Skip to Main Content
HBS Home
  • About
  • Academic Programs
  • Alumni
  • Faculty & Research
  • Baker Library
  • Giving
  • Harvard Business Review
  • Initiatives
  • News
  • Recruit
  • Map / Directions
Faculty & Research
  • Faculty
  • Research
  • Featured Topics
  • Academic Units
  • …→
  • Harvard Business School→
  • Faculty & Research→
  • Faculty
    • Faculty
    • Positions
Reshmaan N. Hussam

Reshmaan N. Hussam

Assistant Professor of Business Administration

Assistant Professor of Business Administration

Read more

Reshmaan Hussam is an assistant professor of business administration in the Business, Government and International Economy Unit, teaching the Business, Government and International Economy course to MBA students. Her research explores questions at the intersection of development, behavioral, and health economics.  Considering the puzzle of the ubiquitously low adoption of many low cost, high return goods, behaviors, and technologies in the developing world, she explores the role of learning and habit formation in sustained behavioral change. She also examines how to utilize community information to optimally allocate capital to microentrepreneurs as well as how digitization of financial services impacts financial inclusion in resource-poor settings. Her most recent work engages refugee populations including the Rohingya of Myanmar, estimating the costs of forced idleness on psychosocial wellbeing and documenting refugee preferences for repatriation, integration, and resettlement.

Prior to joining HBS, Professor Hussam was a postdoctoral fellow at the Economic Growth Center at Yale University. She received her SB and PhD in economics from MIT.

Less
Business, Government and the International Economy
+1 (617) 495-6378
→Send Email
 
Reshmaan N. Hussam
Unit
Business, Government and the International Economy
Contact Information
(617) 495-6378
Send Email
Featured Work Publications Research Summary Awards & Honors
The Pyschosocial Impacts of Forced Idleness
Evidence from the Rohingya Refugee Camps

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.

Race and Mass Incarceration in the United States
The late 20th century saw a dramatic shift in the criminal justice system of the United States. While incarceration rates had remained stable through the 1960s, they quintupled by the 2000s to 707 per 100,000, far exceeding that of all other nations in the world. By 2020, nearly 2.3 million individuals were locked up in U.S. prisons, jails, and detention centers. Of these, 60% were Black or Latinx. Why the mass incarceration, and why such disparities by race? Were they responses to recent political and economic shifts, or part of a deeper social and cultural history? And what could be done to address what was now widely recognized by policymakers as a crisis of the criminal justice system in the United States?
Rational Habit Formation
Evidence from Handwashing in West Bengal

Regular handwashing with soap is believed to have substantial impacts on child health in the developing world. Most handwashing campaigns have failed, however, to establish and maintain a regular practice of handwashing. Motivated by scholarship that suggests handwashing is habitual, we design, implement and analyze a randomized field experiment aimed to test the main predictions of the rational addiction model. To reliably measure handwashing, we develop and produce a novel soap dispenser, within which a time-stamped sensor is embedded. We randomize distribution of these soap dispensers as well as provision of monitoring (feedback reports) or monitoring and incentives for daily handwashing. Relative to a control arm in which households receive no dispenser, we find that all treatments generate substantial improvements in child health as measured by child weight and height. Our key test of rational addiction is implemented by informing a subset of households about a future boost in monitoring or incentives. We find that (1) both monitoring and incentives increase handwashing relative to receiving only a dispenser; (2) these effects persist after monitoring or incentives are removed; and (3) the anticipation of monitoring increases handwashing rates significantly, implying that individuals internalize the habitual nature of handwashing and accumulate habit stock accordingly. Our results are consistent with the key predictions of the rational addiction model and shed light on an underdeveloped dimension of decision-making essential to sustained behavioral change.

Reshmaan Hussam is an assistant professor of business administration in the Business, Government and International Economy Unit, teaching the Business, Government and International Economy course to MBA students. Her research explores questions at the intersection of development, behavioral, and health economics.  Considering the puzzle of the ubiquitously low adoption of many low cost, high return goods, behaviors, and technologies in the developing world, she explores the role of learning and habit formation in sustained behavioral change. She also examines how to utilize community information to optimally allocate capital to microentrepreneurs as well as how digitization of financial services impacts financial inclusion in resource-poor settings. Her most recent work engages refugee populations including the Rohingya of Myanmar, estimating the costs of forced idleness on psychosocial wellbeing and documenting refugee preferences for repatriation, integration, and resettlement.

Prior to joining HBS, Professor Hussam was a postdoctoral fellow at the Economic Growth Center at Yale University. She received her SB and PhD in economics from MIT.

Featured Work
The Pyschosocial Impacts of Forced Idleness
Evidence from the Rohingya Refugee Camps

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.

