Publications

  • Estimating COVID-19 Economic Vulnerability from Outer Space: A District Level Analysis for Bangladesh
    with Syed Rafsan Ali, Syed Basher, 2024
    Paper · [Asia-Pacific Journal of Regional Science]

  • Income and Consumption in Bangladesh: An Analysis of the Permanent Income Hypothesis
    Bangladesh Students’ Digest on Economics and Development, 2021
    Paper

Working Papers

Work in Progress

  • Leaving Out The Elderly: Mistargeting in Bangladesh’s Old Age Allowance (OAA) Program
  • Draft slides available upon request here(https://drive.google.com/file/d/13oDumXJrHGG4AlWOPz7sNYcke10s33w1/view?usp=sharing)
  • Abstract- Social protection programs are designed to reduce poverty and vulnerability (Coady et al., 2004), but the decentralized nature of such programs in developing countries make beneficiary allocation susceptible to discretion, political interference, and capture (Bardhan & Mookherjee, 2006; Niehaus et al., 2013; Panda, 2019; Asri, 2019; Asri et al., 2020; Banerjee et al. 2024). With weak institutions, an autocratic (former) government, a large informal labor force, and a rising elderly population, provision of social protection for the elderly is crucial in Bangladesh but is vulnerable to corruption and political manipulation (ODI, 2018; Transparency International Bangladesh, 2023). I examine Bangladesh’s Old Age Allowance (OAA) program, a means-tested unconditional cash transfer, and find that approximately 45% of current beneficiaries are ineligible. To understand the drivers of mistargeting, I ask whether political connections and reciprocity of individuals predict OAA receipt using probit models. I find political connections are predictive of program receipt. By contrast, reciprocity is not a predictor, as I hypothesized would be the case in settings with weak democratic institutions (Feitosa, 2020; Giommoni, 2021). Furthermore, I provide evidence that mistargeting is regressive, with the improperly included beneficiaries being less poor than those improperly excluded, implying potential welfare gains from reallocating transfers toward the excluded. To answer this, I do a welfare exercise to see whether giving the OAA to those deemed most eligible leads to a better outcome than the status quo. I find this approach leads to an overall reduction in welfare, potentially highlighting the tradeoff between targeting on impact versus deprivation (Haushofer, 2025). The results underscore the control of local political actors in shaping access to social protection and motivate reforms that reduce discretionary power and increase transparency.

Dormant Papers

  • Assessing the Nexus Between Mobile Financial Service Usage and Inflation – Evidence from Bangladesh, 2021

  • An Empirical Analysis of the Weak Form Market Efficiency in the Bangladeshi Pharmaceutical Industry – A Case Study of Renata Ltd, 2021

  • A Vector Error Correction Model Analysis of Gold Prices – How Will COVID-19 Impact the Price of Gold?, 2021