Research

Outdoor air pollution in rural India
- Topics: Pollution
Exposure to air pollution has important consequences for public health. In January 2017, we visited Reusa, a block in Uttar Pradesh, to investigate pollution-generating activities and the policies that aim to mitigate them in rural areas. We found many sources of...Read More..

Open defecation in rural India, 2015-2016: Levels and trends in the NFHS-4
- Topics: Sanitation
The Government of India’s NFHS-4 offers the best new data on open defecation in rural India to be released in over a decade. Although open defecation has become less common than it was ten years ago, it is still highly...Read More..

This paper uses data from the newly done phone survey by r.i.c.e. called Social Attitudes Research, India (SARI). It studies explicit prejudice against women and Dalits in Delhi, Mumbai, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh. We find high levels of explicit prejudice...Read More..

Social disadvantage and mental health: A developing country perspective
- Topics: Caste, Mental Health, Religion, Social inequality
Studies from the United States document important racial gaps in health. In developing societies, research on social disadvantage and health is more limited. Mental health, in particular, is poorly understood relative to its disease burden. Our study contributes the first...Read More..

Switching to sanitation: Understanding latrine adoption in a representative panel of rural Indian households
- Topics: Sanitation
Open defecation, which is still practiced by about a billion people worldwide, is one of the most examples of how place influences health in developing countries. Because of the negative healthy externalities of open defecation, eliminating it is a priority...Read More..

Understanding open defecation in rural India: Untouchability, pollution, and latrine pits
- Topics: Caste, Child health, Government programs, Sanitation, Social inequality
Open defecation in rural India presents a puzzle: India has far higher open defecation rates than other developing regions where people are poorer, literacy rates are lower, and water is more scarce. Because open defecation has terrible consequences for health,...Read More..

Intergenerational effects of women’s status: Evidence from child height in joint Indian households
- Topics: Child health, Employment, Height, Social inequality
The hypothesis that a woman's social status has intergenerational effects on the human capital of her children has featured prominently in development policy and social science. Our paper is the first to econometrically identify such an effect. We exploit an...Read More..

Particulate pollution has important consequences for human health, and is an issue of global concern. Outdoor air pollution has become a cause for alarm in India in particular because recent data suggest that ambient pollution levels in Indian cities are...Read More..

Anemia impairs physical and cognitive development in children and reduces human capital accumulation. The prior economics literature has focused on the role of inadequate nutrition in causing anemia. This paper is the first to show that sanitation, a public good,...Read More..

Health externalities of India’s expansion of coal plants: Evidence from a national panel of 40,000 households
- Topics: Child health, Environment, Pollution
Coal power generation is expanding rapidly in India and other developing countries. In addition to consequences for climate change, present-day health externalities may also substantially increase the social cost of coal. Health consequences of air pollution have proven important in...Read More..

Place and child health : The interaction of population density and sanitation behavior in developing countries
- Topics: Child health, Demography, Sanitation
A long literature in demography has debated the importance of place for health, especially children’s health. In this study, we assess whether the importance of dense settlement for infant mortality and child height is moderated by exposure to local sanitation...Read More..

The puzzle of open defecation in rural India: Evidence from a novel measure of caste attitudes in a nationally-representative survey
- Topics: Caste, Sanitation, Social inequality
Uniquely widespread and persistent open defecation in rural India has emerged as an important policy challenge and puzzle about behavioral choice in economic development. One candidate explanation is the culture of purity and pollution that reinforces and has its origins...Read More..

Disease externalities and net nutrition: Evidence from changes in sanitation and child height in Cambodia, 2005–2010
- Topics: Child health, Sanitation
Child height is an important indicator of human capital and human development, in large part because early life health and net nutrition shape both child height and adult economic productivity and health. Between 2005 and 2010, the average height of...Read More..

Optimal climate policy and the future of world economic development
- Topics: Climate change, Environment
How much should present generations sacrifice to reduce emissions today, in order to reduce the future harms of climate change? Within climate economics, debate on this question has been focused on so called "ethical parameters" of social time preference and...Read More..

Optimal Population and Exhaustible Resource Constraints
- Topics: Climate change
A large literature considers the optimal size and growth rate of the human population, trading o the utility value of additional people with the costs of a larger population. In this literature, an important parameter is the social weight placed...Read More..

Purity, pollution, and untouchability: challenges affecting the adoption, use, and sustainability of sanitation programmes in rural India
- Topics: Caste, Sanitation, Social inequality
Aashish, Diane & Dean wrote a chapter for the book "Sustainable Sanitation for all: Experiences, challenges and innovations", published by Practical Action and edited by Petra Bongartz, Naomi Vernon and John Fox. The abstract of the chapter is pasted below, and...Read More..