The Macroeconomic Impacts of Zombie Houses

With A.K.M Mahbub Morshed · Working paper, Oct 2025

Mobile Money Spillovers and Misallocation in Informal Risk Sharing

Working paper

Rural households in developing countries use labor migration as a strategy to insure themselves against exogenous shocks. With the introduction of mobile money technology, remittances from migrants are now available to these households at a cheaper and faster rate. Previous literature finds that mobile money use does not fully insure against shocks, but there is no explanation as to why this insurance is incomplete. I argue that rural households simultaneously use two insurance technologies: risk pooling within their own village, and labor migration. Mobile money lowers the transaction cost of the migrant channel, inducing households to substitute away from the village pool toward external remittances. This substitution generates a negative externality, as households under-invest in the pool relative to the social optimum. Using a quasi-experimental design with three waves of panel data from rural Bangladesh, I estimate the causal effect of mobile money adoption on consumption smoothing after flood shocks. I find that mobile money users experience 1.1 percent greater consumption loss per standard deviation increase in flood intensity relative to non-users, rising to 2.8 percent relative to households in villages with no mobile money penetration. I find new evidence that the misallocation extends beyond adopters, as non-adopting households in mobile money villages suffer comparable consumption losses after flood shocks, due to pool thinning with no compensating remittance gain. The findings suggest that policies to increase mobile money use in rural areas should accompany incentives to participate in the village pool, to correct the misallocation.

The Impact of Refugee Camps on the Mental Health of Host Communities

With Parinda Rahman · Working paper

In August 2017, conflict in neighboring Myanmar caused a massive influx of Rohingya refugees in the Cox's Bazar region of Bangladesh, who are hosted in one of the most densely populated refugee camps in the world. Using geo-referenced data on refugee camps from UNHCR, and the Cox's Bazar Panel Survey from 2019 to 2023, I study how refugee camp exposure impacts the mental health of the host communities. I identify exposure to nearby hosts using variation in road quality, distance to camps and the camp refugee population over time. Results indicate that higher refugee exposure increases probability of depression and the severity of depression symptoms. To untangle the mechanisms through which host mental health deteriorates, I look at the labor market channel, and find that majority of the mental health declines can be explained by loss of jobs and working hours. I further find that men and older hosts face the worst mental health declines. The empirical evidence has important implications for refugee hosting policies in developing countries, while providing new empirical evidence on the psychosocial value of employment and men's mental health.