More from the Author

• Working Paper | 2020

  The Psychosocial Impacts of Forced Idleness

  Reshmaan Hussam, Erin M. Kelley, Gregory Lane and Fatima Zahra

  Social scientists have long posited that employment may deliver psychological utility beyond the value of income alone. Existing literature, however, suffers from problems of selection into employment and an inability to disentangle the pecuniary and non-pecuniary mechanisms driving wellbeing. This paper presents a real-world causal estimate of the psychosocial benefits of employment. We engage 745 individuals from the Rohingya refugee population in Bangladesh, with whom we run a field experiment with three arms: (1) a control arm, in which no work is offered; (2) a cash arm, in which no work is offered but a weekly fee is provided; and (3) a gainful employment arm, in which work is offered and individuals are paid weekly the equivalent of that in the cash arm. Building on existing observations in psychology, we further investigate the causal roles of past trauma and future uncertainty in mediating the impact of employment on psychosocial wellbeing.

  Citation:

  Hussam, Reshmaan, Erin M. Kelley, Gregory Lane, and Fatima Zahra. "The Psychosocial Impacts of Forced Idleness." Working Paper, June 2020.  View Details

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• Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2020

  Targeting High Ability Entrepreneurs Using Community Information: Mechanism Design in the Field

  Reshmaan Hussam, Natalia Rigol and Benjamin N. Roth

  Microentrepreneurs in low-income countries have widely varying marginal returns to capital, yet identifying those with the best opportunities remains a challenge due to a scarcity of verifiable information. With a cash grant experiment in India we demonstrate that community knowledge can help target high-growth microentrepreneurs; while the average marginal return to capital in our sample is 11% per month, microentrepreneurs reported to be in the top third of the community are estimated to have marginal return to capital between 23% and 35% per month. We cannot reject that microentrepreneurs ranked in the middle and bottom terciles of the community have a marginal return to capital of zero. Further we find evidence that community members distort their predictions when they can influence the distribution of resources. Finally we demonstrate that appropriately designed elicitation mechanisms can realign incentives for truthful reporting. These methods may be useful for using community information to target resources in other contexts, especially when targeting based on predicted treatment effects or when community members may have incentives to distort their predictions.

  Keywords: microentrepreneurs; community information; reporting; Entrepreneurship; Developing Countries and Economies; Information;

  Citation:

  Hussam, Reshmaan, Natalia Rigol, and Benjamin N. Roth. "Targeting High Ability Entrepreneurs Using Community Information: Mechanism Design in the Field." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 20-082, January 2020.  View Details

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• Working Paper | 2019

  Throwing the Baby Out with the Drinking Water: Unintended Consequences of Arsenic Mitigation Efforts in Bangladesh

  Nina Buchmann, Erica Field, Rachel Glennerster and Reshmaan Hussam

  The 1994 discovery of arsenic in ground water in Bangladesh prompted a massive public health effort to test all tubewells in the country and convince nearly one-quarter of the population to switch to arsenic-free drinking water sources. According to numerous sources, the campaign was effective in leading the majority of households at risk of arsenic poisoning to abandon backyard wells in favor of more remote tubewells or surface water sources, a switch widely believed to have saved numerous lives. We investigate the possibility of unintended health consequences of the wide-scale abandonment of shallow tubewells due to higher exposure to fecal-oral pathogens in water from arsenic-free sources. Significant small-scale variability of arsenic concentrations in ground water allows us to compare trends in infant and child mortality between otherwise similar households in the same village who did and did not have an incentive to abandon shallow tubewells. While child mortality rates were similar among households with arsenic-contaminated and arsenic-free wells prior to public knowledge of the arsenic problem, post-2000 households living on arsenic-contaminated land have 27% higher rates of infant and child mortality than those not encouraged to switch sources, implying that the campaign doubled mortality from diarrheal disease. These findings provide novel evidence of a strong association between drinking water contamination and child mortality, a question of current scientific debate in settings with high levels of exposure to microbial pathogens through other channels.

  Keywords: child mortality; Arsenic; Unintended Consequences; Health Disorders; Safety; Outcome or Result; Bangladesh;

  Citation:

  Buchmann, Nina, Erica Field, Rachel Glennerster, and Reshmaan Hussam. "Throwing the Baby Out with the Drinking Water: Unintended Consequences of Arsenic Mitigation Efforts in Bangladesh." NBER Working Paper Series, No. 25729, April 2019.  View Details

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