Essays on Household Responses to Policy and Climate Shocks in Low-Income Settings

Abstract

This dissertation examines how public policies and environmental shocks shape health and economic outcomes for vulnerable populations, with a focus on reproductive autonomy, gender-based violence, and rural livelihoods. Maternal and Child Health (MCH) programs promote safe motherhood by linking financial incentives for institutional delivery with health-worker outreach and family-planning education. In Chapter 1, I study how MCH programs influence reproductive behavior through pre-conception margin, by affecting contraceptive use and fertility, and post-conception margin by affecting whether unintended pregnancies continue to birth. Using a difference-in-differences design exploiting India's national MCH program, I find that it increased the probability of modern contraceptive use by 7 percentage points and reduced fertility among older women. In contrast, the program increased unintended pregnancies ending in births among younger women by 4 percentage points. Evidence from a later-phase reform of the program that expanded health-worker incentives shows that greater contact with community health workers contributed to this rise. These findings reveal an unintended consequence of maternal health interventions: by simultaneously promoting planned and protected pregnancy, they can inadvertently constrain women's reproductive autonomy. Chapter 2 turns to a different dimension of women's vulnerability, examining the causal relationship between anomalously hot days and intimate partner violence (IPV) in Peru, highlighting the intersection between environmental stressors and gender-based violence. The findings demonstrate that anomalously hot days increase IPV, with effects concentrated in urban settings. Two mechanisms help explain this pattern. First, hot days deteriorate the psychological well-being of male partners in the most densely urban provinces, raising the likelihood of violent behavior. Second, hot days increase community crime rates in urban areas, creating an environment where IPV becomes more likely. Together, these results emphasize the economic and social consequences of temperature anomalies and underscore the need for targeted interventions to mitigate IPV risks, particularly in urban populations. Chapter 3 broadens the lens to rural economic welfare, studying Indonesian farmers' responses to temperature and rainfall shocks, defined as deviations from local seasonal means. Coauthored with Hyelim Son and XingXia, this chapter exploits within-subdistrict variation over time to find that both unusually high and low temperatures reduce rural household expenditure, while low rainfall does not. Households buffer these shocks by drawing down liquid assets and increasing agricultural work hours. Low rainfall shifts hours from non-agricultural to agricultural work, whereas temperature shocks increase agricultural hours without reducing non-agricultural work. Farmers also adjust cultivated land area and crop mix. These results suggest that farmers intensify farming labor to mitigate weather-related losses, challenging the view that rural labor readily reallocates to non-agriculture during agricultural downturns, and indicate greater vulnerability to temperature variations than to rainfall.