Research

Referred Journals:

Parental Absence, Remittances and Educational Investment of Children Left Behind: Evidence from Nepal (Joint With Ryuichi Tanaka), Review of Development Economics (forthcoming)

Abstract:

I estimate the causal impact of parental absence and remittances on education of children left behind using the latest household survey from Nepal. The novelty of the paper lies on the separate identification of parental absence and remittances with careful consideration of self-selection into migration and endogeniety of remittances. Using economic condition at potential destination of migrants and the cost of travel (to the nearest Indian border and Kathmandu) as instruments for migration and community .financial network as instrument for remittances, I show that parental absence has substantive disruptive effect on child education while remittances has positive effect. I also show that non-parental absence has negative effect on education but effects are smaller than that of parental absence. Further, we provide supporting evidence about the channels to disruption. I find that the parental absence lacks monitoring of children and also wane their educational aspirations. However, non-parental absence is mostly explained by the children having to work, either household or as a paid worker outside. Finally, I also show some heterogeneity results by child gender, age and mother's education.

Other Publications

"Policing" Health Service Delivery: Evidence from Civil Conflict in Nepal (With Ryuichi Tanaka)

Abstract:

Conflict is normally disruptive for efficient delivery of public services such as health and education and therefore has a long term consequences on human capital formation. The war-induced destruction of health facilities, abductions of health personnel and disruption of the supply of health logistics lowers the rate of health service utilization and the well-being of population health.  We attempt to investigate whether the disruptive hypotheses holds true in the particular conflict setting of Nepal. We investigate the effects of the Maoist insurgency in Nepal on individual health status and the institutional health care utilization. Nepal experienced conflict of moderate intensity during 1996 to 2006 where more than 13000 lives were claimed and about less than a quarter of millions of people were displaced as a consequence.  By using three waves of nationally representative household surveys that uniquely covers various stages of conflict viz., no-conflict, conflict and post-conflict period as well as the detailed conflict data from Informal Service Center Nepal, we exploit district level variation in the exposure to conflict to evaluate short term and medium term impacts of conflict (that corresponds to the latter two stages of conflict). We also correct for endogeneity into the measure of conflict using instrumental variable approach. Following difference-in-difference (DID) approach to estimation; we find that conflict is associated with short-term improvement in individual health status and both short-term and medium-term increase in health care utilization.  One standard deviation increase in conflict-related causalities is associated with about 4 and 10 percentage point improvement respectively in health status and utilization.  We further provide supportive evidence in favor of positive association between conflict and health. We show that the improvement in the quality of health services particularly by way of Maoist policing of staff absenteeism in health facilities have led to better health outcomes in conflict intense areas.

Work in Progress:

Remittances, Natural Disaster and Child Schooling: Empirical Evidence from Nepal (With Uttam Paudel)

Abstract:

We investigate whether remittance acts as a risk coping strategy for child education and labor in case of natural disaster such as flood. We utilize a novel approach to create the exogenous variation in the measure of the flood intensity at the village level. We develop a composite flood measure derived from the rainfall shocks and the Strahler river order – a scientific measure of river intensity. By constructing a panel structure at village-ward level from the two household level nationally representative surveys of Nepal (in 2008 and 2010) and by applying an instrumental variable approach to account for the endogeneity of remittances, we show that the remittance has a significant role to keep the children at school particularly girls thus mitigating the risk of flood-induced loss of human capital formation. Although remittance has a positive and direct role on school graduation (e.g. from primary to lower secondary and from lower secondary to secondary) and preventing household labor, we do not find any evidence of remittances’ role to cope the risk of the impact of flood incidence on these child outcomes.

Do Poor Benefit From Free Health Care ? Empirical Evidence from Nepal (With Ryuichi Tanaka)

Abstract:

This paper attempts to establish the association between the free health care policy, the income inequalities and various health-related outcomes in Nepal (viz., self-reported health status, utilization of public care and the health expenditures). Several years hence the introduction of free care policy, there are no empirical evidence from Nepal suggesting that the policy has been pro-poor. Given that the health status of the poor people have not improved over time and that people’s rising preference towards private health care, it becomes imperative to assess the effect of policy on the utilization of the public health facility, potential relaxation of financial strain and the perceived health status of people (at various level of income distribution). The main research question we ask therefore is whether the policy has been pro-poor.  We develop a theoretical model for the choice of health care provider as a foundation to empirical analysis to demonstrate as to how people at various levels of income distribution in the rural households responds to the introduction of free health care policy in the developing economies context. As an empirical strategy, we apply a difference-in-difference type strategy (before-after design) to the data obtained from second (before i.e., 2003) and third (after i.e., 2010) round of Nepal Living Standard Survey.  The free health care policy was introduced in 2008. Consistent with the theoretical prediction, we find that the policy has an effect of improving the health-related outcomes of the households at the middle range of income distribution only.  We argue that the longer waiting hours and the poor quality of health care in government health facilities induce rich people to seek care from the private ones.  On the other hand, we reason that the lack of knowledge about the intervention as well as of the benefits from treatment may have impeded very poor people’s responsiveness to the policy.

Is Conflict Always Bad? Learning from Education experiences in Nepal