Through which mechanisms does access to digital financial services enhance women’s economic empowerment? We address this question using a lab-in-the-field experiment with married women in Tanzania designed to isolate the pathways through which mobile money may strengthen women’s control over resources. Participants were randomly assigned to conditions that varied both the observability of their financial decisions, whether information about their choices was shared with their husbands (public) or kept confidential (private), and the payment modality, receiving funds either in cash or mobile money across two incentivized games. We find that public observability does not affect women’s willingness to accept mobile money or change their investment behavior, suggesting privacy is not the main channel through which mobile money services give women greater control over money. Instead, utilizing further randomization of the cash treatment into earmarked and unearmarked, we show that funds received as mobile money appear to be better earmarked as the woman’s, increasing her perceived ownership of them. These results suggest that digital finance promotes empowerment primarily by strengthening women’s perceived ownership and authority over resources, rather than by increasing privacy.

Informal risk-sharing networks help households smooth income shocks in low-income settings, but marginalized groups excluded from these networks face greater economic vulnerability when shocks occur. This paper examines how caste-based social exclusion shapes informal insurance in rural Nepal. Using household-level panel data, I show that caste identity significantly constrains access to risk-sharing networks. Households from socially excluded castes experience larger fluctuations in consumption following income shocks, consistent with weaker insurance. However, as the share of excluded individuals within a village rises, their consumption becomes less sensitive to income fluctuations, suggesting the emergence of more effective within-group and cross-group risk-sharing mechanisms. These findings highlight how social identity not only limits participation in informal insurance but also reshapes it as group composition and social integration evolve.

This study examines how improvements in women's labor market opportunities affect intra-household dynamics, bargaining power, and overall marriage quality in developing contexts.

This research compares the effectiveness and accuracy of in-person versus phone-based student assessment methods, with implications for education monitoring in resource-constrained and remote settings.

This paper examines the labor market returns to education credentials earned while incarcerated, using administrative data and rigorous causal inference methods to estimate effects on post-release employment outcomes.

This project examines how student mobility affects both standardized test performance and non-test outcomes like attendance, behavior, and graduation rates through longitudinal analysis of comprehensive education data.

This study evaluates the effectiveness of AI-based educational interventions in improving learning outcomes for students in remedial education programs in Nepal, with a focus on scalability and cost-effectiveness.