Race and Mass Incarceration in the United States
The late 20th century saw a dramatic shift in the criminal justice system of the United States. While incarceration rates had remained stable through the 1960s, they quintupled by the 2000s to 707 per 100,000, far exceeding that of all other nations in the world. By 2020, nearly 2.3 million individuals were locked up in U.S. prisons, jails, and detention centers. Of these, 60% were Black or Latinx. Why the mass incarceration, and why such disparities by race? Were they responses to recent political and economic shifts, or part of a deeper social and cultural history? And what could be done to address what was now widely recognized by policymakers as a crisis of the criminal justice system in the United States?
Rational Habit Formation
Evidence from Handwashing in West Bengal

Regular handwashing with soap is believed to have substantial impacts on child health in the developing world. Most handwashing campaigns have failed, however, to establish and maintain a regular practice of handwashing. Motivated by scholarship that suggests handwashing is habitual, we design, implement and analyze a randomized field experiment aimed to test the main predictions of the rational addiction model. To reliably measure handwashing, we develop and produce a novel soap dispenser, within which a time-stamped sensor is embedded. We randomize distribution of these soap dispensers as well as provision of monitoring (feedback reports) or monitoring and incentives for daily handwashing. Relative to a control arm in which households receive no dispenser, we find that all treatments generate substantial improvements in child health as measured by child weight and height. Our key test of rational addiction is implemented by informing a subset of households about a future boost in monitoring or incentives. We find that (1) both monitoring and incentives increase handwashing relative to receiving only a dispenser; (2) these effects persist after monitoring or incentives are removed; and (3) the anticipation of monitoring increases handwashing rates significantly, implying that individuals internalize the habitual nature of handwashing and accumulate habit stock accordingly. Our results are consistent with the key predictions of the rational addiction model and shed light on an underdeveloped dimension of decision-making essential to sustained behavioral change.

Journal Articles
  • Hussam, Reshmaan, Atonu Rabbani, Giovanni Reggiani, and Natalia Rigol. "Rational Habit Formation: Experimental Evidence from Handwashing in India." American Economic Journal: Applied Economics (forthcoming). View Details
  • Hussam, Reshmaan, David Porter, and Vernon Smith. "'Thar' She Blows: Can Bubbles Be Rekindled with Experienced Subjects?" American Economic Review 98, no. 3 (June 2008): 924–937. View Details
  • Das, Jishnu, Abhijit Chowdhury, Reshmaan Hussam, and Abhijit Banerjee. "The Impact of Training Informal Healthcare Providers in India: A Randomized Controlled Trial." Science 354, no. 6308 (October 7, 2016): 80–91. View Details
Working Papers
  • Hussam, Reshmaan, Natalia Rigol, and Benjamin N. Roth. "Targeting High Ability Entrepreneurs Using Community Information: Mechanism Design in the Field." Working Paper, February 2021. (Conditionally Accepted, American Economic Review.) View Details
  • Hussam, Reshmaan, Erin M. Kelley, Gregory Lane, and Fatima Zahra. "The Psychosocial Impacts of Forced Idleness." Working Paper, January 2021. View Details
  • Hussam, Reshmaan, Abhijit Banerjee, Jishnu Das, Jeffrey Hammer, and Aakash Mohpal. "The Market for Healthcare in Low Income Countries." Working Paper, December 2020. View Details
  • Hussam, Reshmaan, Kailash Pandey, Abu Shonchoy, and Chikako Yamauchi. "Translating Information into Action: A Public Health Experiment in Bangladesh." Working Paper, December 2020. View Details
  • Hussam, Reshmaan, and Dayea Oh. "Institutional Spillovers: Evidence from Behavioral Interventions in Handwashing." Working Paper, January 2021. View Details
  • Hussam, Reshmaan N. "Sex Selection and the Indian Marriage Market." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 18-029, September 2017. (Revised October 2020.) View Details
  • 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
Cases and Teaching Materials
  • Hussam, Reshmaan. "Race and Mass Incarceration in the United States." Harvard Business School Teaching Note 721-034, February 2021. View Details
  • Hussam, Reshmaan N., and Holly Fetter. "Race and Mass Incarceration in the United States." Harvard Business School Case 720-034, April 2020. (Revised June 2020.) View Details
  • Hussam, Reshmaan N. "The Rohingya Refugee: Past, Genocide, Future." Harvard Business School Case 719-068, April 2019. (Revised April 2019.) View Details
  • Hussam, Reshmaan, Grace Liu, and Mattias Fibiger. "Human Rights." Harvard Business School Technical Note 719-036, November 2018. (Revised November 2018.) View Details
  • Hussam, Reshmaan, and Grace Liu. "Colonialism and Imperialism." Harvard Business School Technical Note 719-035, November 2018. View Details
  • Cavallo, Alberto, Kristin Fabbe, Mattias Fibiger, Jeremy Friedman, Reshmaan Hussam, Vincent Pons, and Matthew Weinzierl. "The BGIE Twenty (2021 version)." Harvard Business School Technical Note 718-032, December 2017. (Revised December 2020.) View Details
Research Summary
Overview

