Sayahnika Basu

I am an Assistant Professor in the Economics department at James Madison University. I work on environmental issues with research themes overlapping development, agriculture, and urban economics. Broadly, my research focuses on understanding how environmental degradation and climate change affect different demographic groups and their economic implications.

Prior to joining JMU, I was a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Economics, University of California, San Diego. I received my Ph.D. in Economics from the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University. I am also an external faculty affiliate at the 21st Century India Center, UC San Diego. I co-organize a virtual junior scholar seminar on the Indian Economy.
For more information, see my CV. Contact: basusx@jmu.edu

Working Papers

Miners and Minors: The Impact of Mineral Resource Booms on Female Underage Employment

with Valerie Mueller (under review)

Resource booms are often associated with adverse distributional effects across economies. We exploit temporal and spatial variation generated by the copper boom in the 2000s to measure the effect of mineral resource extraction on human capital investment in Zambia. Combining data from repeated cross-sections of households and mines, we find that adolescent girls near mines have lower school attendance and higher engagement in paid work. We argue that the main pull factor is the increase in the demand for labor among sectors where women typically dominate. As more adult women marry and married women live in households that benefit from the wealth generated by spouses, adolescent girls fill the gap previously met by adult women in the labor market. Our findings suggest that resource booms induce inequitable distributional effects across generations of women.

The Effect of Drought on Household Occupation Choices in Rural India (revise and resubmit, Environment and Development Economics)

Droughts are becoming increasingly common in India, where 50% of the labor force works in agriculture, and most agricultural production is rainfall dependent. This paper investigates the extent to which rural households adapt to drought by reallocating labor from agriculture to other sectors of the economy. I use household-level fixed effects regressions to estimate to find that household agricultural jobs decline in the year following a drought. Further, I find that these effects are mediated by job skills and land ownership. I find that households with working members who have completed primary education account for most of the workers who exit the agricultural sector. In contrast, I find that households that own land increase their agricultural labor share after experiencing a drought. Thus, while I find that drought causes households to diversify away from agriculture on aggregate, the extent of this structural change is mitigated by the behavior of landowners.

Environmental Regulation, Residential Sorting, and Pollution Exposure among Senior Americans

with Jonathan Ketchum and Nick Kuminoff (under review)

We investigate how environmental regulation under the U.S. Superfund program and Clean Air Act affected exposures to fine particulate air pollution and hazardous waste for Americans over age 65 during the 2000’s. Our research design uses quasi-random features of how the two programs enforce regulations and provide information to estimate their causal effects on migration and pollution exposure. We show that senior Americans’ average pollution exposures declined substantially. We also show that spatially heterogeneous improvements in environmental quality had little-to-no effect on residential sorting. This led to relatively large reductions in pollution for seniors living in the dirtiest areas.

Drought, Land Ownership and Labor Reallocation: Evidence from India (under review)

Household labor reallocation provides a potentially important channel for rural households to adapt to changing weather patterns. Exploiting the temporal and spatial variation of drought occurrence in India, I find that drought reduces the share of agriculture labor hours by 110 hours (3% at the mean). This reduction is driven by households that do not own land. Motivated by these facts, I develop a model of labor allocation across the agriculture and non-agriculture sectors to analyze how droughts may affect structural transformation. My results imply that projected increase in the spatial extent of droughts over the coming years will induce landowning households to allocate 2% more labor to agriculture and induce landless households to reduce their agricultural labor. The net effect is a 1% reduction in agricultural labor. While small in percentage terms, this implies that 2.5 million individuals would leave agriculture. I use the model to analyze how projected climate change would affect the cost to the government of achieving its stated target of increasing the manufacturing share of GDP to 25% by 2035. Under climate change, I find that the government would need to subsidize non-agriculture wages by a higher margin due to the presence of land market frictions.

Carbon Footprint of Place-Based Economic Policies

with Yao Wang and Zhanhan Yu

We evaluate the environmental impact of Special Economic Zones (SEZs), a place-based policy designed to foster economic development in India. Specifically, we identify the unintended effects of the policy on firms' energy usage and carbon emissions. Leveraging extensive firm data and a spatial RD-DiD design, we find that SEZs lead to a significant 30\% reduction in firms' carbon emissions. This substantial decline in emissions is predominantly driven by larger firms and those located in regions with access to cleaner energy. Complementary analyses indicate a shift among firms within SEZs from conventional energy to lower-carbon renewable alternatives, potentially contributing to the overall reductions in carbon emissions. These findings underscore the interplay between economic development and environmental conservation.