With Pascaline Dupas, Basimenye Nhlema, Zachary Wagner, and Emily Wroe.
Data from an 18-month randomized trial show large and sustained impacts on water purification and child health of a program providing monthly coupons for free water treatment solution to households with young children. The program is more effective and much more cost effective than asking Community Health Workers (CHWs) to distribute free chlorine to households during routine monthly visits. This is because only 40 percent of households use free chlorine, targeting through CHWs is worse than self-targeting through coupon redemption, and water treatment promotion by CHWs does not increase chlorine use among beneficiaries of free chlorine.
Dupas, Pascaline, Basimenye Nhlema, Zachary Wagner, Aaron Wolf, and Emily Wroe. 2023. "Expanding Access to Clean Water for the Rural Poor: Experimental Evidence from Malawi." American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, 15 (1): 272-305.
DOI: 10.1257/pol.20210121
With Alison Zhao
Does foreign multinational expansion encourage or undermine domestic skill investment? Using South African administrative data, we show that foreign multinational growth intensifies competition for workers at large domestic firms. As more employees move to foreign employers, domestic firms slow hiring and pull back from training in portable general skills. Instead of responding with higher wages to retain workers, they shift away from investments in broadly transferable human capital. The results point to an overlooked tradeoff of globalization. Foreign investment can expand workers’ outside options while weakening domestic firms’ incentives to build skills.
With Alison Zhao
This paper studies how career incentives shape job search and early career choices among young workers in India. We focus on whether entry-level workers value promotion opportunities and future wage growth, and whether these preferences affect how they respond to job postings. Using a discrete choice experiment with young adults in India, we estimate willingness to pay for jobs that provide clearer paths to promotion and higher future earnings. Pilot results show that respondents are willing to give up current wages for advertised promotion opportunities, with valuations increasing when promotion probabilities are higher. Workers also value future wage growth, especially when it is linked to a salient promotion path. These findings suggest that career incentives are an important but under-measured job attribute in youth labor markets.
This project studies job tenure in medieval Low Countries labor markets using newly digitized construction payrolls from Arnhem and Utrecht. By linking worker names across records, I trace individual labor histories and show that these were not purely casual spot markets: both institutions relied on a small core of recurring workers, supplemented by short-term labor when needed. Relative seniority strongly predicts future employment and days worked, suggesting that stable labor relationships existed even without modern contracts.