Research

Publications

• "When Does Crime Respond to Punishment?: Evidence from Drug-Free School Zones" (with Ranae Jabri and Sarah Komisarow) Journal of Urban Economics (2025) 147 [PDF]

• "Monitoring Corruption: Can Top-down Monitoring Crowd Out Grassroots Participation?" (with Matthew Harvey and Foteini Tzachrista) Economic Development and Cultural Change (2025) 73 (3) [PDF] [Online Appendix]

• "Is the Phone Mightier than the Virus? Cell Phone Access and Epidemic Containment Efforts" (with Elisa Maffioli) Journal of Development Economics (2024) 167 [PDF] 

• "Violence and Financial Decisions: Evidence from Mobile Money in Afghanistan" (with Joshua Blumenstock, Michael Callen, and Tarek Ghani) Review of Economics and Statistics (2024) 106 (2): 352-369 [PDF] 

• "Can Community Crime Monitoring Reduce Student Absenteeism?" (with Sarah Komisarow) Education Finance and Policy (2023) 18 (2): 319–350 [PDF]

• "Are socio-demographic and economic characteristics good predictors of misinformation during an epidemic?” (with Elisa Maffioli) PLOS Global Public Health (2022) 3(2) [PDF] Coverage: Forbes, Psychology Today

• "Cell Phone Access and Election Fraud: Evidence from a Spatial Regression Discontinuity Design in Afghanistan" American Economic Journal: Applied Economics (2021) 13 (2): 1-51. [PDF] [Online Appendix] [Additional data] Coverage: AEA Highlights, World Bank Blogs

• "Community Monitoring and Crime: Evidence from Chicago's Safe Passage Program" (with Sarah Komisarow) Journal of Public Economics (2020) 191 [PDF] [Online Appendix]

• "Loss in the Time of Cholera: Long-run Impact of a Disease Epidemic on the Urban Landscape" (with Attila Ambrus and Erica Field) American Economic Review (2020) 110 (2): 475-525 [PDF] [Online Appendix] Coverage: AEA Highlights, Marginal Revolution, Le Monde, Econimate video

• "Infant Mortality Rate as a Measure of a Country's Health: A Robust Method to Improve Reliability and Comparability" (with Donna Gilleskie) Demography (2017) 54:2 p.701-720 [PDF] [Online Appendix]