibilities shift towards women, and also observe a change in some beliefs with respect to gender and inequality upon migrant return. Households offered a migration incentive are more likely to recognize that women are capable of managing a household on their own; see the reduction of inequality as a government responsibility; and reject vote-buying. This, however, is not accompanied by a change in behavior, as dimensions such as intra-household decision-making, female labor force participation, and demand for social services, are unchanged. Altogether, our results indicate that migration, even domestic, can influence beliefs, but that when the penalty for deviating from social norms is high, this does not translate into actions and is restricted from having transformative effects on the norms themselves.

For Everything Else, There's Daycare: daycare, durables, and credit constraints

Access to childcare is a necessary condition for improving women’s labor force participation and employment opportunities. Its longer lasting impacts on women’s work, however, are theoretically ambiguous and have received less empirical attention. In this paper, I use data from a free childcare program targeting poor families and implemented through a lottery in Rio de Janeiro to study the program’s effects on women’s employment and wages in the “medium-run”, once their children are no longer age-eligible for daycare but can instead enroll in universal primary school. Using the randomized set-up of this intervention, I find that, in this context, access to childcare does not affect women’s employment or wages once their children are in school. That is, as the program targets poor households, where the vast majority of women face a labor market that offers low quality jobs with little or no rewards to experience, their employment opportunities do not benefit from – or suffer from the lack of – avoiding a temporary exit from the market. Rather, in a setting where education is the main determinant of earnings, childcare alone may be an intervention too late to improve the quality of women’s employment. In terms of a broader policy, these results imply that, in contexts where the set of opportunities available to women is primarily decided by education, targeting or prioritizing childcare to women who are in school or intend to return to school has the potential to drastically and permanently improve the quality of jobs available to poor mothers.

Does Seasonal Migration Enable or Deter Permanent Migration? lessons from an eight-year follow-up in Bangladesh (with Shyamal Chowdhury and A. Mushfiq Mobarak)

Seasonal migration is a commonly used coping strategy among the rural poor for the lack of employment opportunities in their villages during the lean season in South Asia. In 2008, a randomized control trial (RCT) offered incentives for seasonal migration to poor rural households to encourage access to this strategy, and these registered an increase in temporary migration by 22 percentage points that same year, and still 7-9 percentage points a few years later. A long-standing question regarding seasonal migration, however, has been whether it eventually leads to permanent migration and accelerated urbanization. Following up on the same study households eight years later, we find no evidence of massive flows in permanent migration, as fewer than 5% of households in the entire study sample left permanently during the eight-year period, and at most 1 in 200 treated households migrated permanently in response to the treatment during that period. We can reject any effect greater than 1%, and find that, for households engaged in agriculture, the treatment decreased the likelihood of permanent migration in the long run. In contrast, we confirm that households treated two years prior continue to seasonally migrate at higher rates than untreated households.

Cash and Change: a replication study of a cash transfer experiment in Malawi

(Funded by 3ie, a replication study of Baird, S., C. McIntosh, and B. Ӧzler. 2011. “Cash or Condition? Evidence from a cash transfer experiment,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 126(4):1-44.)

Work in Progress

What works for women’s work? A meta-analysis of policies to increase female labor force participation (with Ana Maria Muñoz-Boudet and Ana Revenga)

Women’s roles and empowerment in the context of unwanted responsibilities: the case of Guatemalan women with migrant partners (with Emcet O. Taş)

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