Publications
Sexual Harassment in Public Spheres and Police Patrols: Experimental Evidence from Urban India
with Girija Borker, Nathan Fiala, Anjani Kumar, Nishith Prakash and Maria Micaela Sviatschi
Quarterly Journal of Economics
We conduct a randomized controlled trial to evaluate the impact of an innovative police patrol program on sexual harassment in public spaces in Hyderabad, India. In collaboration with the Hyderabad City Police, we randomize exposure to police patrols and the visibility of officers by deploying both uniformed and undercover officers across 350 hotspots. To assess the effect, we implement a novel, high-frequency observation exercise to measure sexual harassment at these hotspots, where enumerators recorded all observed instances of sexual harassment and women’s responses in real time. We find that although police patrols had no impact on overall street harassment, uniformed police patrols reduced severe forms of harassment (forceful touching, intimidation) by 27 percent and reduced the likelihood of women leaving the hotspot due to sexual harassment. We uncovered the underlying mechanisms and found that both police visibility and officers’ attitudes toward sexual harassment are key to understanding its incidence.
Conference and Seminar Presentations: Chicago Crime-LSE, LSE, Harvard, Columbia, Toronto, UPenn, World Bank Research Group, ASSA, New Orleans; NBER Fall Development Program; NOVAfrica; Princeton Development Research Group Seminar, Princeton Applied Seminar Group, ifo Institute, ViCE Seminar.
As part of a collaboration with the Hyderabad City Police
Funding: JPAL Crime and Violence Initiative, World Bank, Leibniz Association, Princeton
Media/Policy Coverage: J-PAL Crime and Violence Initiative Blog, Probable Causation podcast, VoxDev Blog, JPAL summary
Helping Families Help Themselves: The (Un)intended Impacts of a Digital Parenting Program
with Lelys Dinarte, Patricio Dominguez and Santiago Perez-Vincent
Journal of Development Economics
Parenting practices play a crucial role in child development. We evaluate the impact of a free digital stress management and positive parenting intervention designed to reduce the prevalence of child maltreatment in El Salvador. Drawing on the prior success of in-person interventions, we study the effects of digital intervention delivery and examine differential treatment effects by caregiver's sex. Using an individual-level experiment, we find that the intervention increased stress and anxiety and lowered caregiver-child interactions among male caregivers. In contrast, among female caregivers, we did not detect changes in mental health but observed a decrease in the use of physical violence against children. While these findings differ from results of in-person interventions, they align with theories that link economic deprivation and family structure to caregivers' mental health.
As part of a collaboration with Glasswing International, El Salvador
Conference and Seminar Presentations: NBER Development Fall 2020; 2nd Joint IZA & Jacobs Center Workshop: Consequences of Covid-19 for Child and Youth Development; Symposium of Economic Experiments in Developing Countries; Gender and COVID-19 research consortium; Nordic Development Economics Conference; ifo Institute, Online Presentation Video
Media/Policy Mentions: VoxDEV Blog
Working Papers
Deterrence or Backlash? Arrests and the Dynamics of Domestic Violence
with Gordon Dahl, Victoria Endl-Geyer, Timo Hener and Helmut Rainer
Revise & Resubmit at the Journal of Political Economy
There is a vigorous debate on whether arrests for domestic violence (DV) will deter future abuse or create a retaliatory backlash. We study how arrests affect the dynamics of DV using administrative data for over 124,000 DV emergency calls (999 calls) for West Midlands, the second most populous county in England. We take advantage of conditional random assignment of officers to a case by call handlers, combined with systematic differences across police officers in their propensity to arrest suspected batterers. We find that an arrest reduces future DV calls in the ensuing year by 51%. This reduction is not driven by reduced reporting due to fear of retaliation, but instead a decline in repeat victimization. We reach this conclusion based on a threshold reporting model and its testable implications regarding (i) the severity of repeat DV calls and (ii) victim versus third-party reporting. Exploring mechanisms, we find that arrest virtually eliminates the large spike in re-victimization which occurs in the 48 hours after a call, consistent with arrest facilitating a cooling off period during a volatile, at-risk time. In the longer run, we estimate a sizeable deterrence effect. Substantiating this, arrest increases the probability an offender is charged with a crime. Our findings argue against recent calls for a decriminalization of domestic violence and suggest the optimal police response is to lower the threshold for arrest.
