Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 923138 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak |
| PRENOMES | Ahmed Mushfiq |
| SOBRENOME | Mobarak |
| ASSINATURA | MOBARAK A M |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Yale University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1916-3438 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 25 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 136 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 25 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2005 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 5 |
The Economic Drivers of State Violence against Civilians
Violence against civilians has killed nearly one million people worldwide and displaced millions more over the past three decades. This paper examines the economic forces driving civilian persecution in Myanmar. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we show that violence against civilians increases in rice-suitable townships when rice prices rise, the opposite pattern from that documented in the literature on two-sided conflicts. We argue t…
To use financial incentives or not? Insights from experiments in encouraging sanitation investments in four countries
Social and financial incentives for overcoming a collective action problem
Addressing public health externalities often requires community-level collective action. Due to social norms, each person's sanitation investment decisions may depend on the decisions of neighbors. We report on a cluster randomized controlled trial conducted with 19,000 households in rural Bangladesh where we grouped neighboring households and introduced (either financial or social recognition) rewards with a joint liability component for the gro…
Impact of community masking on Covid-19
Persuading people to mask Even in places where it is obligatory, people tend to optimistically overstate their compliance for mask wearing. How then can we persuade more of the population at large to act for the greater good? Abaluck et al . undertook a large, cluster-randomized trial in Bangladesh involving hundreds of thousands of people (although mostly men) over a 2-month period. Colored masks of various construction were handed out free of c…
Remove barriers to technology adoption for people in poverty
Coding Bootcamps for Female Digital Employment
This paper evaluates the short-term causal effects of a high-quality, intensive, part-time computer coding bootcamp for women on skill acquisition and employment outcomes. Spots were offered in an oversubscribed coding course to a random subset of applicants in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Bogotá, Colombia. The applicants who were chosen received a scholarship that covered most of the tuition costs of the course. Follow-up data collected shortly …
Falling living standards during the Covid-19 crisis
Income, employment, and food security fell sharply across low- and middle-income countries during the COVID crisis.
Covid-19 vaccine acceptance and hesitancy in low- and middle-income countries
Widespread acceptance of COVID-19 vaccines is crucial for achieving sufficient immunization coverage to end the global pandemic, yet few studies have investigated COVID-19 vaccination attitudes in lower-income countries, where large-scale vaccination is just beginning. We analyze COVID-19 vaccine acceptance across 15 survey samples covering 10 low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) in Asia, Africa and South America, Russia (an upper-middle-inco…
Can Network Theory-Based Targeting Increase Technology Adoption?
Can targeting information to network-central farmers induce more adoption of a new agricultural technology? By combining social network data and a field experiment in 200 villages in Malawi, we find that targeting central farmers is important to spur the diffusion process. We also provide evidence of one explanation for why centrality matters: a diffusion process governed by complex contagion. Our results are consistent with a model in which many…
Subsidies for technology adoption
We use a two-stage experiment to study how a short-term subsidy for a new product affects uptake, usage, and future demand for the same product (a new solar lamp). We use an auction design to gauge willingness-to-pay, and randomly vary the strike price across villages to create random variation in purchase prices and uptake across villages. Our main results are that subsidies do not adversely affect subsequent product use, but stimulate uptake. I…
Estimating the Health and Socioeconomic Effects of Cousin Marriage in South Asia
The effects of marriage between biological relatives on the incidence of childhood genetic illness and mortality are of major policy significance, as rates of consanguinity exceed 50% in various countries. Empirical research on this question is complicated by the fact that consanguinity is often correlated with poverty and other unobserved characteristics of households, which may have independent effects on mortality. This study has developed an …
Social Learning and Incentives for Experimentation and Communication
Low adoption of agricultural technologies holds large productivity consequences for developing countries. Many countries hire agricultural extension agents to communicate with farmers about new technologies, even though a large academic literature has established that information from social networks is a key determinant of product adoption. We incorporate social learning in extension policy using a large-scale field experiment in which we commun…
The challenges of scaling effective interventions
Gender gaps in technology diffusion
Decentralization and Pollution Spillovers
Decentralization can improve service delivery, but it can also generate externalities across jurisdictional boundaries. We examine the nature and size of water pollution externalities as rivers flow across jurisdictions. Panel data on water pollution in Brazilian rivers coupled with county splits that change the locations of borders allow us to identify the spatial patterns of pollution as rivers approach and cross borders, controlling for fixed …
Manufacturing growth and the lives of Bangladeshi women
Informal Risk Sharing, Index Insurance, and Risk Taking in Developing Countries
Preliminary findings are presented from a research project which examined the interactions between informal risk sharing, index insurance and risk-taking. Rainfall insurance contracts were randomly offered to cultivating and landless households in a set of Indian villages where preexisting census data on caste networks allowed the characterization of the nature and extent of informal risk sharing. We study how informal risk sharing mediates the d…
Consanguinity and Other Marriage Market Effects of a Wealth Shock in Bangladesh
This paper uses a wealth shock from the construction of a flood protection embankment in rural Bangladesh coupled with data on the universe of all 52,000 marriage decisions between 1982 and 1996 to examine changes in marital prospects for households protected by the embankment relative to unprotected households living on the other side of the river. We use difference-in-difference specifications to document that brides from protected households c…
Low demand for nontraditional cookstove technologies
Biomass combustion with traditional cookstoves causes substantial environmental and health harm. Nontraditional cookstove technologies can be efficacious in reducing this adverse impact, but they are adopted and used at puzzlingly low rates. This study analyzes the determinants of low demand for nontraditional cookstoves in rural Bangladesh by using both stated preference (from a nationally representative survey of rural women) and revealed prefe…
Skilled Immigration and Innovation
Journal Article Skilled Immigration and Innovation: Evidence from Enrolment Fluctuations in us Doctoral Programmes Get access Eric T. Stuen, Eric T. Stuen University of Idaho Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak, Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak Yale University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Keith E. Maskus Keith E. Maskus University of Colorado at Boulder Se…
The Political Economy of Health Services Provision in Brazil
We examine the impact of local politics and voter preferences on the allocation of publicly subsidized the Unified and Decentralized Health Care System (SUS) health services across 4,338 counties in Brazil. SUS clinics, doctors, and nurses (per capita) are higher in counties with a higher share of uninsured in the population and with higher per capita incomes, as is consistent with a probabilistic voting model. Political participation (i.e., the …
The Transforming Power of Democracy
Theory on democracy and its consequences turns on how democracy influences behavior among politicians and the citizenry. Ultimately, the literature seeks to determine who benefits under democratic rules. This is our concern, posed in a context that allows us to address a classic question: does democracy favor large but diffuse segments of society over small but concentrated interests? We employ sectoral electricity consumption data for a panel of…
Does rising income increase or decrease damage risk from natural disasters
The Effects of Urban Spatial Structure on Travel Demand in the United States
We examine the effects of urban form and public transit supply on the commute mode choices and annual vehicle miles traveled (VMTs) of households living in 114 urban areas in 1990. The probability of driving to work is lower the higher are population centrality and rail miles supplied and the lower is road density. Population centrality, jobs-housing balance, city shape, and road density have a significant effect on annual household VMTs. Althoug…
Democracy, Volatility, and Economic Development
Growth stability is an important objective—because development requires sustained increases in income, because volatility is costly for the poor, and because volatility deters growth. We study the determinants of average growth and its volatility as a two-equation system, and find that higher levels of democracy and diversification lower volatility, whereas volatility itself reduces growth. Muslim countries instrument for democracy, and measures …
Manufacturing growth and the lives of Bangladeshi women
The Transforming Power of Democracy
Theory on democracy and its consequences turns on how democracy influences behavior among politicians and the citizenry. Ultimately, the literature seeks to determine who benefits under democratic rules. This is our concern, posed in a context that allows us to address a classic question: does democracy favor large but diffuse segments of society over small but concentrated interests? We employ sectoral electricity consumption data for a panel of…
Skilled Immigration and Innovation
Journal Article Skilled Immigration and Innovation: Evidence from Enrolment Fluctuations in us Doctoral Programmes Get access Eric T. Stuen, Eric T. Stuen University of Idaho Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak, Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak Yale University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Keith E. Maskus Keith E. Maskus University of Colorado at Boulder Se…
Does rising income increase or decrease damage risk from natural disasters
Gender gaps in technology diffusion
The Political Economy of Health Services Provision in Brazil
We examine the impact of local politics and voter preferences on the allocation of publicly subsidized the Unified and Decentralized Health Care System (SUS) health services across 4,338 counties in Brazil. SUS clinics, doctors, and nurses (per capita) are higher in counties with a higher share of uninsured in the population and with higher per capita incomes, as is consistent with a probabilistic voting model. Political participation (i.e., the …
