Working Papers
“Civil Conflict and Later Life Crime"
In the 1980s, Peru was marred by a gruesome civil conflict that persisted for over a decade. This paper looks at the impact of exposure to conflict at different stages of childhood on criminal activity later in life. To identify effects, I exploit the temporal and geographic variation in the spread of the war across Peru. Using the birth year and birth location information from the 2016 national penitentiary population census and the 2015-2017 national household survey data, I estimate how exposure to war during different ages affects long-term criminal behavior. I find evidence that exposure to conflict during primary school going ages for men increases their probability of incarceration in adulthood. Unlike other evidences on the long-term impacts of war, exposure during early childhood does not seem to explain criminal behavior in later life in this context.
“Maternal Conditions and Child Well-Being" (with Marco Castillo)
Maternal contribution in the nurture and growth of their children is indispensable. However, they may be faced with unfavorable situations that can adversely affect the children. One such common and pervasive problem is domestic violence. Peru, as a country with one of the highest rates of domestic violence in the world, introduced Women's Emergency Centers (WEC) that were found to be effective in reducing domestic violence towards women. In this paper, we examine whether a program targeted towards the victims of domestic violence can impact the cognitive and health outcome of children. We find evidence that exposure to the WEC within 2 km of the household improves the health outcomes of children under the age of five in terms of their weight-for-age z-scores, wasting and underweight. We also find some evidence that access to these centers improve the cognitive development of children in terms of their symbolic function. The improvement in the health outcomes is posited to be driven by reduction in the probability of experiencing domestic violence of the mothers with closer proximity to the Women's Emergency Centers. We also find evidence that maternal-child attachment improves with exposure to these centers. This is consistent with maternal involvement being impaired by domestic violence.
“The Many Faces of Abuse: Labor Market Opportunities and Domestic Violence" (with Marco Castillo and Ragan Petrie)
Despite the substantial implications of increased female labor market opportunities for women, relatively less is known about the impact of improved outside option for women on domestic violence, especially in the context of developing countries. Economic theory on household bargaining model predicts that better outside option for women should reduce the level of domestic abuse through greater bargaining power. We exploit the exogenous variation in labor demand induced by differing gender composition across industries to show the impact of changes in the relative labor market condition for women on various forms of abuse. Using nine waves of Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) from Peru, we find evidence of lower likelihood of intimate partner violence with improvement in the labor market opportunities for women.
Other Working Papers
“Does Fairness Matter? Only if it Benefit me: An Extended Replication" (with Catherine Eckel, Manuel Hoffmann and Yinjunjie Zhang)
We reexamine the prediction power of theories of individual’s fairness behavior by replicating the experimental design from Engelmann and Strobel (2004). We recruit a larger sample of subjects via the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform, which results in a different subject pool compared to the original study. In addition to the replication, we add two new treatments that vary the type of information given to each subject about the games. To provide a better test of fairness, our two variations reveal information relevant to FS and ERC theory and give the theories the best shot when agents are boundedly rational. While we find many of the same patterns of behavior as in the original study, our data do not fully replicate the original results. Contrary to the original study, arguing Charness and Rabin’ efficiency and maximin the best theories to predict behavior in these games, we find that fairness does matter. In particular, individuals shy away from disadvantageous inequality while embracing advantageous inequality: Fairness matters when it benefits the decision maker.
Work in Progress
“The Intergenerational Impact of Civil Conflict on Birth outcome in Peru" (with Marco Castillo)
“The Intergenerational Impact of Civil Conflict on Education" (with Moffii Odunowo)