"Closing the gap: Effect of a gender quota on women's access to education in Afghanistan", Economics of Education Review, 2024 [Link to dataset] World bank Working Paper available here. 

Affirmative action is a promising solution to the crucial challenge of bridging the gap in women's access to higher education in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). I use public universities' matriculation data from 2013–2018 and difference-in-differences estimators to examine the causal impact of a gender quota on women's educational opportunities in Afghanistan. The quota increased the proportion of women in the treated concentration group by nine percentage points and the share of women from low socio-economic status by three percentage points. The expansion was associated with a 0.04-unit decline in the average score ratio of female-to-male applicants, driven by a reduction in the score threshold needed for women's admission. The effects were condensed in competitive concentrations, where the overall share of women and women with low SES increased by seventeen and four percentage points, respectively. Given the findings, affirmative action appears to be a viable option for addressing the gender gap in fragile settings.

Media coverage:  VoxDev Article 

"The Taliban's Return to Power: An Empirical Analysis of the Afghan Peace Negotiations of 2018-2020", Defence and Peace Economics, 2023 [Link to dataset] [working paper]

"Social determinants of rural household food insecurity under the Taliban regime" (with Wasiuddin Najam, Temitope Ibiyemi, Sajia Aziz, Wanjiku N Gichohi-Wainaina, Wilna Oldewage-Theron), Nutrients, 2023

"Information provision and preferences toward tuition introduction in public universities: Evidence from a survey experiment in Afghanistan" (with Alison Johnston), Education Economics, 2022

"Impact of four-day school week on juvenile crime" (With Paul Thompson)