Research

Job Market Paper

When Protection Fails: Effects of Military Bases on Sexual Violence in Colombia (with Felipe Parra) Download
To be presented at: NEUDC 2024, SEA 2024. Presented at: Empirical Studies of Conflict (ESOC) 2024, PacDev 2024, SITE 2024.

Sexual violence committed by soldiers is ubiquitous across the world. This paper investigates the impact of military base presence on sexual violence, fertility, and child support disputes in Colombia, a nation with a recent experience of large-scale growth in military base presence. Using a dataset constructed from diverse sources, we track military base locations across Colombian municipalities from 1998 to 2016. Employing an event-study approach, we identify the causal effects of military bases on host communities. Our findings reveal that the presence of military bases significantly increases sexual violence, with a 72% rise in registered cases over the course of 15 years after the introduction of a military base. Despite this increase in sexual violence, we find no significant changes in fertility or child support disputes. These results are not driven by changes in population or security conditions. This study advances the literature on conflict-related sexual violence and the broader consequences of military base presence on local populations.

Current Projects

Understanding Constraints in Hiring Women in Pakistan (with Zunia Tirmazee and Hana Zahir) Download

74% of the employers in our survey think women are at least as good as, if not better than, men at on-site production jobs in the garment manufacturing industry in Pakistan. Yet, most factories still do not hire many women on factory floors. While much research has been conducted into the constraints women face in obtaining out-of-home employment, this paper instead investigates: What deters firms from hiring women? We utilized unique firm survey data, complemented by a hypothetical-choice methodology and a behavioral game, to examine the economic and non-economic costs of hiring women. Our study observes how monetary incentives can influence compliance with social norms related to gender segregation. Preliminary results suggest that the willingness to comply with these norms are not as relevant as expected, and costs of hiring women, especially the cost of providing safe transportation to women may be more salient to firms’ decision to hire women.

Watch Your Step:The Economic and Behavioral Responses of Rural Households to Landmines during Conflict (with Felipe Parra) Download
To be presented at: APPAM 2024, SEA 2024.

Antipersonnel landmines, though intended to target combatants, disproportionately impact civilians, disrupting economic activity and altering household decision-making processes. This paper examines how rural households in Colombia adjust their labor market decisions and healthcare-seeking behavior in response to recent and nearby landmine events, using detailed spatial data on landmine events combined with longitudinal household survey data. Our findings show that individuals engage less in risky labor activities following recent landmine events, but these responses are heavily influenced by liquidity constraints. Specifically, liquidity-unconstrained individuals are 28\% less likely to work in occupations other than agricultural day labor, particularly in agriculture, and 12\% less likely to spend time on agricultural tasks in their own fields. These households hire additional agricultural workers after landmine exposure, substituting external labor for their own. In contrast, liquidity-constrained individuals are 45\% more likely to engage in agricultural day labor to compensate for income losses stemming from reduced non-agricultural employment. Moreover, landmine events deter both adults and children from seeking formal preventative medical care. This study highlights the differences in responses between liquidity-constrained and unconstrained individuals to shifts in perceived security during conflict.

The Effects of Internally Displaced Peoples on Consumption and Inequality in Mali (with Jeremy Foltz)
Revise and Resubmit at the Journal of African Economies

A series of civil conflicts in Mali has generated more than 346,000 internally displaced people (UNHCR,2020). This study estimates the effect of conflict-generated internal displacement on consumption, poverty, and inequality in host communities. Using comprehensive nationwide household survey data this study finds that wealth at the commune and household level is non-decreasing in internally displaced people (IDP) hosting communes relative to non-IDP host communes. We also find some partial evidence of increasing consumption at the household level although inequality and poverty at the commune level remain the same. The evidence suggests a fairly successful hosting and aid process inMali for IDP in terms of mitigating economic disruption for host communities.