"Better Roads, Better Off? Evidence on Improving Roads in Tanzania", joint with Christelle Dumas (submitted)
Spatial isolation is considered as one of the main determinants of poverty. Therefore, many transport investments are undertaken with a stated objective of poverty reduction. In our paper, we evaluate a Tanzanian program that rehabilitated 2500km of major roads between 2008 and 2013. We deal with endogenous placement issues with a household fixed-effect strategy combined with a propensity score matching to strengthen the common trend assumption. Contrary to most studies, we find damaging effects of the road on the rural population: we observe a reduction in life satisfaction, a reallocation of labor away from farm without many additional opportunities of work, that we trace back to a decrease in the price of the main product (rice). This is consistent with predictions obtained from trade models where rural households, with lower transaction costs, actually face competition from lower price goods.
"Weather Fluctuations, Food Consumption and Malnutrition in Mexico", joint with Lisa Oberländer
Predictions suggest that global warming will increase the frequency of hot days. Understanding households' consumption responses to higher temperatures is important to assess potential negative health effects and design effective public policies. In this paper, we investigate the short-term effect of temperature variations during the past week on drinks and food consumption in Mexico. To this end, we exploit random variations in daily temperatures within municipalities while controlling for spatio-temporal trends, common shocks and food prices. We find large positive effects on consumption of drinks, in particular sodas and juices. Individuals consume more food outside and we find negative effects for staples. We then evaluate the effect of a sugar tax introduced in 2014 and find no evidence that this policy package lowered temperature-induced soda consumption. These findings point at a need for more effective policy interventions that address these consumption responses to temperature fluctuations.
"Lower castes reservations and investment in schools in India", joint with Christelle Dumas
This paper uses a novel dataset to estimate the effect of lower caste reservations in local gov- ernments of rural areas. We are interested on their effect on primary school-level infrastructure investments, organization, enrollment and test results. The data set covers all primary schools in four North Indian states over the period 2005-2016. We exploit a discontinuity induced by the institutional design of the reservation policy, we find evidence that lower caste represen- tation leads to limited positive effects on school investments in areas relevant to the needs of their group as well as negative effects on school enrollment for other disadvantaged minorities. These findings suggests that quotas have limited effects on primary education, which may be explained by a lack of agency of these population classes or by a lack of interest in education investment.
"Morbidity effects of antibiotics pollution in India", joint with Stefanie Baumgartner and Christelle Dumas
The Effect of Refugee Inflows and Progressive Refugee Policies on Host Communities: Evidence from Uganda
Refugee Inflows and the Marriage Market: Evidence from Tanzania