I'm a PhD student in Development Economics at Dyson, Cornell, fortunate to be advised by Chris Barrett, Brian Dillon, Johannes Haushofer, and Karlijn Morsink. I visited PSE in Fall 2024, with shorter visits to Utrecht and Wageningen. Reach me at yn266[at]cornell.edu.
My research focuses on strategies to reduce chronic poverty and suffering by promoting human capital accumulation in low-income, challenging environments.
We study the long-run effects of catastrophic drought insurance on pastoralist households in Kenya and Ethiopia. Instrumenting with randomized premium discounts, we estimate the impacts of insurance coverage a decade later. Insurance induced households to herd fewer small livestock like goats, typically used as precautionary savings, and generated a significant increase in children’s education. These effects are driven by households with small baseline herds, reflecting reduced child labor demand, as well as by suggestive positive income effects. These impacts stem primarily from reduced ex ante risk exposure and the behavioral change it induces, rather than from ex post indemnity payments.