IZA working paper NBER Working Paper - resubmitted
As part of a collaboration with the West Midlands Police, UK
Conference and Seminar Presentations: Zurich, EALE, ASSA, New Orleans; ViCE Online Seminar, Chicago, University of Bath, CLEAN, Bocconi, SITE-Stockholm, Heidelberg, Passau, Bavarian Micro Day, Berlin, UConn, UCSD
Media/Policy Mentions: Welt.de,Corriere della Sera (Corriere dell’Alto Adige, Corriere del Trentino and Corriere del Veneto)
Gender-Based Violence in Schools and Girls’ Education: Experimental Evidence from Mozambique
with Aixa Garcia-Ramos, Selim Gulesci, Alejandra Ramos and Maria Micaela Sviatschi
Gender-based violence (GBV) at schools is a pervasive problem that affects millions of adolescent girls worldwide. In partnership with the Ministry of Education in Mozambique, we developed an intervention to increase the capacity of key school personnel to address GBV and to improve students' awareness as well as proactive behaviors. To understand the role of GBV on girls' education, we randomized not only exposure to the intervention but also whether the student component was targeted to girls only, boys only, or both. Our findings indicate a reduction in sexual violence by teachers and school staff against girls, regardless of the targeted gender group, providing evidence of the role of improving the capacity of key school personnel to deter perpetrators. Using administrative records, we also find that in schools where the intervention encouraged proactive behavior by girls, there was an increase in their school enrollment, largely due to an increased propensity for GBV reporting by victims. Our findings suggest that effectively mitigating violence to improve girls’ schooling requires a dual approach: deterring potential perpetrators and fostering a proactive stance among victims, such as increased reporting.
NBER, CESifo and CEPR working paper - under review
Conference and Seminar Presentations: NBER; Econometric Society World Congress; CEPR Development Economics Annual Symposium; King's College; African Union-AfGIL Community of Practice; Africa Chief Economist Office World Bank; Yale; Africa Gender Innovation Lab; Warwick
As part of a collaboration with the Ministry of Education, UNICEF, GIZ, Girl Child Rights.
Funding: UNICEF, JPAL Post Primary Education Initiative, Princeton University, Weiss Foundation, Leibniz Association, GIZ.
Media/Policy Mentions: VoxDev, UNICEF, Development Impact World Bank Blog
Text or Talk?: Evaluating Response Rates by Remote Survey Method During Covid-19
with Lelys Dinarte, Patricio Dominguez, Santiago Perez-Vincent and Steffanny Romero
Researchers and policy makers face significant challenges in selecting a method to conduct remote surveys, especially when collecting sensitive information or during turbulent life stages of hard-to-reach groups. In the context of the COVID-19 lockdown, we randomly selected about 600 adults in El Salvador to survey using two different tools: telephone interviews or a self-completion survey via WhatsApp. We find that phone-based surveys increase the rate of survey completion by 42 percentage points. We document even larger effects for women and older adults. Although direct costs of phone-based surveys are substantially larger---doubling implementation cost---our estimates imply that when adjusted for the probability of completion, the costs of conducting phone-based surveys can be 25 percent lower.
World Bank Working Paper - under review
As part of a collaboration with Glasswing International, El Salvador
Conference and Seminar Presentations: IPA-Northwestern Research Methods and Measurement Conference
Media/Policy Mentions: World Bank Let's Talk Development Blog; World Bank Policy Research Roundup
Gender, Crime and Punishment: The effects of Women Police Stations in India
with Sonia Bhalotra and Nishith Prakash
Revise & Resubmit at Economic Development and Cultural Change
We examine the impact of establishing women police stations (WPS) on reporting of gender-based violence. Using administrative crime data and exploiting staggered implementation across Indian cities, we find that the opening of WPS is associated with an increase in police reports of crimes against women of 29 percent, a result driven by domestic violence. This appears to reflect reporting rather than incidence as we find no changes in femicide or in survey-reported domestic violence. We also find some evidence of an increase in women's labor supply following WPS opening, consistent with women feeling safer once the costs of reporting violence fall.
