Working Papers
Disastrous Displacement: The Long-Run Impacts of Landslides (with Jakob Hennig)
Conditionally Accepted, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics. [Slides] [WB Policy Working Paper]
Reaching the Novice or Nudging the Expert? Networks, Information, and the Experimental Returns to Migration (with Zachary Barnett-Howell, Thomas Ginn, and Stepan Gordeev)
Cash and Small Business Groups for Ugandans and Refugees (with Thomas Ginn, Ibrahim Kasirye, Belinda Muya, and Andrew Zeitlin)
Publications
Social Welfare Portability and Migration: Evidence from India’s Public Distribution System (with Ambar Narayan, Odyssia Ng, and Sutirtha Sinha Roy)
American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, forthcoming. [WB Policy Working Paper] [AEA RCT Registry]
Can Redistribution Change Policy Views? Aid and Attitudes Toward Refugees (with Thomas Ginn, Robert Hakiza, Helidah Ogude-Chambert, and Olivia Woldemikael)
Journal of Political Economy, 2025. [Working Paper] [Slides] [AEA RCT Registry] [Coverage: VoxDev]
Migration Spillovers Within Families: Evidence from Thailand
Review of Economic Dynamics, 2025. [Working Paper]
Valuing the Time of the Self-Employed (with Daniel Agness, Sylvain Chassang, Pascaline Dupas, and Erik Snowberg)
Review of Economic Studies, 2025. [Slides] [NBER Working Paper] [AEA RCT Registry] [Coverage: Development Impact]
Persecution and Migrant Self-Selection: Evidence from the Collapse of the Communist Bloc (with Ran Abramitzky and Isabelle Sin)
Review of Economics & Statistics, 2024. [Slides] [NBER Working Paper]
Hidden Income and the Perceived Returns to Migration
American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 2023. [Working Paper] [Slides] [AEA RCT Registry] [Coverage: The Economist]
Selected Work in Progress
Spillover Effects of Transfer Programs (with Jules Gazeaud and Erik Snowberg)
We test whether cash and asset transfer programs generate spillover effects onto non-recipients, focusing on the population most likely to be affected: control households in treatment villages. We aggregate results from published economics studies involving cash or asset transfers and designed to measure spillover impacts. Average spillover effects on assets and consumption are negligible in both the short and longer-term. However, negative psychological spillovers emerge in the longer term and do not appear to be driven by indirect economic impacts. Negative psychological spillovers are concentrated in consumption-poor households randomly assigned to not receive a transfer, and do not appear in studies using eligibility-based (as opposed to randomized) selection of households. These findings are consistent with preferences against within-village randomization of transfers.
Housing, Social Networks, and Migration (with Sudhir Singh and Alp Sungu)
Difficulty finding housing is among the most important challenges migrants report after moving to a new city, and many potential migrants do not have urban contacts they can rely on for housing support. We hypothesize that free, temporary housing may help workers “experiment” with migration by allowing them to search for jobs without the risk of a long-term rental contract. We plan to randomize two treatments at the village level in Kenya: 1) pre-arranged, temporary housing in the capital, and 2) a temporary rental subsidy.
Direct and Spillover Impacts of Graduation Programs (with Raphaela Karlen and Odyssia Ng)
We cross cut regular cash transfers with a graduation-style intervention, randomized at the village level across rural Guinea. Within a village, households are eligible for the program based on a proxy-means test, allowing us to identify both direct effects and spillovers onto non-recipients. We will test whether graduation programs can be impactful without regular cash transfers and how these impacts compare to 1) providing only regular cash transfers, and 2) providing regular cash transfers and graduation interventions jointly.
The Value of Landmine Awareness Programs in Conflict Settings: Evidence from Myanmar (with Sutirtha Sinha Roy and Roy van der Weide)
Landmines pose a significant threat not only to physical safety but also to socio-economic well-being. Living near landmines may restrict agricultural activity, impede mobility, and diminish access to essential services such as schools and markets. We randomize a landmine awareness program across conflict-affected regions of Myanmar, one of the most heavily landmine-contaminated countries in the world. The intervention includes village-level risk education sessions, including a discussion of local hazards and maps highlighting unsafe areas and safe routes to essential resources like schools, farmland, and water.
Can coaching help families adapt to displacement following a natural disaster? Evidence from a flood adaption program in Ghana (with Abdul Hanan Abdallah, Awal Abdul-Rahaman, Salifu Amadu, and Nikita Patial)
Displacement often forces people into unfamiliar environments and can sever the networks they rely on for both support and information, implying that the marginal value of information and mental health services may be high after displacement. We randomize two programs in a population displaced internally by floods in Ghana: 1) providing IDPs with information about government services for displaced populations (focusing on aid, housing, and employment opportunities), and 2) providing the same information + personalized coaching providing advice on adapting to the new environment and mental health counseling.
The Effects of Phone-Based Surveys on Measurement Quality: When and Why Does Modality Matter? (with Lipeng Chen and Thomas Ginn)
We study the impact of survey modality on data quality by randomizing a sample of 900 micro-entrepreneurs in Uganda to 1) be surveyed in person or by phone, 2) be surveyed by a familiar enumerator or not, and 3) participate in a trust-building activity with the enumerator prior to the survey. We analyze modality impacts based on question complexity and sensitivity. [AEA RCT Registry]