"The 2015/16 El Niño Drought Impacts and Household Coping Strategies: Gender-based perspective" job market paper [View paper here: doi.org/10.1016/j.ijdrr.2026.106519 ]
Abstract: South Africa's 2015/16 El Niño drought, the most severe in two decades, exposed household vulnerabilities over time and across gender. Using a household panel spanning 2010 to 2017 merged with gridded drought data, I combine Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition and fixed effects estimation to trace how drought impacts on food security and adaptation expenditure evolve over time and heterogeneity by household gender headship. The first set of results reveal a significant food security gaps between household types (24%) and its are driven entirely by structural inequalities in education, income, and employment rather than drought exposure itself. The drought's impacts show that male-headed households suffer more severe immediate shocks (15.1 pp reduction in food security), yet female-headed households bear disproportionately larger persistent burdens as the drought endures (11.8 pp). Critically, the drought triggers significant dietary deterioration, with children in male-headed households experiencing worse anthropometric outcomes than their counterparts in female-headed households. These findings reveal that climate shocks are neither gender-neutral nor time-invariant, carrying direct implications for designing targeted social protection and climate adaptation policies in developing economies.
"Power Outages, Sales and Labour in Informal Sector Firms: Evidence from 12 Developing Countries" with Enock Ntsiful
Informal enterprises employ most of the workforce in developing countries and face the least reliable electricity, yet how they absorb disruption is largely unknown. We provide within-firm and between-firm evidence from 12,283 informal businesses in twelve countries, exploiting a survey design in which each proprietor reports outcomes both for the month during the outage and for a typical month a year earlier. We find that, when the power fails, the consequences operate within-firms. Sales fall by about 12.4%, while labour does not meaningfully respond, leading to a fall in labour productivity (sales per labour) almost as large as the fall in sales (11.7%). We explore various mechanisms and find that the loss is concentrated among grid-connected businesses and absent among those off the grid. Rather than shedding labour or reducing hours, firms absorb the shortfall through working capital. They rely on supplier credit and run down inventory, while formal credit access does not respond. The sales result survives every alternative specification, sample, and inference check we apply. Conventional cross-sectional comparisons between firms reverse the employment finding, which may explain why this effect has gone undetected in this sector. Therefore, the cost of unreliable power is substantial, but it falls on output, proprietors' incomes, and trading partners, rather than on jobs.
Through this project, I contributed as a research consultant to UNEP’s research on climate change and adaptation across the globe. I conducted a detailed review of climate policies, appliance disposal practices, and adaptation actions across more than 20 developing countries. This work contributed to the development of a policy paper launched at COP28 in Dubai.
"Multidimensional Poverty, Energy Poverty, and Dietary Diversity: The Welfare Effects of Women’s Empowerment in South Africa"
"Bridging the Divide: Housing Infrastructure and Energy Poverty" with Enoch Ntsiful
"Power Outages, Sales and Labour in Informal Sector Firms: Evidence from 12 Developing Countries" with Enoch Ntsiful
"Economic policy uncertainty and energy vulnerability in Africa: How crucial is governance?" with Emmanuel Gbolonyo; Isaac
Mensah & George Awuah Baffour
"Employment, Food Security and Women’s Happiness in Africa: Evidence from Ten Countries" with Esther Nuamah.
"More open, less corruption or more open, more corruption?: Examining the impact of globalization on corruption in Africa." with Samuel Tawiah Baidoo, Joel Ansah and Jennifer Asare-Lah
"Assessing the impact of economic globalization on corruption: New empirical insight from Ghana" with Samuel Tawiah Baidoo, Joel Ansah and Jennifer Asare-Lah
4th Milan PhD Economics Workshop, Bocconi University, Italy - May 2026
III PhD Students Seminar on Energy and Environment, University of Barcelona, Spain - April, 2026
2025 Symposium Consortium of Environmentally Resilient Businesses (CERB) , University of Arizona Scottsdale Center - November, 2025
International Conference on Empirical Economics (ICEE) at Pennsylvania State University at Altoona (USA) - August 3 2025
University of Arizona and University of Arizona State (UA-ASU) Environmental and Energy Economics Workshop, Spring 2025.
International Conference on Empirical Economics (ICEE) at Pennsylvania State University at Altoona (USA) - August 3 2024 [Online]