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.
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