Conference and Seminar Presentations: IEA World Congress (virtual), Barcelona Summer Forum; Econometric Society Meeting (Atlanta); NEUDC (Cornell); Urban Economics Association (New York); EEA (Cologne); Italian Development Economics Conference (Florence); CSAE 2018 (Oxford); ifo Institute; CMI (Bergen); International Center for Research on Women (DC); Essex; Growth and Development Conference (Delhi)
Media/Policy Coverage: Interpol Internal Podcast, OZY, J-PAL Crime and Violence Initiative Blog, J-PAL Blog, QuartzIndia , Scroll.in , The Indian Wire , Times of India
Selected Work in Progress
Debiasing Law Enforcement: Effects of an Expressive Arts Intervention in India
with Girija Borker, Nishith Prakash and Maria Micaela Sviatschi
Gender bias in institutional service delivery hampers access to justice for women and the workplace of the minority female service providers. We evaluate whether training male police officers can improve workplace dynamics and policing quality towards female citizens. In a randomized controlled trial across 419 police stations in Bihar, India, senior officers received expressive-arts-based training to build technical and soft skills related to GBV. Treated officers improved GBV-relevant skills, driven by greater empathy, reduced victim-blaming, and less caste bias. Treated officers’ technical skills also improved in comparison to the control group. Female officers reported lower workplace anxiety. Results highlight the role of norms and soft skills in improving service delivery and women’s access to justice.
As part of a collaboration with the police in Bihar, India and Mittika.
Status: Draft coming soon.
Conference and Seminar Presentations: John Hopkins (SAIS), World Bank (SAR GIL), Ashoka University, University of Notre Dame, Northeastern University
Funding: Fund for Innovation in Development, JPAL Crime and Violence Initiative, JPAL Gender and Economic Agency Initiative, ifo Institute
Media/Policy Coverage: The Indian Express, JPAL
Entrepreneurial Mindsets at Scale: Evidence from a Curriculum Expansion in India
with A. Bhalotia, R. Chaurey, I. Gaddis, S. Malik, G. Khana, N. Prakash, A. Mukhopadhyay
The evolving nature of the modern labor market has a growing need for entrepreneurial mindsets that encompass a range of cognitive and non-cognitive skills. Yet, how youth acquire these skills is a major challenge in low human capital environments. We test the causal impact of a new entrepreneurial skills curriculum through a large-scale experiment. The program consists of a special curriculum, delivered to over 300,000 students over the academic year in Andhra Pradesh, India. After one year of exposure, we find that treated students score 0.03 to 0.15 SD higher in agency over goals and other personal initiative skills. We find an increase in career agency, educational agency, and equitable gender norms. Girls improve their financial skills, and are more likely to aspire to have a career that does not involve self-employment. Students improve test scores in English and Math in the two first and second academic years since the intervention. These findings underscore the potential of low-cost school-run programs aiming to bring youth, and girls particularly, into the demands of the modern labor market.
As part of a collaboration with the Andhra Pradesh Government. The EMDP is the 2024 Winner of "The Money Awareness and Inclusion Awards" in the category "Best Entrepreneurship Education".
Status: Draft coming soon.
Funding: World Bank, Y-Rise -Yale University
Conference and Seminar Presentations: : ISI, Delhi; World Bank;
Childcare and Women's Safety Trade-offs: Evidence from Colombian Neighborhoods
with P. Kobl, L. Dinarte-Diaz and M. Mello
The role of childcare in shaping women’s economic and physical empowerment remains poorly understood, with theoretically ambiguous impacts. Understanding this relationship is key to explaining the mixed effects of childcare policies across contexts. We study how the expansion of two of the world’s largest childcare programs affected women’s safety. Exploiting variation in facility openings across neighborhoods in Colombia and Brazil, we find that childcare availability increases women’s reports of intimate partner violence, with no corresponding effects on violence against men, reports by older women, or intimate-partner homicides. We also document a rise in sexual harassment outside the household, consistent with increased female labor supply. Heterogeneity analyses suggest that improved childcare access enhances women’s empowerment over safety-related decisions, partly by altering reporting behavior.
Status: Draft coming soon.
As part of a collaboration with the Instituto Colombiano de Bienestar Familiar
Personal Initiative Skills, Gender Gaps, and Social Norms: Experimental Evidence from Rural India
with I. Gaddis, A. Pinto, J. Sethi and R. Sherif
Soft skills are increasingly recognized as critical for economic success, yet little is known about how these skills interact with firm performance and prevailing social norms around entrepreneurship in South Asia. This paper studies the role of personal initiative skills and gender norms among rural entrepreneurs in Tamil Nadu, India. We implement a gender-stratified randomized controlled trial with 2,558 entrepreneurs, evaluating a soft skills training program designed to enhance non-cognitive skills such as grit, goal-setting, and communication. Nearly one year post-intervention, we find that treated entrepreneurs report higher profits and sales. Among men, access to credit improves, while treated women show increased innovation and better business practices. Among women, those with more gender-equal empirical expectations and normative beliefs around female entrepreneurship experience larger effects of the intervention. In contrast, women who perceive stronger social sanctions against female entrepreneurship improve their skills but these do not translate into improved firm performance. These findings highlight the importance underlying social norms to unlock firms full economic potential for women-led firms.
