Research

JOB MARKET PAPER -- Economic and Psychological Returns to Social Relationships: Alleviating Constraints to Network Formation in Malawi | Draft | AEA RCT Registry

What are the causal effects of new social relationships, and do returns to link formation vary within versus across social class? I conduct a field experiment among women in rural Malawi who, due to the widespread practice of patrilocality, relocate to their husband’s home village, thereby disrupting their preexisting social ties. I randomly assign low socioeconomic status (SES) female migrants to information on neighboring women willing to receive meal invitations and the opportunity to send invitations; experimentally varying whether the potential guests are of the same SES, a higher-SES, or both. I cross-randomize the invitation-sending arms with an in-kind meal subsidy. I find a substantial response to the invitation list: 81% of women send invitations across all treatment arms, suggesting that information and effort frictions are important barriers to building networks in this setting. The price of food discourages sending invitations to higher-SES women when inviting low-SES women is an option. I show that there are substantial but differential returns to cross- and same-SES linkages: participants with the opportunity to invite higher-SES guests report being 50% more likely to earn income from self-employment and a 0.21 SD improvement in food security, while women with the opportunity to invite guests within-SES experience a 0.23 SD (30%) reduction in depression one year later. This highlights a trade-off in network formation, where social ties that offer economic advancement may come at the expense of relationships that improve psychological well-being.

Experiential and Social Learning with Agha Ali Akram, Reshmaan Hussam, and Akib Khan | Draft | AEA RCT Registry

Behavioral change can arise from learning from oneself or learning from others. But how might these two forms of learning interact? We examine complementarities between individual experiential learning and social learning in health technology adoption using an 1800-household field experiment on water chlorination in peri-urban Pakistan. We randomize treated participants to a learning intervention, where they record and visually track their children's diarrhea rate before and after we offer free chlorine tablets. We exogenously expose them to social learning through random variation in neighbors' treatment assignment. While there is no difference on average in the rate of chlorine use between the learning arm and households that receive free chlorine tablets only, learning-arm households with learning arm neighbors chlorinate their water at a significantly higher rate than their counterparts for almost one year after the end of the learning intervention. Households who are not in the learning arm but have learning-arm neighbors exhibit no difference in behavior. We propose a model of learning where agents are sensitive to signal acquisition technologies and trust signals from technologies with which they have personal experience, giving rise to a complementarity between experiential and social learning. The welfare implications of this complementarity are substantial: ITT estimates suggest that, more than one year later, learning households with learning neighbors exhibit a 0.10 SD (p=0.015) increase in an index of child anthropometrics compared to all other households that receive chlorine.

Distorted Signals and Evaluator Bias: A Two-Stage Experiment on Gendered Hiring in Malawi with Mansa Saxena | Draft | AEA RCT Registry

We evaluate how well-meaning inclusion efforts can backfire if not implemented carefully. We partner with a firm in Malawi to conduct two sequential experiments to study supply-side and demand-side constraints to hiring women for formal jobs. The first experiment focuses on increasing the pool of female applications during a recruitment drive through female-directed advertising. Despite no differences in the objective skills of the female applicants across treated and control areas, the treatment has the perverse effect of leading to a reduction in female hiring. This surprising result informs our second experiment—a resume audit study—where we use real applications from stage one and manipulate application features, while holding qualifications constant, to isolate biases in hiring evaluations. We argue that the treatment backfires due to the combination of evaluator bias, where evaluators place greater weight on soft-skill signals for women, and the treatment leading women to change the way they fill out the application. The treatment weakens the correlation between soft-skill signals and objective technical skills, which are otherwise positively correlated. Combined with evaluators’ greater reliance on soft-skill signals for female applicants, this leads to the screening in of less-qualified women for interviews in treated areas.

