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PUBLICATIONS

Blue Collar Booms and American Mortality: Evidence From the Fracking Revolution (with Paul Shaloka). [pdf] Accepted: American Journal of Health Economics

Agricultural Technological Change, Female Earnings, and Fertility: Evidence from Brazil. VoxDev
The Economic Journal [
link]

Every Day is Earth Day: Evidence on the Long-term Impact of Environmental Activism (with Daniel Hungerman). AEJ: Applied Economics [link]
Media: 
Le MondeNotre Dame News

WORKING PAPERS

A Pentecostal Ethic? Effects of a Randomized Religious Intervention (With David Murphy, Samuel Bird, and Susan Kilonzo) [link to draft] [AEA RCT Registry]

Neo-Pentecostalism is among the fastest-growing religious movements in the world. We study how exposure to it shapes individual dispositions and economic behavior using a randomized controlled trial in Kisumu, Kenya. Participants were randomly assigned invitations to workshops hosted by Pentecostal churches, workshops hosted by mainline Christian churches, or neither, followed by surveys and choice experiments to elicit incentive-compatible economic behavior both one and twenty months afterward. Assignment to either type of church reduces contributions to a communal entrepreneurship fund by 16 percent relative to the control. Assignment to Pentecostal churches also reduces reported financial transfers to family and friends and increases men's willingness to make interest-bearing investments in the experimental game. Pentecostal assignment further lowers self-reported grit and self-control, effects that persisted twenty months later and are consistent with changing evaluative standards regarding personal success. By twenty months, treated respondents were less likely to identify as Pentecostal, with exploratory evidence suggesting disillusionment when the material promises of its associated prosperity theology failed to emerge. Our findings provide causal evidence that religious participation can reshape informal obligations and economic behavior, and that the rapid growth of Pentecostalism may further amplify such effects with economically meaningful implications for investment behavior.

Social Norm Salience and Fertility: Evidence from Papal Visits (with Lakshmi Iyer and Paloma Moyano). [link]
Media: Notre Dame News; Crux

How do social norms affect fertility? We examine the impact of Pope John Paul II’s visits to 13 Latin American countries, which reinforced the salience of existing Catholic norms. We find positive long-term effects on fertility. These are driven by first births and by those residing in a region that the Pope visited. Papal messaging matters: fertility increases more when the Pope mentions marriage, abortion or contraception and decreases with condemnations of pre-marital sex. Marriages increase with all three messages. The fertility effect is stronger for wealthier and more educated women, whose behavior is further from the Catholic social norm.

Within the Calculus of Conscious Choice: Industrialization, Religion, and Fertility Decline in Early 1800s France (New Draft Coming Soon)

I examine whether the economic incentives generated by the First Industrial Revolution contributed to fertility decline, and how their effects depended on prevailing social norms. Using plausibly exogenous variation in the adoption of steam engines and mechanized cotton spinning across French departments, I find that early industrialization reduced marital fertility, but only in less religious regions. These results suggest that economic incentives associated with early industrialization mattered for fertility behavior, but that their effects were conditional on the prevailing social context. More broadly, the findings show the importance of considering interactions between economic incentives and cultural constraints in shaping the fertility transition.

WORKS IN PROGRESS

​​Improving the Working Conditions of Domestic Workers in Brazil (Field Work in Progress JPAL Jobs and Opportunity Initiative Brazil Funded Project)

 

Can Human Capital Investments Lower Coercive Institutions? Evidence from US History

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