As part of a collaboration with the Tamil Nadu Rural Transformation Project in India
Implementation Partner: Doorways gGmbH
Funding: World Bank
Status: Draft coming soon.
Bus-tling to Success: Experimental Evidence on Subsidized Transportation for Girls in Highly Remote Contexts
with K. Vyborny (World Bank), I. Gaddis (World Bank), S. Srinivasan (World Bank)
As part of a collaboration with the Khyber Pakhunkhwa Government
Status: Draft coming soon.
Funding: World Bank
Credit Market Consequences of Divorce: Evidence from an Infidelity Platform Data Breach
with A. Silva (Fed Board), K. Sachdeva (University of Michigan)
Status: Draft coming soon.
Conference and Seminar Presentations: University of Michigan, FedBoard
Understanding Preferences and Norms around Childcare among Parents
with L Dinarte-Diaz, A. Guha, J. Sethi (World Bank)
Status: Data collection completed.
Funding: Early-Learning Initiative - World Bank
Listening to Women on the Road: Evidence from a Customer Feedback Experiment in Dhaka
with G. Borker (World Bank), N. Prakash (Northeastern), M. Sviatschi (Princeton), G. Genicot (Georgetown), A. Raihan (BUET)
Job Search and Skills Development of Technical Vocational Education and Training Students: Experimental Evidence from Bangladesh
with K. Vyborny, I. Gaddis (World Bank)
As part of a collaboration with the Directorate of Technical Education, Ministry of Education of Bangladesh.
Status: In preparation
Funding: World Bank
with L Dinarte-Diaz, N. Prakash, S. Bhattacharya, V. Gorthi
As part of a collaboration with Glasswing International
Status: Data collection completed.
Access to Markets for Female Entrepreneurs in India, Bangladesh and Pakistan (various)
Pre-PhD Publications and Other Older Working Papers
Employment Programmes for the Poor and Female Empowerment: The Effect of NREGS on Gender-based Violence in India, with Siddhartha Bandyophdyay and Rudra Sensarma. Journal of Interdisciplinary Economics.
Media/Policy Coverage: Times of India
Crime and Social Conflict in India, with Siddhartha Bandyophdyay, Samrat Bhattacharyya and Rudra Sensarma. The Economics of Peace and Security Journal.
Population Sex Ratio and Violence against Women: The long-run effects of sex-selection in India
with Sonia Bhalotra
This paper examines the impact of gender imbalances in the population on crime. Using administrative crime data from India matched with census, household and individual-level information, we show that a surplus of young men significantly increases crimes committed against women, accounting for more than a fifth of the rise in gender-based violence since 1995. In contrast, we find no discernible impact of this imbalance on other forms of non-gender based violent crime or on property and economic crime. Our results are explained by the adverse effects a distorted population sex ratio has on marriage markets and on early formation of gender norms.
Conference and Seminar Presentations: IFPRI, ifo Institute; Bath-Conflict Workshop; NIPE-EEG; Royal Holloway-Economics of Domestic Violence Workshop; Reading; Leicester; Kent Workshop in Development Economics; Leicester Workshop on the Economics of Domestic Violence; European Economic Association Conference; European Society for Population Economics Conference; Population Association of America Conference; JESS Seminar; Growth and Development Conference, ISI Delhi
Do Improved Property Rights Decrease Violence against Women? Evidence from India
This paper uses the staggered implementation of a legal change in inheritance law in India to estimate the effect of women's improved access to inheritance on both police-reported and self-reported violence against women. I find that the rate of all forms of violence against women decreased following the amendments, including female suicides. This is due to decreases in the major forms on violence committed against women: police-reported violence and female unnatural deaths. Further, women eligible for inheritance are 17 percent less likely to be victims of domestic violence. These findings are explained by an improvement in husbands' behaviour and better marriage market negotiations.
Conference and Seminar Presentations: Royal Economic Society Conference; Royal Economic Society Ph.D. Meetings; Summer School in Development Economics, Verona; UBC Empirical Seminars; RECODE Meetings, Ottawa; University of Birmingham; French Economic Association Conference; Growth and Development Conference, ISI Delhi
Media/Policy Coverage: Prevention collaborative