Publications

Violence against women is a problem worldwide, with economic costs ranging from 1% to 4% of global gross domestic product. During the coronavirus disease 2019 lockdowns, the United Nations coined the term the Shadow Pandemic to describe the increase in global violence against women. Here, using variation in the intensity of government-mandated lockdowns in India, we show that domestic violence complaints increase significantly in districts with the strictest lockdown rules. We find similarly large increases in cybercrime complaints. However, rape and sexual assault complaints decrease in districts with the strictest lockdowns, consistent with decreased female mobility in public spaces, public transport and workplaces where they might be at greater risk for rape and sexual assault. Medium-term analysis shows that increases in domestic violence complaints persist 1 year later, while other complaints related to rape, sexual assault and cybercrimes return to pre-lockdown levels.

Carbon offsets from improved cookstove projects could advance Sustainable Development Goals 13 (climate), 7 (energy), 5 (gender), and 3 (health). To legitimately "offset" emissions, methodologies must accurately or conservatively quantify climate impact. We conduct the first comprehensive, quantitative over/under crediting analysis of five cookstove methodologies, comparing them against published literature and our own analysis. We find misalignment, in order of importance, with: fraction of non-renewable biomass, fuel consumption, stove adoption, usage, and stacking, emission factors, rebound, and firewood-charcoal conversion factor. Additionality and leakage require more research. We estimate that our project sample, on average, is over-credited by 6.3 times. Gold Standard’s Metered and Measured methodology, which directly monitors fuel use, is most aligned with our estimates (only 1.3 times over-credited) and is best suited for fuel switching projects which provide the most abatement potential and health benefit. We provide specific recommendations for aligning all methodologies with current science.

We examine the impacts of a sanitation program designed to eliminate open defecation in at-scale randomized field experiments in four countries: India, Indonesia, Mali, and Tanzania. The programs – all variants of the widely-used Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) approach - increase village private sanitation coverage in all four locations by 7–39 percentage points. We use the experimentally-induced variation in access to sanitation to identify the causal relationship between village sanitation coverage and child height. We find evidence of threshold effects where increases in child health of 0.3 standard deviations are realized once village sanitation coverage reaches 50–75%. There do not appear to be further gains beyond this threshold. These results suggest that there are large health benefits to achieving coverage levels well below the 100% coverage pushed by the CLTS movement. Open defecation decreased in all countries through improved access to private sanitation facilities, and additionally through increased use of sanitation facilities in Mali who implemented the most intensive behavior change intervention.

This paper explores the aggregate economic effects from India’s National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS), which provides up to 100 days of labor to rural laborers at the mandated minimum wage. We examine the within-district change to night-time lights and banking deposits using the staggered program rollout for identification. We find consistent and robust evidence that NREGS increased aggregate economic output by 1-2% per capita measured by night-time lights. This effect, however, is not equal across districts. We observe no positive effect of the program in poorer districts, illuminating an important source of heterogeneity.
 

The COVID-19 pandemic brought the dual crises of disease and the containment policies designed to mitigate it. Yet, there is little evidence on the impacts of these policies on women in lower-income countries, where there may be limited social safety nets to absorb these shocks. We conduct a large phone survey and leverage India’s geographically varied containment policies to estimate the association between the pandemic and containment policies and measures of women’s well-being, including mental health and food security. On aggregate, the pandemic resulted in dramatic income losses, increases in food insecurity, and declines in female mental health. While potentially crucial to stem the spread of COVID-19, the greater prevalence of containment policies is associated with increased food insecurity, particularly for women, and reduced female mental health. For surveyed women, moving from zero to average containment levels is associated with a 38% increase in the likelihood of reporting more depression, a 73% increase in reporting more exhaustion, and a 44% increase in reporting more anxiety. Women whose social position may make them more vulnerable – those with daughters and those living in female-headed households – experience even larger declines in mental health.

When individuals receive benefits from government programs, does it affect their attitudes toward those programs, or toward government generally? A growing literature blends policy feedback theory and political behavior research to explore these questions, but so far it has focused almost exclusively on social policies such as the Affordable Care Act. In this article, we focus on a very different set of government programs that reach a more conservative, rural population: agricultural assistance.  Our study ties administrative records on participation in USDA farm aid programs to an original, first-of-its-kind survey measuring agricultural producers’ political attitudes. We find that receiving agricultural assistance is sometimes related to producers’ views of the program delivering the benefits, but it depends on the divisiveness of the program and—for highly partisan programs—recipients’ ideology. However, receiving federal agricultural assistance is not associated with more positive views of government.