Reducing Neonatal Mortality at Scale: Lessons for Targeting (with Hans H. Sievertsen and Mahesh C. Puri). This supersedes a paper circulated under the title "Saving Neonatal Lives for a Quarter".

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Abstract:

Neonatal mortality contributes an increasing share of under-5 mortality. Experimental estimates of a low-cost preventive measure (chlorhexidine cord care) vary widely across settings, leading to external validity concerns. We provide the first, quasi-experimental, estimates of the effect of a nationwide roll-out in Nepal and apply recently developed machine-learning techniques (ML) to analyze treatment effect heterogeneity. We find that the program decreases neonatal mortality by 36% and that a simple targeting policy leveraging heterogeneous treatment effects improves neonatal survival relative to WHO recommendations. Heterogeneous treatment effects extrapolated from our ML analysis are broadly in line with experimental findings across five countries.​​

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Probabilistic Beliefs about Contraception and Contraceptive Use in a High-Fertility Environment (with Grant Miller, Bintu Ibrahim Abba and Aureo de Paula). Draft available upon request.

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Abstract:

Over one in five married women in Sub-Saharan Africa report not wishing to become pregnant, but also not using any form of contraception---often not because of inadequate supply or cost of contraceptives. In this paper, we use detailed new data from a large, diverse sample of women and their husbands across Nigeria (the most populous country in Sub-Saharan Africa) to study the accuracy of probabilistic beliefs about pregnancy risk and contraception and their relationship to actual contraceptive choices. We document systematically mistaken beliefs held by respondents, and we find that two are also strongly related to actual contraceptive choices: women’s underestimation of pregnancy risk absent contraception and women’s mistaken beliefs about their partners’ approval of contraception. Partner approval may not easily be amenable to change, but importantly, our results suggest that credible, contextually-tailored information about pregnancy risk absent contraception could align women’s contraceptive choices more closely with their fertility desires and therefore reduce unwanted pregnancies.

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Parental Minimum Wages, Children's Education, and Racial Inequality (with Luyang Chen and Hans H. Sievertsen).

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Abstract

Parental income inequality contributes to disparities in educational outcomes. One of the most widely implemented strategies to address income inequality is the establishment of minimum wage mandates. Yet we do not know whether the children of those who benefit from these mandates gain more education. We test whether parental minimum wage coverage improves long-run education outcomes. We exploit variation in exposure to the 1966 Fair Labor Standards Act by child birth cohort and predetermined parental occupation. Parental minimum wage coverage during children's teenage years increases children’s completed education. This effect is larger among black children, contributing to lowering educational inequality. The main mechanism at play is the relaxation of household budget constraints. Indeed, we find larger education effects for groups experiencing larger first-generation wage increases and suggestive evidence of reduced teenage labor force participation and reduced dropout due to financial difficulties, especially for black children.