Deeply engaged with field work in South Asia, Professor Hussam places a focus on exploring questions with strong theoretical motivation in the economics literature as well as relevant downstream policy implications. Her research spans four broad interests. First, demand for health: how households perceive, engage with, and organize around health-promoting behaviors and technologies. Second, supply of healthcare: how the informal healthcare market is structured and the malleability of quality offered by informal providers. Third, capital allocation to and financial inclusion of microentrepreneurs in the developing world. And finally, the lived experience and psychosocial wellbeing of migrants who are forcibly displaced.

Currently, Professor Hussam is working in rural Bangladesh to estimate the informational and behavioral spillovers of hygiene campaigns from school to home, asking a critical policy question on the patterns of informational transfer between community institutions and the household. The size of these spillovers in turn has motivated an exploration of where in a community third-party monitoring and the inculcation of social norms can be most effective. A second project, set in the particularly impoverished river basin regions of Bangladesh, distributes a hygiene information campaign through the unique medium of mobile SD-card entertainment and evaluates the behavioral and health impacts of this scalable intervention; the role of parent versus child agency in hygiene behavioral change; and the process of information retention and response motivated by the theoretical framework of limited attention.

In a second stream of research involving informal healthcare practitioners (RHCPs) in rural West Bengal, Professor Hussam and coauthors are exploring the effects of a training program on the quality of care offered by RHCPs and considering how the price of healthcare services are mediated by practitioner competency, confidence, and knowledge.

In a third stream of research around financial inclusion, Professor Hussam and coauthors are examining the role of community information in the allocation of resources and business growth. They employ techniques from mechanism design to elicit truthful responses from microentrepreneurs in peri-urban Maharashtra about one another’s entrepreneurial ability with the aim of advancing policy design regarding the optimal allocation of capital and credit in poor households and communities. A related interest of Professor Hussam’s is in the impact of financial digitization campaigns, like that of the present Bangladeshi government, on household welfare and financial services; with her coauthors, she is evaluating, in a large-scale randomized control trial, the effects of the digitization of government transfers on the financial inclusion of recipients and the broader banking landscape of the country.

Her fourth area of focus has been shaped by three years observing the evolving livelihoods of the Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh. Her current projects explore the costs of forced idleness, communal cohesion in post-conflict spaces, and the psychosocial and economic implications of the loss of home. These features of the refugee experience receive little attention in existing economic models of migration and policy discussions of the same, but have significant implications for the welfare of the 67 million (and counting) FDPs globally.

Awards & Honors
Recipient of a United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Research and Innovation Fellowship, 2014-2015.
Recipient of a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, 2010-2015.
Recipient of a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans, 2010-2012.
Selected as a Burchard Scholar in the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at MIT, 2007-2008.
Additional Information
Email
  • rhussam@hbs.edu
Curriculum Vitae
  • Curriculum Vitae
In The News

In The News

    • 26 Sep 2019
    • HBS Working Knowledge

    What Can the World’s Largest Refugee Camp Teach Us About the Meaning of Work?

    • 11 Oct 2017
    • Medium

    Global Waters Radio: Nga Nguyen and Reshmaan Hussam on Incentivizing Handwashing Habit Formation

    • 24 Jan 2018
    • HBS Working Knowledge

    How to Get People Addicted to a Good Habit

Additional Information

Email

rhussam@hbs.edu

rhussam@hbs.edu

Curriculum Vitae

Curriculum Vitae

In The News

    • 26 Sep 2019
    • HBS Working Knowledge

    What Can the World’s Largest Refugee Camp Teach Us About the Meaning of Work?

    • 11 Oct 2017
    • Medium

    Global Waters Radio: Nga Nguyen and Reshmaan Hussam on Incentivizing Handwashing Habit Formation

    • 24 Jan 2018
    • HBS Working Knowledge

    How to Get People Addicted to a Good Habit

ǁ
Campus Map
Harvard Business School
Soldiers Field
Boston, MA 02163
→Map & Directions
→More Contact Information
  • Make a Gift
  • Site Map
  • Jobs
  • Harvard University
  • Trademarks
  • Policies
  • Digital Accessibility
Copyright © President & Fellows of Harvard College