Subsidies for technology adoption
We use a two-stage experiment to study how a short-term subsidy for a new product affects uptake, usage, and future demand for the same product (a new solar lamp). We use an auction design to gauge willingness-to-pay, and randomly vary the strike price across villages to create random variation in purchase prices and uptake across villages. Our main results are that subsidies do not adversely affect subsequent product use, but stimulate uptake. I…
Consanguinity and Other Marriage Market Effects of a Wealth Shock in Bangladesh
This paper uses a wealth shock from the construction of a flood protection embankment in rural Bangladesh coupled with data on the universe of all 52,000 marriage decisions between 1982 and 1996 to examine changes in marital prospects for households protected by the embankment relative to unprotected households living on the other side of the river. We use difference-in-difference specifications to document that brides from protected households c…
Social and financial incentives for overcoming a collective action problem
Addressing public health externalities often requires community-level collective action. Due to social norms, each person's sanitation investment decisions may depend on the decisions of neighbors. We report on a cluster randomized controlled trial conducted with 19,000 households in rural Bangladesh where we grouped neighboring households and introduced (either financial or social recognition) rewards with a joint liability component for the gro…
The challenges of scaling effective interventions
The Effects of Urban Spatial Structure on Travel Demand in the United States
We examine the effects of urban form and public transit supply on the commute mode choices and annual vehicle miles traveled (VMTs) of households living in 114 urban areas in 1990. The probability of driving to work is lower the higher are population centrality and rail miles supplied and the lower is road density. Population centrality, jobs-housing balance, city shape, and road density have a significant effect on annual household VMTs. Althoug…
Democracy, Volatility, and Economic Development
Growth stability is an important objective—because development requires sustained increases in income, because volatility is costly for the poor, and because volatility deters growth. We study the determinants of average growth and its volatility as a two-equation system, and find that higher levels of democracy and diversification lower volatility, whereas volatility itself reduces growth. Muslim countries instrument for democracy, and measures …
Does rising income increase or decrease damage risk from natural disasters
The Transforming Power of Democracy
Theory on democracy and its consequences turns on how democracy influences behavior among politicians and the citizenry. Ultimately, the literature seeks to determine who benefits under democratic rules. This is our concern, posed in a context that allows us to address a classic question: does democracy favor large but diffuse segments of society over small but concentrated interests? We employ sectoral electricity consumption data for a panel of…
The Political Economy of Health Services Provision in Brazil
We examine the impact of local politics and voter preferences on the allocation of publicly subsidized the Unified and Decentralized Health Care System (SUS) health services across 4,338 counties in Brazil. SUS clinics, doctors, and nurses (per capita) are higher in counties with a higher share of uninsured in the population and with higher per capita incomes, as is consistent with a probabilistic voting model. Political participation (i.e., the …
Low demand for nontraditional cookstove technologies
Biomass combustion with traditional cookstoves causes substantial environmental and health harm. Nontraditional cookstove technologies can be efficacious in reducing this adverse impact, but they are adopted and used at puzzlingly low rates. This study analyzes the determinants of low demand for nontraditional cookstoves in rural Bangladesh by using both stated preference (from a nationally representative survey of rural women) and revealed prefe…
Skilled Immigration and Innovation
Journal Article Skilled Immigration and Innovation: Evidence from Enrolment Fluctuations in us Doctoral Programmes Get access Eric T. Stuen, Eric T. Stuen University of Idaho Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak, Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak Yale University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Keith E. Maskus Keith E. Maskus University of Colorado at Boulder Se…
Informal Risk Sharing, Index Insurance, and Risk Taking in Developing Countries
Preliminary findings are presented from a research project which examined the interactions between informal risk sharing, index insurance and risk-taking. Rainfall insurance contracts were randomly offered to cultivating and landless households in a set of Indian villages where preexisting census data on caste networks allowed the characterization of the nature and extent of informal risk sharing. We study how informal risk sharing mediates the d…
Consanguinity and Other Marriage Market Effects of a Wealth Shock in Bangladesh
This paper uses a wealth shock from the construction of a flood protection embankment in rural Bangladesh coupled with data on the universe of all 52,000 marriage decisions between 1982 and 1996 to examine changes in marital prospects for households protected by the embankment relative to unprotected households living on the other side of the river. We use difference-in-difference specifications to document that brides from protected households c…
