Research

Dissertation Chapters

1. Alcohol Prohibition and Violence against Women: Quasi-experimental Evidence from India (Job market paper)

• I use a policy experiment from the Indian state of Bihar's complete alcohol prohibition law (enacted in October 2016) to estimate the causal effects of a total alcohol ban on the prevalence of domestic violence against women. To evaluate prohibition's effect on alcohol consumption and violence against women, I use the most recent three rounds of the Indian National Family Health Survey (NFHS), i.e., NFHS 4 (2015-16) as the pre-treatment period, NFHS 5 (2019-21) as a post-treatment period and NFHS 3 (2005-06) to support the parallel time trend condition for the difference in difference use. I use the three neighboring states of Bihar as a control group and verify that the control group satisfies the parallel time trend conditions for sexual and emotional violence but not physical violence. I find that prohibition significantly reduced alcohol consumption, particularly from market channels, resulting in reduced violence against women by their husbands. Furthermore, I estimated the heterogeneous effects of the alcohol ban in Bihar for districts with high alcohol consumption at baseline, individuals who are poor, household head education, and individuals living in urban areas and near the border. My results are robust to numerous checks, including randomized inference and changing control groups.

2. Health Impacts of Agricultural Fires In India: Economic Valuation and Disease Burden Estimates (with Harounan Kazianga)

• • We investigate the effects of agricultural fires on mortality (infant mortality and all-cause mortality), morbidity (systolic blood pressure), and estimates of the economic costs of disease burden. Biomass burning (crop and forest fires) is common in many Indian States despite the government's attempt to curb the practice (stubbornly higher in Haryana and Punjab in the northwest), which burns mostly agricultural residues after paddy and wheat harvest. First, we show that agricultural crop fires are highly correlated with pollution. In the second step, we considered the treatment group as a combined Haryana and Punjab (burn most agricultural crop fires), while the control group consisted of other major rice-producing states in India. Our results show that technology adoption (i.e., combine harvester that replaces manual labor harvesting) leads to more fires, and regulations have little effect in reducing agricultural crop fires using a difference in difference methods. Using nationally representative household surveys, we extracted district-level panel data on infant mortality and morbidity. Our variable of interest is the measure of crop fires extracted from MODIS/Aqua/Terra satellites with high resolution 1*1 km. We created district exposure to fire in two ways: (1) fire in megawatts and (2) total count of fires in the district. Our results show that districts with more fires significantly increase infant mortality rate and systolic blood pressure, increasing the likelihood of all-cause mortality risk. These estimates are lower bound since there will be a positive economic activity with increased fire since more area of rice and wheat implies more increased income and greater village economics and thus leads to more fires. Our preliminary economics valuation and disease burden estimates show that eliminating agricultural crop residue burning would avert US$ 5 billion over five years.

3.  Cash Transfers and Household Consumption Smoothing in Burkina Faso: Evidence from Randomized Control Trails (with Harounan Kazianga)

• We test whether Cash Transfer improves household consumption in Burkina Faso. Additionally, we explore the effectiveness of conditional (CCT) and unconditional (UCT) transfers and their gendered response in smoothing consumption during rainfall shock. The 75 villages in Nahouri province of Burkina Faso that each have a primary school were randomly allocated to five groups: (i) conditional cash transfers given to the father (CCTF), (ii) conditional cash transfers given to the mother (CCTM), (iii) unconditional cash transfers given to the father (UCTF), (iv) unconditional cash transfers given to the mother (UCTM), and (v) a control group. Fifteen villages were in each treatment arm, and the control group (consisting of a total of 2775 households), and only poor households were eligible to receive a cash transfer conditioned on quarterly visits of children to the local health clinic for preventive health care and school enrollment with an attendance rate above 90 percent. For unconditional, no conditions are linked with receiving the stipend. Each household is expected to receive about $67 USD per year, i.e., about 7 percent of total household expenditures, in line with CCT generosity levels. The transfer is exogenous in our experiment because it comes from randomized controlled trials and compliance was perfect. Our results show that rainfall strongly affects consumption and income, and rainfall affects consumption as a function of transfer received. Our preliminary results show that transfers help in smoothing consumption and can fully smooth consumption if the transfer increases to $100.

Work in progress

1. "Revisiting India’s Nutrition Puzzle: Identifying the role of different food groups dynamics” with Travis Lybbert (UC Davis) and Harounan Kazianga (OSU)

2. "Technology Adoption and the Coasean Solution to Agricultural Crop Residue Burning (ACRB) in Northwest India” with Avinash Kishore (IFPRI) and Harounan Kazianga (OSU)

3. "Shocks, Risk Management and Consumption Smoothing in Rural Ethiopia” with Digvijay Negi (Cornell University) and Harounan Kazianga (OSU)

4. "The Threshold Effects of Global Petroleum Oil Price Shocks on Energy Consumption” with JB Kim (OSU)