Publications

Promises on Paper or Money Well Spent? Gender Budgeting Delivers (Job Market Paper) - Under review at Economics of governance
Difference-in-Differences analysis (1991–2020); shows gender budgeting improves credibility and reallocation towards inclusive sectors.
Gender Budgeting and Health Spending Efficiency in Indian States (CERDI Working Paper)
Staggered DiD and entropy balancing; persistent gains in fiscal efficiency and transparency.
Federalism and Women Empowerment in India
2SLS estimation; fiscal autonomy improves women’s outcomes and reduces gender inequality.
Revenues vs. Expenditures: How Fiscal Decentralization Improves Infrastructure Spending Efficiency
IV and GMM estimations in 40 countries; dynamic analysis of revenue vs. expenditure decentralization.
Mobile Money Adoption and Poverty Reduction in African Countries (with Alassani, Karippacheril, Tinta)
DiD on 46 countries; digital G2P improves income distribution, conditional on structural factors.
Designing Autonomy: Federalism, Conflict, and the Lessons of Fragility
Game theory + empirical analysis; fiscal autonomy reduces secessionist and resource-related conflicts.

Reshaping Citizen-Government Dynamics: The Impact of Mobile Money on State Relations
(with Alassani, Karippacheril, Tinta) – currently under development.
Can we trust subnational government discourse, or is it just ex-post rationalization of what we already know?
Applies text-as-data methods to 30 years of Indian state budget speeches to examine whether fiscal rhetoric predicts or merely rationalizes fiscal outcomes.
Does Money Talk? Gender-Responsive Budgeting and Gender Parity in School Enrolment in Developing Countries
(with Yacouba Coulibaly) - Gender-responsive budgeting (GRB) directs public spending toward closing gaps between women and men. This paper asks whether adopting GRB actually narrows the gap between girls’ and boys’ school enrolment, using data on nearly 200 countries over three decades.