"Reallocation According to Comparative Advantage Under Climate Change: The Role of Land Markets and Coordination in Coastal Bangladesh"
Abstract: Climate change shifts comparative advantage in developing-country agriculture, but whether land markets can deliver the reallocation the new comparative-advantage structure requires is an open question. We study coastal Bangladesh, where sea-level-rise-driven soil salinity has rendered traditional rice agriculture unviable on large areas and made brackish-water aquaculture more profitable, but aquaculture requires consolidating plots beyond the typical scale of land ownership and imposes brackish-water externalities on neighbors. Using a hydro-geological boundary as an instrument for high salinity, we find two things. First, the rental market does deliver large reallocation toward aquaculture: high salinity raises aquaculture land per household by 29 decimals and operational farm size by 28 decimals, achieved through fewer but much larger rental transactions; ownership barely moves. Contrary to the prevailing view that factor-market frictions block reallocation in developing-country agriculture, a suciently large comparative advantage shock overcomes those frictions. Second, the realized reallocation overshoots the individually-optimal benchmark. Among dual-sector adopters, the within-farmer marginal-product wedge between crops and aquaculture is positive (93% of adopters, mean +1.47 log points; robust in sign to instrumental-variables recalibration of the underlying production function elasticities): by these farmers' own production technology, the realized allocation places too much land in aquaculture and too little in crops. The signature of overallocation is concentrated where village-level fundamentals (e.g., soil salinity) do not justify the realized aquaculture share (the wedge declines with own-salinity, rises with village-share), identifying village-level coordination as the operative friction; the brackish-water externality is the leading candidate micro-foundation, though several other village-level frictions produce the same observed patterns. The implied aggregate welfare loss is approximately $1.1 billion per year (range $0.6-1.5B across sensitivity cases). Across coastal developing regions facing sea-level-rise-driven salinity intrusion, the constraint on climate-induced reallocation lies not in factor markets but in the village-level coordination frictions surrounding the adaptive technology.
"Adapting to Moderate, Failing at the Extreme: Newborn Heat Mortality in Bangladesh over Four Decades" (with Anoushka Chopra)
Abstract: Damage functions in climate economics assume that rising incomes and cooling technology steadily reduce the mortality cost of extreme heat. We test this using 239,563 births from eight rounds of the Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey (1994–2022), merged with ERA5 daily-maximum temperature, and estimate how the heat–neonatal mortality relationship has shifted across birth cohorts. Adaptation is real but partial. Between 30 and 40°C, a positive mortality response appears only in the 1980s cohort and falls to essentially zero from the 1990s onward; a Sun–Abraham interaction-weighted estimator ties that flattening to the staggered rollout of Bangladesh’s Rural Electrification Board program. Above 40°C, no adaptation occurred. The effect for the most recent cohort is large and precisely estimated — roughly 41 additional neonatal deaths per 1,000 live births per 10 extreme-heat days in the 28-day neonatal window — is carried by sustained heat waves rather than isolated hot days, and shows no decline across cohorts. Electric fans reach 96% of households; air conditioning, 1.4%. Because adaptation is uneven across the temperature distribution, projections that attenuate the whole response with income understate the mortality cost of warming precisely where mid-century warming is concentrated: 815 to 2,540 excess neonatal deaths per year by 2060.
"From Two Daughters to a Hurried Third: Son Preference, Birth Spacing, and Mortality" (with Syed Manzoor Ahmed Hanifi)
In rural Bangladesh, women whose first two children are both daughters are substantially more likely to attempt a third birth, and to do so sooner, than women with a son. The World Health Organization recommends at least 24 months between pregnancies to protect the next child. Using the plausibly random sex composition of the first two children as an instrument, we estimate the effect of short interpregnancy intervals on third-child mortality in two independent data sources: the Matlab and Chakaria HDSS (34,579 mothers, 2005–2024) and pooled rural Bangladesh DHS rounds (17,946 mothers, 2004–2022). Two-stage least squares with girl-girl as the instrument imply that mothers shifted into a sub-24-month interpregnancy interval face a 9.5 pp higher risk of third-child neonatal death in HDSS (95% CI 2.3–16.6) and 15.8 pp in BDHS (95% CI 1.8–29.9). High-frequency surveillance and nationally representative cross-sectional surveys yield convergent evidence. Combining the two data sources and monetizing at the central Robinson et al. (2019) value-of-statistical-life transfer, the implied annual cost lies in the range $171–$400 million, with an aggregate of $3.4–$8.0 billion in mortality cost over the 2005–2024 sample period.
"Effects of Increase in Decadal Monsoon Onset Variability on Farming: Evidence from Bangladesh"
(with Jared Stolove)
"Migration to the Middle East and Women’s Empowerment in Bangladesh: Evidence on Household Decision-Making and Agency"
(with Cecile Pierre and Frederica Mendonça)
"Adapting to Drinking Water Scarcity in Coastal Bangladesh through Community Level Water Desalination Business"
(with Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak and Jared Stolove)
"Approaches to Studying Adaptation in Early Climate Change Battlegrounds"
(with Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak and Matthew Kahn)
“Underinvestment in a Profitable Adaptation Technology: The Role of Market Access”
(with Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak)