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PUBLICATIONS and WORKING PAPERS
Agricultural Technological Change, Female Earnings, and Fertility: Evidence from Brazil. Most Recent Draft
Accepted: The Economic Journal
I study how bias in agricultural technological change affects labor market opportunities and fertility in a modern developing country context. Exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in the adoption of genetically engineered soy across municipalities in Brazil, I show that these technologies reduced female earnings and employment in agriculture, without reallocation of female labor into other sectors. Further, this technology adoption increased fertility, due to increases in overall household earnings and substitution effects driven by the reduction in female earnings and employment. These results suggest that, contrary to historical experience, technological progress in modern developing countries may not improve female labor market opportunities or contribute to fertility decline, unless substitution effects are negative and sufficiently large.
Every Day is Earth Day: Evidence on the Long-term Impact of Environmental Activism (with Daniel Hungerman). Link
AEJ: Applied Economics
We explore the importance of activism in the context of Earth Day. We use variation in weather to study the long-term effects of the original Earth Day on attitudes, environmental outcomes, and children's health. Unusually bad weather in a community on April 22, 1970, is associated 10 to 20 years later with weaker support for the environment, particularly among those who were school-aged in 1970. Bad weather on Earth Day is also associated with higher levels of carbon monoxide in the air and greater risk of congenital abnormalities in infants born in the following decades. These results indicate a long-lasting and localized effect of Earth Day, and show that there can be benefits to voluntary activity that would be impossible to identify until years after the volunteering occurs.
Blue Collar Booms and American Mortality: Evidence From the Fracking Revolution (with Paul Shaloka). Link
We exploit the positive labor demand shocks driven by the fracking boom to investigate whether increased economic opportunity reduces mortality. Exploiting geological characteristics amenable to fracking within a difference-in-differences design, we find that the boom increases earnings and employment for both men and women for up to six years after fracking begins. While overall mortality decreases by 2%, we do not find significant reductions in external causes like suicides. We instead find reductions in more treatable causes such as cardiovascular deaths. Finally, we find evidence of increased health insurance coverage, suggesting that non-pecuniary employment benefits may drive our results.
Religion and Demography: Papal Influences on Fertility (With Lakshmi Iyer and Paloma Moyano). Link
Do religious leaders affect fertility? Examining the visits of Pope John Paul II to 13 Latin American countries, we find significant and positive long term effects of Papal visits on fertility. Effects are driven by first births and by those residing in a region the Pope visited. Papal messaging matters:fertility increases more when the Pope mentions marriage or admonishes abortions and contraception, and decreases with explicit condemnations of pre-marital sex. Marriages also increase with mentions of marriage or pre-marital sex. Consistent with a reduction in contraceptive behavior, we find that fertility rises more for richer and more educated households.
WORKS IN PROGRESS
Industrialization, Religion, and Fertility Decline in 1800s France (Draft Coming Soon, Presented at the 19th World Economic History Conference in Paris and the Brown University Growth Lab)
Aspirations, Beliefs, and Behavior: Evidence from a Randomized Religious Intervention in Western Kenya (With David Murphy, Samuel Bird, and Susan Kilonzo). Link