Research

Publications

  1. “Cash Crops and The Development-Environment Tradeoff: Evidence from Benin.”
    (with Zhenong Jin and Leikun Yin). Forthcoming, Land Economics
    [pdf][appendix]

  2. “Infrastructure, Institutions, and the Conservation of Biodiversity in India.”
    Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, 2025
    [pdf][appendix][podcast][commentary]

  3. “Ruling The Roost: Avian Species Reclaim Urban Habitat During India’s COVID-19 Lockdown.”
    (with Sumeet Gulati). Biological Conservation, 2022

  4. “Saving the world from your couch: The heterogeneous benefits of COVID-19 lockdowns on air pollution.”
    (with Jean-Philippe Bonardi, Quentin Gallea, Dimitrija Kalanoski, Rafael Lalive, Frederik Noack, Dominic Rohner, and Tommaso Sonno). Environmental Research Letters, 2021

Working Papers

  1. “Internal Migration and the Spatial Reorganization of Agriculture.” Submitted.
    (with Frederik Noack, Mushfiq Mobarak, and Olivier Deschenes)
    [NBER WP][commentary]

  2. “Ethnic Favouritism in Environmental Disaster Payouts.” Submitted.
    (with Sumeet Gulati and Pushpendra Rana)

  3. “Off-Target Impacts of Targeted Policy: Evidence from Colombia.”
    (with Tatiana Zarate-Barrera)

Selected Works in Progress

  1. “Tribal Forest Rights and Firm Behaviour.” (with Sabyasachi Das) [slides] [abstract]

Informal titles expose tribal land to commercial exploitation. We show that formalizing tribal forest rights reduces firm activity near tribal areas on average, but shifts the composition toward larger firms. We develop a model of firm behaviour in which titling raises land acquisition costs, disproportionately burdening smaller firms for whom these costs are more binding. We test the model using India’s Forest Rights Act as a natural experiment, which granted forest rights to tribes in 2008. Using a firm panel and a difference-in-differences design, we find that firms’ land valuations decline near tribal areas, but less so for larger firms. Conservation patterns reveal a similar pattern: deforestation permits and forest cover data show that industrial forest encroachment falls post-policy, but intrusions by larger projects persist. Our findings suggest a re-sorting rather than a retreat of development pressure on tribal land.

  1. “Willingness to Pay for Biodiversity: Evidence from Recreation Demand.”
    (with Matt Braaksma, Ryan Mcway, and Jovin Lasway)

  2. “Gross Ecosystem Product.” (with NatCap TEEMS)

  3. “Decentralizing Forest Governance: A Clustered Randomized Experiment in the Himalayas.”
    (with Pooja Choksi, Eric Coleman, Harry Fischer, Forrest Fleischman, Munib Khanyari, Pushpendra Rana, Erin Sills) [AEA RCT Registry] [status: baseline survey completed]

Resting Papers

  1. “The Long Run Effects of Coal Power Plants on Health.”
    (with Rohini Pande, Kevin Rowe, and Anish Sugathan)