Research
My research focuses on development economics, health outcomes, and environmental policy. I use econometric methods, field experiments, and data analysis to address important questions in these areas.
Fieldwork Highlight: Maternal Health in Nigeria
Problem Management Plus (PM+) Intervention
As part of my research on maternal mental health and child undernutrition, I conducted fieldwork in Gombe, Nigeria. This project examines the effects of Problem Management Plus (PM+) intervention on maternal mental health and child nutrition outcomes.
Working closely with local teams, I helped design experiments and questionnaires for a randomized control trial involving 800 caregivers. I also created audio assistant survey tools for sensitive questions and trained data collectors in the field.
This research aims to provide evidence-based recommendations for improving maternal mental health interventions in low-resource settings and understanding their impact on child development outcomes.
Working Papers
Competing for Clean Air: Dynamic Incentives in China's Environmental Protection Interviews
This study examines the Environmental Protection Interview (EPI), a campaign-style environmental policy in China that subjects poorly performing cities to central government scrutiny. Using near real-time air quality data from the Tracking Air Pollution in China (TAP) project and a Difference-in-Differences approach, I demonstrate that previous studies substantially underestimated the policy's impact by overlooking its dynamic competitive structure. I show that cities at risk of being interviewed (top 15 most polluted) achieve PM2.5 reductions of 15.7 μg/m³—nearly four times larger than previous estimates that focused only on initially interviewed cities. The effects are most pronounced at year-end, coinciding with annual evaluations, and lead to significant reductions in household healthcare expenditures, revealing how local governments strategically respond to the EPI's ranking system.
Presentations:
- Association of Environmental and Resource Economists (AERE), May 2025
- Western Economic Association International (WEAI), June 2025
- WSU Student Seminar, November 2025
- Selected for presentation at 2025 AAEA Annual Meeting
- Northwest Development Workshop, June 2024
Birth Timing Decisions, China's Two-Child Allowance, and Women's Human Capital
This research critically examines the decline in fertility rates in China beginning in the 1980s when the one-child policy was introduced, focusing on the transition to the two-child policy. I employ a two-stage, discrete-choice model that enables individuals to make fertility decisions based on utility maximization. The model elucidates the roles and relationships of return rates on human-capital accumulation, personal value of the child, time costs associated with child-rearing, and potential penalties for non-compliance in shaping these decisions. Using Chinese Family Panel Survey data from 2010 to 2020 with a log-linear approach, I demonstrate that women with low wage returns to human capital are more likely to favor giving birth at least once, ceteris paribus.
Optimal Pricing Policies for Campus Parking
This paper develops comprehensive economic models for optimizing campus parking pricing strategies to improve both efficiency and accessibility. We analyze various pricing mechanisms and their effects on parking utilization patterns, congestion reduction, and user satisfaction across different campus constituencies. The research provides actionable insights for university administrators seeking to balance revenue generation, parking availability, and equitable access for students, faculty, and staff.
Presentations:
- Region 10 Transportation Conference, October 2022
The Impacts of COVID-19 on U.S. Containerized Agricultural Exports
This study measures the impacts of COVID-19 on monthly U.S. containerized agricultural export volumes using a near-saturated fixed effects panel data model. Results show heterogeneous reductions in containerized agricultural export volumes through time: monthly exports fell by 4.6% from March 2020-May 2021, by 11.1% from May 2021-January 2022, and by 7.5% over the full period from March 2020-August 2022. Impacts vary significantly across origin ports (Long Beach, CA fell 25% vs. Houston, TX fell <1%), commodities (cotton exports fell 25% while tobacco increased 27%), and destination countries (exports to China increased 12% while exports to Japan fell 26%). The analysis includes port-commodity, port-destination, and commodity-destination pairs to evaluate substitution effects at granular levels.
Assessing the Economic Impacts of Technological Intervention on Organic Vegetable Farm Profitability and Gender Roles in Organic Farming
This study determines whether agricultural labor productivity across genders changes following the introduction of organic vegetable technologies through a randomized controlled trial with vegetable farmers in rural households in the Philippines. We introduce household training in the production and use of different organic vegetable technologies to examine gender-specific responses. Exposure to organic vegetable training significantly increased female labor during fertilizer and pesticide application stages for low-income households, with no significant effect for middle and high-income households. The intervention reduced labor productivity gaps across all income groups, with the largest effect for low-income households, pointing to the potential for organic vegetable technology as a means of reducing gender-based productivity disparities.
The Role of Public Sentiment in Evaluating Lockdown Effects on Mobility: An Application of Natural Language Processing Method
This paper investigates the potential influence of public sentiment and health policies on behavioral changes, specifically focusing on mobility during COVID-19. We employ daily counts of COVID-related tweets and sentiment trends derived using a natural language processing model to gauge public sentiment. Using Regression Discontinuity in Time Series (RDiT) method with county-level daily data from March to April 2020, we find that lockdown implementation leads to a significant 5.5% reduction in mobility, but this impact is only observed for ten days. Importantly, neutral-tone sentiment has the most pronounced negative impact on mobility compared to both negative and positive sentiments—substituting 3% of positive sentiment tweets with neutral-tone sentiment results in similar magnitude effects on mobility reduction as lockdown policies. This emphasizes the importance of considering public sentiment alongside policy measures to avoid overestimation issues.
Research Interests
Development Economics
Studying economic development in low and middle-income countries, with a focus on interventions that can improve welfare and reduce poverty.
Health Economics
Investigating maternal and child health outcomes, mental health interventions, and the economic impacts of health policies.
Environmental Economics
Analyzing environmental policies, air quality regulations, and their effects on health outcomes and economic behavior.
Labor Economics
Examining labor market outcomes, human capital development, and the relationship between education, fertility, and labor force participation.
Transportation Economics
Studying transportation systems, pricing mechanisms, and their effects on economic efficiency and welfare.
Applied Econometrics
Developing and applying econometric methods to analyze causal relationships and policy effects in various economic contexts.