Research
Publications
Incentivizing School Attendance in the Presence of Parent-Child Information Frictions (with Damien de Walque). World Bank blog. VoxDev column. American Economic Journal: Economic Policy,15 (3): 256-85.
Individual Consumption in Collective Households: Identification Using Repeated Observations with an Application to PROGRESA (with Senay Sokullu). Journal of Applied Econometrics, 37(2), 286-304.
Primary Education Expansion and Quality of Schooling. 2019. Economics of Education Review 73:101913.
Population Policy: Abortion and Modern Contraception are Substitutes (with Grant Miller). 2016. Demography, 53(4), 979-1009.
Do the Maths: An analysis of the gender gap in mathematics in Africa (with Andy Dickerson and Steve McIntosh). 2015. Economics of Education Review, 46:1-22.
Civil Conflict, Gender-Specific Fetal Loss, and Selection: A new test of the Trivers-Willard Hypothesis. 2015 . Journal of Health Economics, 39:31-50.
Access to Abortion, Investments in Neonatal Health, and Sex Selection: Evidence from Nepal. 2014. Journal of Development Economics, 107:225-243.
Education and Civil Conflict in Nepal. 2014. World Bank Economic Review, 28(2), pp. 354–383.
Household Returns to Land Transfers in South Africa: A Q-squared analysis. 2011. Journal of Development Studies, 47(2), pp. 354-375.
The Puzzle of Muslim Advantage in Child Survival in India (With Sonia Bhalotra and Arthur van Soest). 2010. Journal of Health Economics, 29(2), pp. 191-204.
The Food (In)Security Impact of Land Redistribution in South Africa: Microeconometric evidence from national data. 2009. World Development, 37( 9), pp. 1540-1553.
Working Papers
Saving Neonatal Lives 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". Submitted.
Subjective Expectations and Demand for Contraception (with Grant Miller and Aureo de Paula). Policy Briefing. Revisions requested by the Journal of Econometrics.
Selected Work in Progress
Poverty Traps and Female Labor Force Participation, with Ragui Assaad, Adam Osman and William Parienté. Status: Intervention completed. Endline survey underway. AEARCTR-0009041
Subjective Expectations and the Demand for Contraception of Men and Women, with Aureo de Paula and Grant Miller. Status: Initial survey completed.
Measuring Desired Fertility, with Aurélia Lépine, Wally Toh, Aureo de Paula, and Grant Miller. Status: Fieldwork completed.
Selected Research Reports
Family Planning and Fertility Behavior: Evidence from Twentieth Century Malaysia. (With Kimberly Singer Babiarz, Jiwon Lee, Grant Miller and Tey Nai Peng). 2017. CGDev Working Paper 470.
Family Planning and Women’s Empowerment: Incentive Effects and Direct Effects among Malaysian Women (With Kimberly Singer Babiarz, Jiwon Lee, Grant Miller and Tey Nai Peng). 2017. CGDev Working Paper 471. Media Coverage: The Economist ; Malay Mail