Working Papers
Information Frictions and the Market for Climate Adaptation (Job Market Paper)
Climate change poses significant risks to smallholder farmers across the developing world. Index insurance could provide risk mitigation, but has demonstrated persistently weak demand despite high theoretical value. I show that decision difficulty can partly explain this puzzle in index insurance as well as other agricultural adaptation products. With a framed field experiment with smallholder coffee farmers in Cauca, Colombia, I elicit incentivized demand across rainfall contracts that vary in payout probability and covariance with farm income. Farmers exhibit substantial difficulties in evaluating products. I test two interventions: the first targets evaluation difficulty, the second, average quality beliefs. The former increases quality responsiveness by over 50%, evidence of improvement in farmers' mapping from contract terms to value. Conversely, an advertising treatment does not affect average quality sensitivity while decreasing average demand by over 10%, consistent with low insurer reputation. A model characterizes how limited quality responsiveness creates incentives for firms to offer low-quality products, potentially “poisoning” the market and sustaining persistent missing markets despite possible welfare gains.
Climate Maladaptation and the Commons: Groundwater Management in India (with Nikhil Basavappa)
Groundwater enables agricultural activity in areas with low and variable rainfall. However, agricultural expansion has led to highly stressed aquifers throughout India. We show how a popular policy intervention, increasing irrigation efficiency, can lead to welfare losses. Marginal productivity gains can widen the gap between private and socially optimal extraction when stock externalities are strong. We leverage a multi-state groundwater management scheme that improved irrigation efficiency as well as variation in externality due to physical aquifer properties. Although the policy appears to have a null effect on aggregate, this hides significant heterogeneity: consistent with our theory, high-externality areas increase extraction both in absolute terms and relative to low-externality areas. This increase in extraction is accompanied by more multi-cropping, as well as more volatile evapotranspiration. Finally, these areas that have further depleted their groundwater reserves are less able to use groundwater to smooth over drought periods. In all, we show that although efficiency improvements can increase welfare during high rainfall periods, these areas are effectively maladapting by increasing total water need and becoming more vulnerable to climate variability.
Depositor Preferences and Climate Finance (with Jing Lu and Edward Shore)
We study whether depositors’ social preferences discipline banks’ lending to environmentally intensive (“brown”) firms and how exposed banks manage the resulting funding risk through loan structure, especially syndication. We construct a bank-level index of deposit sensitivity by combining FDIC Summary of Deposits branch footprints with county-level presidential vote shares to proxy the local depositor base’s “green” tilt. Merging this measure with loan-level data from the syndicated market (Dealscan), we build a lender–loan panel with lender and year fixed effects to isolate within-bank variation over time in both the extensive margin of participation and the intensive margin of deal design. Two predictions guide the analysis: banks with more deposit-sensitive funding should (i) be less likely to participate in loans to brown borrowers and (ii) when they do lend, share exposure more aggressively—retaining smaller shares, assembling larger syndicates to facilitate offloading and mitigate risk. Using sectoral and emissions-based definitions of “brown,” we document patterns consistent with both predictions. Substantively, the results show that retail funding composition—beyond wholesale markets or regulation—disciplines climate-relevant credit allocation. Despite evidence of “sticky” deposits, banks actively manage tail reputational risk by rebalancing their lending activity.
Works in Progress
Public Information Provision: Subsidy and Bureaucratic Efficiency (with Fernando Ochoa, Daniela Paz Cruzat, and Marcela Zapata)
We study how physical access to ChileAtiende—Chile’s nationwide one-stop service platform—shapes take-up of social programs, with a focus on housing subsidies. We assemble a national, multi-year panel that links (i) the timing and location of ChileAtiende office openings/closures and office-level visit logs, (ii) administrative records on applications and awards for major benefits (with DS01 housing subsidies as a core case), (iii) beneficiary origin and destination addresses to measure distance to the nearest office, and (iv) dated policy announcements that plausibly shift information demand. Our central question is whether improved proximity to an office increases applications and awards—and for whom—versus simply reallocating demand across channels. We test whether effects are stronger for households living nearer (vs. farther) to offices, around office openings, and in response to salient national announcements. The design leverages staggered office rollouts and announcement timing in a difference-in-differences framework with granular location and time fixed effects.
The Salesperson as an Educator: Incentives, Persuasion, and Financial Literacy* (with Brian Jonghwan Lee)
*Currently raising funding. This study examines how financial intermediary incentives and financial literacy interventions shape financial product uptake and consumer protection among unbanked smallholder farmers in rural Colombia. Through a randomized controlled trial, we vary agent compensation structures (fixed versus commission-based pay) and client-focused messaging (financial literacy workshops versus standard promotional materials) to assess impacts on product comprehension, responsible use, and susceptibility to risky financial behaviors. By disentangling the roles of persuasion and information, the study contributes new insights into how agents can serve as effective educators rather than exploitative salespeople. Our findings will directly inform policy and practice, providing actionable evidence for regulators and financial institutions aiming to balance market expansion with consumer welfare.
Insurance and Crop Choice: Experimental Evidence from Zambia* (with Lorenzo Casaburi and Jack Willis)
*Paused due to USAID funding cuts. In the face of increasing climate risk, Zambia has suffered from substantial droughts in the past 20 years, with severe consequences for smallholder farmers. We consider two broad approaches to help farmers adapt and build resilience to this new reality: the provision of crop insurance, to insure farmers in the face of increased risk; and the encouragement of diversification and climate-resilient crop choice. While these two approaches are often considered in isolation, we argue that programs like Zambia’s Food Security Pack program should consider them in unison. Farmers face initial risk and uncertainty when changing crops, making them reluctant to do so, even if it would reduce risk in the long run. Insurance, in overcoming some of this risk, has been shown to increase ex-ante investments, including by changing to more productive crops and varieties (Karlan et al. 2014). Moreover, switching to crops more suited to local agroeconomic conditions is argued to increase productivity substantially (Adamopoulos and Restuccia 2021). Switching to riskier but higher average return crops may thus be another benefit of insurance provision. We study the logistical feasibility of a large randomized controlled trial with Food Security Pack beneficiaries, farmers who meet the income and wealth requirements delineated by the government. Participants are cross randomized into free insurance and crop choice incentive treatments, in order to determine the added value of insurance in experimentation with new crops and higher productivity.
Policy Pieces
- Groundwater management strategies, T20 South Africa 2025
with Nikhil Basavappa, Nitin Bassi, Anik Bhaduri, Soorya K K, Ekansha Khanduja, and Yashita Singh - Can Chile Escape its Inequality Trap? 2024
with Ignacia Lecaros, Daniela Paz Cruzat, Pablo Tillán, and Michael Walton - Inequality in Chile, Perceptions and Patterns, 2023
with Ignacia Lecaros, Daniela Paz Cruzat, Pablo Tillán, and Michael Walton
