Work in progress

"Antibiotic pollution and infant mortality in India: a research note" with S. Baumgartner and X. Jativa

R&R Demography

The number of deaths from antibiotic resistance is steadily rising and has become a global public health issue. Children from the low- and middle-income countries pay a strikingly high tribute, as last-line antibiotics are usually unavailable. Pollution of riverways due to pharmaceutical products is one driver of resistance. In this paper, we assess whether this channel explains a large part of infant mortality in India. We show that living downstream of a producer increases the infant mortality risk by 16% and that antibiotic production explains 20,000 infant deaths in India per year. This suggests that new regulations, improved production processes and strategic considerations on the location of antibiotic producers are needed to guarantee that production does not induce negative externalities on the local population.

"Informal labor exchange teams and participation on the labor market : Evidence from rural Tanzania" with C. Arciniegas and M. Fahn

CESifo Working Paper n°11809, 2025.

We investigate labor exchange teams in rural communities, which are prevalent in many developing countries. We show theoretically that these teams are beneficial to employers, who can outsource the monitoring of workers. Team members are incentivized to exert high effort because any deviation would lead to the dissolution of their production team. Data from Tanzania support the model's predictions: members of labor exchange teams are more likely to obtain paid work and are often hired to perform tasks for which monitoring is costly. Consequently, this informal arrangement helps reduce moral hazard in the context of employment relationships.

 "Reservations and school infrastructure and quality in India" with X. Jativa

This paper uses a novel dataset to estimate the effect of Women and Scheduled Castes reservations in local governments in rural areas of four North Indian states over the period 2005-2016 on primary school-level infrastructure investments, organization, enrollment and examinations. Taking advantage of natural experiments resulting from the institutional design of the reservation policy, we find evidence that female representation had no detectable impact on any of the dimensions we address in this paper. On the contrary, SC representation lead to limited positive effects on school investments in areas relevant to the needs of their group; but mostly negative effects on school enrollment for other disadvantaged minorities, without benefiting enrollment of pupils of their own group. These findings suggests that quotas have limited effects on primary education, which can be explained in part by a lack of agency of these population classes.

"Child fostering and nutrition in South Africa" with A. Gosselin-Pali and E. Gautrain

In sub-Saharan Africa, child fostering - where children live outside their parental home - is a widespread practice. Approximately one in four women have at least one fostered child. Given the scale and potential implications of this phenomenon for child development, understanding its impact on children's well-being is crucial. This paper focuses on nutrition, a key determinant of health. Using a longitudinal dataset with individual tracking from South Africa, we apply Machine Learning techniques to address both selection into fostering and endogenous attrition. Our results show that the migration of a child out of the parental household reduces the child's probability of being stunted by 6.4 percentage points, which amounts to a reduction by 41 percent compared to the mean level. This nutrition improvement may be due to the fact that foster children usually move to host households that are smaller, more rural, and often include retired individuals, typically grandparents, who receive a pension. Interestingly, our findings indicate that fostering not only improves the nutritional status of fostered children but also benefits those remaining in the sending household, suggesting a mutually beneficial situation for both groups.

Unpublished Working Papers

Early schooling and later outcomes: Evidence from pre-school extension in France, with Arnaud Lefranc, Thema WP 2010-07.

Non-standard forms of employment in Uganda and Ghana, with Cédric Houdré, International Labour Organization, WP 29.03.2016, 2226-8944 [ISSN].

Trajectoires de scolarisation et de travail des enfants au Sénégal, with Sylvie Lambert, International Labour Organization, WP 2005-07.