Manufacturing growth and the lives of Bangladeshi women
Decentralization and Pollution Spillovers
Decentralization can improve service delivery, but it can also generate externalities across jurisdictional boundaries. We examine the nature and size of water pollution externalities as rivers flow across jurisdictions. Panel data on water pollution in Brazilian rivers coupled with county splits that change the locations of borders allow us to identify the spatial patterns of pollution as rivers approach and cross borders, controlling for fixed …
Estimating the Health and Socioeconomic Effects of Cousin Marriage in South Asia
The effects of marriage between biological relatives on the incidence of childhood genetic illness and mortality are of major policy significance, as rates of consanguinity exceed 50% in various countries. Empirical research on this question is complicated by the fact that consanguinity is often correlated with poverty and other unobserved characteristics of households, which may have independent effects on mortality. This study has developed an …
Social Learning and Incentives for Experimentation and Communication
Low adoption of agricultural technologies holds large productivity consequences for developing countries. Many countries hire agricultural extension agents to communicate with farmers about new technologies, even though a large academic literature has established that information from social networks is a key determinant of product adoption. We incorporate social learning in extension policy using a large-scale field experiment in which we commun…
The challenges of scaling effective interventions
Gender gaps in technology diffusion
Coding Bootcamps for Female Digital Employment
This paper evaluates the short-term causal effects of a high-quality, intensive, part-time computer coding bootcamp for women on skill acquisition and employment outcomes. Spots were offered in an oversubscribed coding course to a random subset of applicants in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Bogotá, Colombia. The applicants who were chosen received a scholarship that covered most of the tuition costs of the course. Follow-up data collected shortly …
Falling living standards during the Covid-19 crisis
Income, employment, and food security fell sharply across low- and middle-income countries during the COVID crisis.
Covid-19 vaccine acceptance and hesitancy in low- and middle-income countries
Widespread acceptance of COVID-19 vaccines is crucial for achieving sufficient immunization coverage to end the global pandemic, yet few studies have investigated COVID-19 vaccination attitudes in lower-income countries, where large-scale vaccination is just beginning. We analyze COVID-19 vaccine acceptance across 15 survey samples covering 10 low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) in Asia, Africa and South America, Russia (an upper-middle-inco…
Can Network Theory-Based Targeting Increase Technology Adoption?
Can targeting information to network-central farmers induce more adoption of a new agricultural technology? By combining social network data and a field experiment in 200 villages in Malawi, we find that targeting central farmers is important to spur the diffusion process. We also provide evidence of one explanation for why centrality matters: a diffusion process governed by complex contagion. Our results are consistent with a model in which many…
Subsidies for technology adoption
We use a two-stage experiment to study how a short-term subsidy for a new product affects uptake, usage, and future demand for the same product (a new solar lamp). We use an auction design to gauge willingness-to-pay, and randomly vary the strike price across villages to create random variation in purchase prices and uptake across villages. Our main results are that subsidies do not adversely affect subsequent product use, but stimulate uptake. I…
Impact of community masking on Covid-19
Persuading people to mask Even in places where it is obligatory, people tend to optimistically overstate their compliance for mask wearing. How then can we persuade more of the population at large to act for the greater good? Abaluck et al . undertook a large, cluster-randomized trial in Bangladesh involving hundreds of thousands of people (although mostly men) over a 2-month period. Colored masks of various construction were handed out free of c…
Remove barriers to technology adoption for people in poverty
Social and financial incentives for overcoming a collective action problem
Addressing public health externalities often requires community-level collective action. Due to social norms, each person's sanitation investment decisions may depend on the decisions of neighbors. We report on a cluster randomized controlled trial conducted with 19,000 households in rural Bangladesh where we grouped neighboring households and introduced (either financial or social recognition) rewards with a joint liability component for the gro…
To use financial incentives or not? Insights from experiments in encouraging sanitation investments in four countries
The Economic Drivers of State Violence against Civilians
Violence against civilians has killed nearly one million people worldwide and displaced millions more over the past three decades. This paper examines the economic forces driving civilian persecution in Myanmar. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we show that violence against civilians increases in rice-suitable townships when rice prices rise, the opposite pattern from that documented in the literature on two-sided conflicts. We argue t…
Economics (20 obras) · Business (13 obras) · Political science (13 obras) · Economic growth (10 obras) · Geography (9 obras) · Medicine (9 obras) · Poverty, Education, and Child Welfare (9 obras) · Demographic economics (7 obras) · Public economics (7 obras) · Sociology (7 obras)