Research

Working Papers

Tailoring Advice and Incentives to Enhance Consumer Welfare from Catastrophic Drought Insurance , (with Chris Barrett, Tagel Gabrehiwot Gidey, Glenn Harrison, Nathan Jensen, Karlijn Morsink), and J. Todd Swarthout)

Long-run Effects of Catastrophic Drought Insurance , (with Chris Barrett, Nathan Jensen, Karlijn Morsink), Yuma Norimoto, Rupsha Banerjee, and Nils Teufel)

Catastrophic aggregate shocks such as droughts have negative long-run effects on lifetime well-being. While formal insurance against such shocks has repeatedly yielded positive short-run impacts, the long-run effects of formal disaster insurance remain unknown. We study the long-run impacts of catastrophic drought insurance on pastoral households in Kenya and Ethiopia. We leverage randomized insurance premium discounts distributed when this insurance product was first introduced to estimate its impacts ten years later. We find that insurance changes household production strategies -- increasing holdings of large animals at the expense of small livestock like goats -- and a substantial increase in children's education. These findings are linked because changed herd composition reduces the marginal productivity of child labor and generates positive income effects. Reduced ex ante risk exposure and the behavioral change it induces -- not the cash transfers resulting from ex post indemnity payments -- generate the long-run effects. The results are robust to controlling for prospective interpersonal spillovers among households.

The Effect of Microinsurance on Child Work and Schooling , submitted

Adverse weather shocks disrupt human capital investment in low-income families in developing countries, but the effectiveness of formal insurance in mitigating this is underexplored. This paper investigates how index-based microinsurance affects children’s engagement in work and schooling, employing randomized premium discounts for the Index-Based Livestock Insurance (IBLI) program as instrumental variables for insurance uptake. I find that insured pastoral households shift children’s activity from work to schooling during non-drought periods, and less likely to increase children’s work during droughts. Moreover, there are heterogeneous impacts across age, birth order, and gender, with insurance increasing full-time work among first-born and older children during non-drought periods, while mitigating adverse effects of droughts, particularly for girls. These shifts in children’s activities are largely influenced by increased herd mobility and size, as well as investments in livestock during non-drought periods.

Unpacking the Links between Conflict and Child Welfare: Evidence from a Foreign Insurgency, (with Heidi Kaila and Larissa Nawo), R&R at Economic Development and Cultural Change

Violent conflict has enduring effects on child human capital, but little is understood about the mechanisms underlying these effects. This study investigates the immediate effects of decreased security environment due to foreign-borne terrorism on children’s human capital, using data from a decade before to shortly after the Nigerian Boko Haram insurgency extended across the border to Cameroon. Boko Haram attacks immediately decrease weight-for-height for children under five -- an indicator of short-term health and nutrition, reduce healthcare service utilization which can prolong and aggravate the highly prevalent fever and diarrhea, and do not reduce dietary diversity. Child mortality remains unaffected. Attacks affect school-aged children, who spend more time at home instead of in outside activities. The results underscore the urgent importance of health care service provision after the eruption of violence to prevent irreversible impacts, which is increasingly important in West African countries combating the infiltration of foreign terrorists.

Gold Mine Openings and Child Labor in Mali

This study investigates the effect of a natural resource shock on child labor using the opening dates and the location of the industrial gold mines in Mali. Unlike other papers that show mines increase children’s work, I find that the opening of mines decreases children’s work, specifically the working hours for household tasks while it does not affect the school enrollments. The effects were heterogeneous by age and birth order. I claim that my results stem from the income effects of the mines dominating the substitution effects by presenting the evidence on the adults’ employment and occupational choices.

Publications

When Student Incentives Don't Work: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Malawi, (with James Berry and Hyuncheol Bryant Kim), Journal of Development Economics, September 2022. 158(2022).

We study how the structure of tournament incentive schemes in education can influence the level and distribution of student outcomes. Through a field experiment among upper-primary students in Malawi, we evaluate two scholarship programs: a Population-based scholarship that rewarded overall top performers on an exam and a Bin-based scholarship that rewarded the top performers within smaller groups of students with similar baseline scores. We find that the Population-based scholarship decreased test scores and motivation to study, especially for those least likely to win. By contrast, we find no evidence for test score impacts among those in the Bin-based scholarship program.

Teaching for large-scale Reproducibility Verification, (with Lars Vilhuber, Meredith Welch), David Wasser), and Michael Darisse), Journal of Statistics and Data Science Education, 2022, vol. 30(3): 274-281.

We describe a unique environment in which undergraduate students from various STEM and social science disciplines are trained in data provenance and reproducible methods, and then apply that knowledge to real, conditionally accepted manuscripts and associated replication packages. We describe in detail the recruitment, training, and regular activities. While the activity is not part of a regular curriculum, the skills and knowledge taught through explicit training of reproducible methods and principles, and reinforced through repeated application in a real-life workflow, contribute to the education of these undergraduate students, and prepare them for post-graduation jobs and further studies. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.

Work in Progress

The Impact of Information about Consumer Value and Contract Performance on Demand and Welfare of Insurance (with Lotte van der Haar, Nathan Jensen, Karlijn Morsink, and Kelvin Shikuku), in the field