Personal Projects
What the Stork Brought: Endogenous Fertility Preferences
View PaperAbstract: Where most existing literature on fertility preferences has described how fertility preferences shape outcomes, this paper provides insight into how the sex of a recent birth affects a mother’s fertility preferences. Utilizing data from the Demographic Health Survey from 1985-2020 in 81 countries containing 309,238 mothers who gave birth in the past 12 months and who have equal to or fewer than three children, I employ OLS with two-way fixed effects as my primary specification, examining the effects of the plausibly exogenous sex of a recent birth on sibship sex composition preferences. Results show that a recent daughter birth increases a mother’s stated ideal number of daughters by roughly 0.1 while decreasing the ideal number of sons by about 0.06. Additionally, a recent daughter birth raises the ideal number of total children by 0.04, but this result is less robust to endogeneity. Previous literature has emphasized the power of the firstborn child in shaping a mother’s preferences, but this paper displays that mothers continuously update their preferences past the first birth in magnitudes statistically analogous to treatment effects of the first birth. Treatment effects of a recent daughter birth are directionally homogeneous across different model specifications and when testing for heterogeneous treatment effects across a variety of distinct subsamples. Convincingly, results can be explained within the framework of cognitive dissonance theory, ex-post rationalization, and contact theory. Considering the persistence and directional homogeneity of the results, a novel psychological regularity emerges: mothers with a recent daughter birth prefer a greater ideal number of daughters and a lower ideal number of sons when compared to those who recently birthed a son.
A Quilt of Spirit
View Book (PDF - Unpublished Draft)Summary: "A Quilt of Spirit" aims to encapsulate the essence of fieldwork, shedding light on its challenges and rewards. It delves into the spellbinding culture of Kadaba, its warm-hearted residents, and its rich cultural heritage. It offers a glimpse into the sweltering heat and humidity of Southern India, along with the devastating, inevitable realities of food poisoning. Above all, though, it highlights how life-changing the experience of conducting fieldwork in the social sciences can be for an aspiring researcher.
Projects Contributed to as a Research Assistant
Misallocation in Firm Production: A Nonparametric Analysis Using Procurement Lotteries
View PaperAbstract: This paper develops new tools to study misallocation that do not require assumptions about the heterogeneity of firms’ technologies. We show how features of the distribution of marginal products can be identified from exogenous variation in firms’ input use and used both to test for misallocation and to quantify its resulting welfare losses. We apply this method to a setting with exogenous demand shocks from public procurement contracts for construction services in Ecuador. Our results reject the null of efficiency but our estimates of the resulting welfare losses from misallocation are small.
The effects of classroom incentives: Experimental evidence from Kenya
View PaperAbstract: We conduct a randomized experiment in 225 low-cost primary schools in Kenya using non-monetary incentives (certificates and badges) for students based on performance in Math and English. We randomized over 20,000 students to receive either individual-level, classroom-level, combined, or no incentives for a month. Being in any incentive treatment arm significantly raised test scores by 0.15 and 0.14 standard deviations for Math and English, respectively, generated positive spillovers to non-incentivized subjects, and improved student attendance. The standard errors are too large to distinguish between the effects of the three incentive schemes.
Great Expectations? Leveraging Teachers to Improve Student Performance
View PaperAbstract: Do high teacher expectations improve student performance? Theoretically, expectations can motivate students by raising aspirations or discourage them if perceived as unrealistic or evoking unfavorable peer comparisons. To causally identify their effects and unpack mechanisms, we randomize whether students receive expectations framed as attainable or ambitious, are additionally paired with a classmate for encouragement, or only receive information about past performance. Communicating expectations increases math scores by 0.21s, particularly for students receiving ambitious goals or predicted to perform poorly. Information about past performance has comparable effects (0.18s), as students interpret it as attention and encouragement from the teacher. Pairing only helps when students are similar, indicating that interpersonal comparisons negatively affect motivation. Although students with large gaps between expectations and baseline performance show sustained gains 12–18 months later, the effects of expectations and information remain statistically indistinguishable. Overall, our findings highlight that signals of personalized teacher attention—through communicating expectations or performance—are a low-cost, effective input in the education production function.
3G Internet and Human Capital Development
View PaperAbstract: We study the impact of mobile internet expansion on student outcomes by exploiting the staggered global rollout of 3G between 2000 and 2018. We link geospatial data on 3G coverage to 2.5 million test scores from 82 countries and find that access to 3G substantially increased smartphone ownership and internet use among adolescents, yet reduced test scores in math, reading, and science by the equivalent of one-quarter of a year of learning. Negative effects are driven by exposure during adolescence and are concentrated among lower-achieving students. Mechanisms include increased passive online activities, reduced study efficiency, and weaker social connectedness.
Financial Literacy and Entrepreneurial Aspirations: Results from Pilot Experiments in India, Peru, and Uganda
View PaperAbstract: Much recent research has sought ways to raise the impact of microcredit in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). One set of interventions has addressed hard skills, often aimed at promoting business skills and financial literacy among microentrepreneurs. Another set of interventions has addressed socio-emotional skills such as the development of self-efficacy, entrepreneurial confidence, and aspirations. We present results from three small randomized controlled trials in India, Peru, and Uganda, each with four treatment arms in which we randomized a mobile-phone-based app designed to teach financial literacy, a video documentary intervention designed to boost entrepreneurial aspirations and goal-setting, the combination of these two interventions, and a control group. Results show positive and significant effects from both interventions, where the financial literacy app increased overall financial literacy by 0.32σ and by 0.49σ when combined with the aspirations intervention. The aspirations intervention increase an overall aspirational hope index by 0.40σ and by 0.36σ when combined with the financial literacy intervention. Further research seeks to scale up this combined intervention.