Reshmaan N. Hussam - Faculty & Research - Harvard Business School

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Reshmaan N. Hussam

Assistant Professor of Business Administration

Business, Government and the International Economy
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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.

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Journal Articles

  1. Article | American Economic Review

    'Thar' She Blows: Can Bubbles Be Rekindled with Experienced Subjects?

    Reshmaan Hussam, David Porter and Vernon Smith

    We report 28 new experiment sessions consisting of up to three experience levels to examine the robustness of learning and “error” elimination among participants in a laboratory asset market and its effect on price bubbles. Our answer to the title question is: “yes.” We impose a large increase in liquidity and dividend uncertainty to shock the environment of experienced subjects who have converged to equilibrium, and this treatment rekindles a bubble. However, in replications of that same challenging environment across three experience levels, we discover that the environment yields a rare residual tendency to bubble even in the third experience session. Therefore, a caveat must be placed on the effect of twice-experienced subjects in asset markets: in order for price bubbles to be extinguished, the environment in which the participants engage in exchange must be stationary and bounded by a range of parameters. Experience, including possible “error” elimination, is not robust to major new environment changes in determining the characteristics of a price bubble.

    Keywords: experimental economics; asset markets; bubbles; Price Bubble; Financial Markets;

    Citation:

    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
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  2. Article | Science

    The Impact of Training Informal Healthcare Providers in India: A Randomized Controlled Trial

    Jishnu Das, Abhijit Chowdhury, Reshmaan Hussam and Abhijit Banerjee

    Health care providers without formal medical qualifications provide more than 70% of all primary care in rural India. Training these informal providers may be one way to improve the quality of care where few alternatives exist. We report on a randomized controlled trial assessing a program that provided 72 sessions of training over 9 months to 152 informal providers (out of 304). Using standardized patients (“mystery clients”), we assessed clinical practice for three different conditions to which both providers and trainers were blinded during the intervention, representative of the range of conditions that these providers normally diagnose and treat. Training increased correct case management by 7.9 percentage points (14.2%) but did not affect the use of unnecessary medicines and antibiotics. At a program cost of $175 per trainee, our results suggest that multitopic medical training offers an effective short-run strategy to improve health care.

    Keywords: health care; india; business training; RCT; Health Care and Treatment; Training; Performance Evaluation; Performance Improvement; India;

    Citation:

    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
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Working Papers

  1. 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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  2. Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2019

    Rational Habit Formation: Experimental Evidence from Handwashing in India

    Reshmaan Hussam, Atonu Rabbani, Giovanni Reggiani and Natalia Rigol

    We test the main predictions of the rational addiction model, reconceptualized as rational habit formation, in the context of handwashing. To track habit formation, we design soap dispensers with timed sensors. We test for rational habit formation by informing some households about a future change in the returns to daily handwashing. Child weight and height increase for all households with dispensers. Monitoring and incentives raise handwashing contemporaneously, and effects persist well after they end. Anticipation of future monitoring further raises handwashing: individuals internalize handwashing's habitual nature and accumulate stock. Our results inform policy design around the adoption of healthy behaviors.

    Keywords: Behavior; Motivation and Incentives; Health;

    Citation:

    Hussam, Reshmaan, Atonu Rabbani, Giovanni Reggiani, and Natalia Rigol. "Rational Habit Formation: Experimental Evidence from Handwashing in India." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 18-030, September 2017. (Revised September 2019.)  View Details
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  3. Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2020

    Sex Selection and the Indian Marriage Market

    Reshmaan N. Hussam

    This paper considers the widespread phenomenon of sex ratios skewed by parental preference. It tests the seminal theory of Edlund (1999), who proposes that if parents prefer sons over daughters and permit poor women (but not men) to marry up in social class, the sexes will segregate by wealth in equilibrium. That is, wealthy parents will select for sons, while poor families, knowing their sons stand little chance in the marriage market, refrain from sex selection or select for girls. Using data on 30,000 Indian children, I show that parents indeed consider the marital prospects of their children when sex selecting: in markets with many wealthy suitors, poor parents select substantially fewer for sons. This leads to the average woman in the market being poorer than the average man, a compositional shift, which yields greater asymmetry in marriage matches and lower female bargaining power. The result stands in contrast to implications of the popular model of scarcity on bargaining outcomes in marriage.

    Keywords: sex selection; son preference; Marriage Market; bargaining power; Gender; Technology; Household; Outcome or Result; India;

    Citation:

    Hussam, Reshmaan N. "Sex Selection and the Indian Marriage Market." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 18-029, September 2017. (Revised February 2020.)  View Details
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  4. 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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Cases and Teaching Materials

  1. Case | HBS Case Collection | April 2020 (Revised June 2020)

    Race and Mass Incarceration in the United States

    Reshmaan N. Hussam and Holly Fetter

    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?

    Keywords: criminal justice system; incarceration; Race; Prejudice and Bias; United States;

    Citation:

    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
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  5. Technical Note | HBS Case Collection | December 2017 (Revised November 2018)

    The BGIE Twenty (2019 version)

    Alberto Cavallo, Kristin Fabbe, Mattias Fibiger, Jeremy Friedman, Reshmaan Hussam, Vincent Pons and Matthew Weinzierl

    The purpose of this technical note is to explain the BGIE Twenty, an “idea-kit” that serves as the intellectual backbone of the BGIE course. Each year, the BGIE professors decide on the twenty ideas that we believe are the most important for students to study in pursuit of the course’s objective. As scholars of economics, history, and political science, we bring an interdisciplinary approach to constructing and revising the BGIE Twenty, and we intend for it to have pedagogical and intellectual impact beyond our classrooms. The ideas in the BGIE Twenty provide starting points for analysis, not simple answers, and the BGIE Twenty is a living list that responds to changes in the world and our understanding of it. Each element of the BGIE Twenty is highlighted during at least one case discussion, and suggested supplemental readings (plus separate technical notes for all elements) are provided to facilitate deeper study by interested students. Thus, when students complete the BGIE course, they have engaged with a curated selection of ideas that their faculty have found most valuable in analyzing how the world works.

    Keywords: ideas; Business Education; Curriculum and Courses; Analysis;

    Citation:

    Cavallo, Alberto, Kristin Fabbe, Mattias Fibiger, Jeremy Friedman, Reshmaan Hussam, Vincent Pons, and Matthew Weinzierl. "The BGIE Twenty (2019 version)." Harvard Business School Technical Note 718-032, December 2017. (Revised November 2018.)  View Details
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