High Temperature and Learning Outcomes: Evidence from Ethiopia (with A. Patrick Behrer and Kibrom Tafere), Journal of Environmental Economics and Management
Working Paper Version; Blog; Media
Nigeria has experienced over 18,000 crude oil spills in its 50-year history of oil production and supply. These spills are associated with land, surface water, and groundwater pollution. By employing a staggered difference-in-differences framework, I study adaptation measures adopted by households in the face of these land pollution shocks. I find that exposure to crude oil spill shocks increases the likelihood of out-migration. A sub-group analysis helps me investigate the causal mechanism driving my results. I find that oil spills are linked to migration only for those who resided in households that practiced agriculture at baseline. They report fewer hours worked in cultivation after exposure to oil spills. Weak evidence suggests that rural household members migrate to urban areas as a consequence of oil spill exposures, indicating a substitution away from their farms for better work or education opportunities elsewhere. Reported short-term migration responses to oil spill exposure are often marriage-related, while longer-term migrations are reportedly driven by work and education pursuits, predominantly among female members. Thus, persistent exposure to land pollution shocks can prompt agriculture-dependent households to resort to out-migration as a coping strategy.
(with Ifeanyi Nzegwu Edochie, Aparajita Goyal, and Andrew Dabalen)
Sub-Saharan Africa’s low agricultural productivity exacerbates rural poverty. An important investment, the sustainable use of groundwater for irrigation, has the potential to increase agricultural productivity, but the region has been much slower to adopt this irrigation method compared to other regions, despite abundant reserves. Our study uses a simulation-driven approach to examine the benefits of sustainably utilizing groundwater for irrigation. By mapping data from 291,798 Global Agro-Ecological Zones to 8,099 groundwater grids, we model the production gains from groundwater irrigation for rain-fed croplands. Simulation results indicate groundwater access could increase output by 27.97% to 129.42%, contingent on crop and model conditions. This research facilitates the assessment of groundwater irrigation’s transformative potential and identifies areas in Sub-Saharan Africa where investments can yield significant returns without depleting the groundwater table.
(with Angelo Reyes Diaz, Camila Gomes, and Satyam Anand)
According to standard economic theory, negative income shocks should increase labor supply among secondary earners. Yet, the opposite happened in Egypt. This paper investigates why female labor force participation (FLFP) in Egypt fell sharply following the country’s 2016 currency devaluation. We develop a general equilibrium model with overlapping generations to examine how macroeconomic shocks interact with structural gender barriers. Our model features sector-specific wage discrimination, gendered disutility from labor, and asymmetric human capital dynamics. We capture the currency devaluation’s price effects by following a two-sector model of tradeables and non-tradeables. Calibrated to pre-shock Egyptian data, the model reproduces the observed 30% decline in FLFP and highlights how gendered frictions— such as wage penalties, caregiving burdens, and career fragility— amplified the regressive effects of this macroeconomic adjustment in the form of female workforce exit. Counterfactual simulations show that targeted reforms such as equal pay, childcare support, and second-earner tax deductions could have meaningfully offset the shock’s adverse impact on women’s employment. Our results underscore the need to integrate gender constraints into macroeconomic policy design and offer a framework for more inclusive stabilization strategies in low- and middle-income countries.
(with Timothy Liptrot)
While the impact of democratic constraints on executive behavior has been extensively studied, the effect of constraints on autocrats remains under-explored. Our research shows that unlike democratic constraints on leaders, leader personalism in autocracies does not increase the likelihood of expropriation of FDI. However, by using plausibly exogenous changes in leadership caused by leaders’ terminal illnesses and accidents, we find that the risk of expropriation increases during leadership transitions only in regimes where the outgoing leader is personalist. Our results suggest that the effect of leadership transitions is contingent on the degree of constraints imposed on the departing leader (measured by the predecessor’s personalism). Our results are robust to controlling for various factors such as democracy, regime type, ideology, and natural resource rents.