Job Market Paper
The Idle Margin: Frictions in Everyday Conservation
This paper asks why privately and socially beneficial conservation fails when it must be repeated. I study vehicle idling---a ubiquitous but underexplored margin of vehicle use---using a randomised field experiment with 6,621 private vehicles in Pakistan whose GPS trackers report engine status, speed, and location every 10 seconds. The experiment separately varies private information, social-cost salience, financial rewards, and real-time in-car reminders. Baseline beliefs reveal widespread misperceptions about warm-up idling and the stop duration at which engine shutoff saves fuel or reduces environmental harm. Private information reduces idling at stops longer than 30 seconds by 1.8 minutes per observed vehicle-day, about 9 percent of the placebo mean. Adding social-cost information or payments produces little further reduction. Activating a real-time reminder instead attenuates the preceding no-reminder package. Heterogeneity and revealed-demand evidence point to self-monitoring crowdout, with external reminders substituting for drivers' own attention. The results identify private misperceptions as a binding friction and show that externally supplied attention can backfire when it displaces self-monitoring.
Working Papers
Subsidies and Debt under Nonlinear Electricity Pricing
This paper studies how households respond when electricity prices change at some margins but not others. In a field experiment with 1,731 households in rural Pakistan, we randomise 30% subsidies across different blocks of an increasing-block tariff, using nonlinear pricing to separate marginal-price incentives from average-price bill relief and examine effects on electricity use, bills, payments, and arrears.
Preaching Against Power Theft
This paper studies whether religious authority can strengthen state capacity where formal enforcement is weak. In a field experiment in Pakistan, we randomise anti-theft messages delivered through Friday sermons across electricity feeders and combine this with a nested household subsidy experiment to study effects on power theft, bill payment, collection losses, and the interaction between moral and financial incentives.
Hardening the Grid: Technology versus Enforcement
This paper studies whether hardening the grid or increasing enforcement is more effective at reducing electricity theft. In a field experiment with LESCO and the Ministry of Energy in Pakistan, we randomise 120 high-loss transformers to theft-resistant infrastructure, enhanced audit-based enforcement, or status-quo operations, and study effects on power losses, bill payment, consumer regularisation, arrears, and legal electricity use.
Selected Work in Progress
Small Farms, Coordination, and Air Pollution
This project studies whether the environmental costs of small-scale farming arise partly from coordination failures. Using a diagnostic survey of rice farmers in Punjab, Pakistan, we study timing pressure, machinery access, residue value, and demand for coordinated baling services, and use the evidence to design a field pilot testing whether neighbouring smallholders can make cleaner residue management viable.
Making Pollution Visible: Emissions Disclosure
This project studies whether making industrial pollution visible can improve environmental accountability. In collaboration with the Punjab Industries Department and Punjab Urban Unit, we use third-party emissions monitoring to generate plant-level ratings for industrial units in Lahore, and test whether public disclosure of these ratings induces cleaner practices and pollution-control investment.