Ongoing Research
First Motherhood Age and Breastfeeding Duration. 2024.
[ Abstract | Draft]
We examine the declining trend in breastfeeding in Nepal. Using 21 years of nationally representative survey data on Nepalese women, we study the effects of mothers' age at first child birth on the breastfeeding duration. To this end, we employ a series of two-way fixed effects models combined with an instrumental variable (IV) strategy which let us to estimate the effects. Our preferred specification in the IV estimation suggests delaying pregnancy by a year is associated with an increase in breastfeeding duration by 2.5 days for the first child, and a reduction by 1.5 days for the second child. This suggests that delaying pregnancy likely shifts resources and attention, increasing breastfeeding duration for the first child but slightly decreasing it for the second due to potential prioritization of the older sibling's needs. In an ongoing work, we are conducting robustness checks using a Cox Proportional Hazards Model to account for the completed breastfeeding duration, which differs from the observed duration and is not available in the DHS data, and using machine learning algorithms to predict breastfeeding duration using data on covariates.
Impacts of Community Forestry on Rural Welfare. Ongoing since 2024-.
[ Abstract | Data collection phase]
This paper aims to examine the impacts of community forest management on rural household income in Nepal. The Forest Act 1993 and Forest Regulation 1995 marked a significant decentralization shift, granting local communities in Nepal the rights to manage and utilize forests. These legislations provided communities with the right to self-governance and forest management, building on earlier regulations from 1978 that allowed local governments some oversight. With this context of the paper, I shall utilize detailed panel datasets on household demographics, income sources, land ownership, and forest management practices. Once all the datasets are in, the study shall employ a difference-in-differences (DiD) methodology, particularly the recently developed heterogeneity-robust DiD estimators such as in Callaway and Sant'Anna (JoE, 2021). The reason for these choices is that Forest Acts impacts different regions of Nepal at different times, so there are multiple treatments in a staggered or roll-out setup, and recent econometrics literature suggests we cannot rely on classical two-way fixed effects estimators as they likely give biased estimates. This approach allows me to make a comparison of income changes between cohorts of households in areas with community forests and those in comparable areas without them. The findings shall provide insights into the effectiveness of community forest management in improving economic welfare in rural Nepal, highlighting its potential as a sustainable development strategy with possible implications for other regions in the world.