Why do we Pay for Symbolism? Evidence from U.S. Geographic Landmark Name Changes with Emily McDonnell. | AEA RCT Registry | Data collection in progress

Do the processes that agents use to establish social and cultural inclusion matter for their ultimate success? We study symbolic policy changes by analyzing reactions to the renaming of U.S. geographic landmarks. Descriptively, people living in zip-codes that experience geographic landmark name changes are more likely to donate to to Republican political candidates and less likely to donate to Democratic political candidates after name removals are announced, but not when the replacement names themselves are announced. In a survey experiment, respondents express much more conservative policy preferences when we frame the 2015 renaming of Mt. McKinley to Mt. Denali as a process enacted by and benefiting groups of people, rather than a passive occurrence. Emphasizing the Indigenous origins of the name ``Denali'' does not generate the same response, and when combined with the active voice treatment actually mitigates the backlash. Jointly, these findings suggest that people lose utility through the processes that seek to enact, remove, or replace symbols, distinct from preferences over the symbols themselves. Crucially, tailored information can psychologically compensate people for these utility losses and reduce backlash.

General Equilibrium Impacts of Social Network Formation. | AEA RCT Registry | Data collection complete, analysis in progress.

Does exogenously generating social inclusion for one person have externalities for others' social inclusion? I leverage cluster-randomized treatment saturation of an experiment that creates exogenous opportunities for social linking, which effectively creates variation in the spatial proximity of Control participants to neighbors' network activity. The treatment design also randomly varies the socio-economic status of the exogenous interactions among low-income treated participants. This design allows me to answer fundamental questions about social network formation that we have limited causal evidence for: Does proximity to social network activity crowd in or crowd out one’s own social ties? Do these effects depend on socio-economic status of the agent who is proximate to others' social network activity, or the socio-economic status of the socially-active nodes to whom she is proximate?

Peer Effects in Adherence to HIV Treatment with Jessica Gallant. Analysis

This paper investigates the role of peer influence in health behavior by studying antiretroviral therapy (ART) adherence among adolescents living with HIV in Malawi, a group that is both developmentally sensitive to peer dynamics and disproportionately affected by poor health outcomes in the context of HIV. With high-frequency electronic medical records of almost 45,000 adolescents, across twelve years, 85 clinics, and 23 districts in Malawi, we track high-stakes health decision-making for as long as adolescents receive care. We utilize three empirical strategies to examine the causal impact of peer behavior on long-term health adherence: a staggered differences-in-differences analysis of the effects of Teen Club entry at the clinic on contemporaneous attendance on scheduled visits; a regression discontuinty design using age cut-offs in Teen Club eligibility and age at the time of initiation to measure long-term effects on outcomes such as mortality; and two instrumental variables specifications to measure how attendance at Teen Club is impacted directly by peer attendance in their prior Teen Club appointment, as instrumented by the peer's attendance record prior to the patient's initiation at Teen Club, or as instrumented by rainfall on the peer's appointment date.

Gendered Misallocation of Agrarian Labor with Nicholas Rahim. | AEA RCT Registry | Trial in progress

We test a novel explanation for disparities in agricultural output between men and women in Malawi: child-bearing as a unique shock to women's labor supply that inhibit efficient land utilization. Pregnancy and child-rearing are negative shocks to women’s available labor. In frictionless land, labor, and credit markets, or with substitutability between household member's labor, women should be able to make productive use of their land when their own labor supply is physiologically constrained. We implement a randomized controlled trial with female farmers who are pregnant or have a child under the age of one year old. We test the impact of subsidizing the cost and search frictions for hiring five days of agricultural labor during the farming season on agricultural and health outcomes.

Public Services and Private Behavior: Evidence from Water Infrastructure in Pakistan with Akib Khan. Data collection complete, analysis in progress

We study how private health behavior responds to new public water infrastructure. During an 18-month randomized controlled trial (RCT) in peri-urban Karachi, we distribute chlorine tablets to households and collect monthly, objective measures of chlorine use and water source choices. Concurrently, local NGOs independently implement water infrastructure projects in a staggered fashion. This natural variation in proximity to new standpipes and boreholes, combined with randomized access to water treatment, allows us to estimate the dynamic effects of infrastructure exposure on private behavior and health outcomes.