Publications

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.
 

This article examines the legal contours of the international law regime as it relates to internally displaced people (IDPs) and assesses it critically. It analyzes the structural legal and humanitarian injustices from which IDPs suffer as a result of often arbitrary distinctions between them and refugees in international refugee law, international human rights law, and international humanitarian law. It explores how IDPs do not have the same explicit, dedicated legal protections in international law as refugees who have fled their countries of origin and crossed an international border. It argues that precisely because IDPs lack international legal protections, their rights and needs are often overlooked and met with indifference and lack of sufficient humanitarian response from the United Nations, its agencies and member states, and global humanitarian NGOs. It discusses efforts to recognize a specific set of international legal rights for IDPs, why they have been stymied for several decades, and the practical consequences in terms of human rights deferred and denied and human welfare undermined for IDPs and their increasing vulnerability and disadvantage. Finally, it presents ways of improving respect for and fulfillment of the human rights of IDPs.

Borrowing from Cognitive Hierarchy Theory, I introduce bounded rationality into the beta-delta model of present-biased preferences. I define a level-two agent–or k-2 sophisticate–as one who is aware that her future selves will have present-bias, but believes that they will be naive about their future present-bias. The key feature of the k-2 sophisticate is that she does only one round of backwards induction about her future behavior instead of the unlimited number of rounds of the full sophisticate. Extending the framework of O’Donoghue and Rabin, 1999, in which an agent must take an action exactly one time in a finite period of time, the k-2 sophisticate always procrastinates tasks with immediate costs less than the full sophisticate, and almost always preproperates (does too soon) tasks with immediate rewards less than the full sophisticate. In addition, the k-2 sophisticate is protected from severe harm from both extreme preproperation and extreme procrastination, overcoming one of the intuitively implausible results of the O’Donoghue and Rabin model. There are cases in which the k-2 sophisticate may suffer from excessive costly preemption of future procrastinatin due to incorrect pessimism about future preemption, which I argue is not impluasible. My model also overcomes the dissatisfying result from O’Donoghue and Rabin (2001) that in an infinite-horizon setting it is not possible to identify when the fully sophisticated individual will actually do the task.

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.