Recent Publications and Forthcoming
Alcohol Prohibition and Violence against Women: Quasi-experimental Evidence from India (Job market paper)
This paper examines the causal impact of Bihar’s 2016 alcohol prohibition policy on alcohol consumption and violence against women using a quasi-experimental framework. Leveraging three rounds of the India National Family Health Survey (NFHS 2005–06, 2015–16, and 2019–21), we employ a Difference-in-Differences (DID) design comparing Bihar with neighboring states Jharkhand, West Bengal, and Uttar Pradesh, which did not impose alcohol bans. To reinforce identification, we test and confirm parallel pre-policy trends, implement an event-study specification, and apply the Honest DID approach to obtain bias-corrected confidence intervals. The analysis reveals that the prohibition policy led to a nearly 50 percent reduction in male alcohol consumption, driven primarily by declines in beer, wine, and hard-liquor intake. Correspondingly, the likelihood of emotional and sexual violence against women declined by 40–50 percent, while physical-violence remained unaffected. Heterogeneity analysis shows that the policy’s effects were stronger in rural and interior districts, and among households with less-educated heads. Robustness checks, including randomization inference and alternative control groups, confirm that the findings are not driven by sampling variability or model dependence. While prohibition reduced alcohol use and improved women’s safety in the short run, it also imposed substantial fiscal costs and spurred illicit liquor markets. These results underscore that prohibition can yield meaningful welfare gains for women but remains an unsustainable long-term strategy without complementary interventions.
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 (which 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 a high resolution of 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 bounds since there will be a positive economic activity with increased fire, since more area of rice and wheat implies more 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.
"Revisiting India’s Nutrition Puzzle: Identifying the role of different food groups dynamics” with Harounan Kazianga (OSU)
"Shocks, Risk Management and Consumption Smoothing in Rural Ethiopia” with Digvijay Negi (Cornell University) and Harounan Kazianga (OSU)
"The Threshold Effects of Global Petroleum Oil Price Shocks on Energy Consumption” with JB Kim (OSU)