Publications

To Use Financial Incentives or Not? Insights from Experiments in Encouraging Sanitation Investments in Four Countries
(with Sanghmitra Gautam, Raymond Guiteras, and Mushfiq Mobarak), World Development, 2025.
Code and data

Generalizing the Results from Social Experiments: Theory and Evidence from India
Journal of Business and Economic Statistics, 2024.
Code and data

Indian Labor Regulations and the Cost of Corruption: Evidence from the Firm Size Distribution 
(with Amrit Amirapu)
Review of Economics and Statistics, 2020.
VoxDev, The Economist, Code and data

Working papers

Combining Experimental and Observational Studies in Meta-Analysis: A Debiasing Approach
Revised and resubmitted (2nd round) to the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics.

Spatial Spillovers from High-Rise Developments: Evidence from the Mumbai Mills, complete version including appendices and supplementary material
(with Nick Tsivanidis), revise and resubmit at Econometrica.
Online Appendix, Supplementary Material

Firm Presence, Pollution, and Agglomeration: Evidence from a Randomized Environmental Place-Based Policy
(with Namrata Kala).

Selecting Experimental Sites for External Validity
(with Keisuke Hirano, Jean Lee, Mahreen Mahmud, Orville Mondal, Jonathan Morduch, Saravana Ravindran and Abu Shonchoy).

Evaluating Ex Ante Counterfactual Predictions Using Ex Post Causal Inference (updated slides), older working paper version
(with Cyrus Samii, Rajeev Dehejia, and Kiki Pop-Eleches).

Learning Practical Policies for Populations with Implementation Costs
(with Junlong Aaron Zhou and Cyrus Samii).

Selected work in progress

Measuring Slums from Space (slides), in preparation for the Journal of Economic Perspectives
Funding: IGC, Weiss Fund, World Bank
(with Minas Sifakis, Nicholas Swanson, and Nick Tsivanidis).

We apply frontier machine vision techniques to identify slums from high-resolution daytime satellite imagery in cities across India and Africa over the past 20 years. Our model is built for external validity and scalability, addressing the scarcity of high quality slum maps and making best use of the ones we have.

Evaluating Expert Predictions for the Impact of Mobile Money on Poverty: Evidence from a Multi-Site Experiment
(with Alejandro Sanchez-Becerra, Rajeev Dehejia, Kiki Pop-Eleches, Jean Lee, Mahreen Mahmud, Jonathan Morduch, Saravana Ravindran, Cyrus Samii and Abu Shonchoy).

We econometrically compare treatment effect estimates obtained in the six sites selected for mobile money training program evaluations in Selecting Sites for External Validity to the predictions from the model from that paper, and to the predictions made by experts such as past and future participants, local and global academics, and policymakers.

Inferring PM2.5 Levels using Satellite Imagery: A Deep Learning Approach
Funding: NSF, PEDL, STEG, IGC, Weiss Fund, NYU FAI
(with Namrata Kala and Minas Sifakis).

Given the scarcity of air quality monitoring in India and other developing countries we develop deep learning methods using satellite imagery to create pollution measures at a fine spatial and temporal resolution.

Structural Network Meta-Analysis: Theory and An Application to Global Sanitation
Funding: Y-RISE, Yale McMillen Center, World Bank
(with Sanghmitra Gautam, Raymond Guiteras, and Mushfiq Mobarak).

We classify common interventions intended to decrease open defecation in rural parts of the developing world according to their underlying theoretical mechanisms and build a structural model nesting all theoretical mechanisms and estimate its parameters in different experimental datasets. We evaluate the model’s performance in predicting intervention effects out of context and compare it to atheoretic statistical alternatives.

The Impacts of Refugee Influxes: Evidence from Administrative and Cellphone Data in Jordan
Funding: EBRD, TaiwanBusiness, IGC, Weiss Fund
(with Konhee Chang, Nick Tsivanidis, and Nathaniel Young).

What does a migrant influx imply for the welfare of both urban incumbents and the migrants themselves, and what policies are most effective for relieving the associated problem of congestion? Using administrative data, call detail records (CDR) for the universe of cellphone transactions made on one of Jordan’s largest operator’s network from mid-2015 until the present and a linked survey we conducted, we document patterns of migration into Amman at high spatial and temporal frequency and examine the effects of the migrant influx given city structure.