Working Papers
"Alone" Students' Academic Outcomes (JMP)
This paper examines the experiences of college students who are the sole representatives of their race, ethnicity, or nationality in a classroom setting, a situation referred to as being "alone." Specifically, I explore whether being the only student of a particular background in a course section impacts the academic outcomes of undergraduate students. To answer this, I exploit the random course and section assignment based on freshman students' course preferences at a large public college in the USA. I use actual course assignment data to define an instrument for the treatment of being alone. Conditional student's course preferences, the instrument (i.e., being assigned alone ) is as good as random. The findings show that being the only student in a class by race or ethnicity impacts students' course grades positively. Being alone increases the course grades by 0.11 for domestic students and 0.12 for international students. The empirical mechanism reveals that the positive alone effects are driven by low-ability students' exposure to similarly low-ability peers, as lone students are shielded from certain negative racial peer influences that non-lone students cannot avoid. While loneliness is not the driving mechanism behind course-level positive treatment effects, chronic loneliness provides a suggestive explanation of student-level outcomes of isolated international students, including term-level performance, graduation rates, and major choices are negatively impacted while it is not for domestic students.
"Physicians Recruitment and Rural Health Access" (with Redwan Baten and Azharul Islam
This study evaluates the impact of a 2014 policy that increased physician supply in rural Bangladesh, using Household Income and Expenditure Survey data from 2005-2016. A Difference-in-Differences model was applied to assess healthcare access and outcomes for rural residents compared to urban counterparts. Results show a 14 percentage point increase in rural visits to government doctors and a 15-point decline in private doctor visits. Reliance on informal care sources, such as pharmacy salesmen and traditional healers, decreased, while access to public medication improved. Overall healthcare costs for rural residents decreased, despite higher transportation and medicine costs due to increased utilization. Chronic conditions like heart disease and arthritis were more frequently reported, and travel time to healthcare providers was reduced. The intervention successfully enhanced healthcare access and utilization for rural residents
Work in Progress
College Students' Performance in (potentially) Stereotypical Environment
Experimental, education, and behavioral psychology literature papers that minorities and women underperform in math classes when their within-group representation is reduced. From real university classes, I find environments where women and minority students would feel potentially negatively stereotyped exploiting the class compositions. Using that, I find both women and minority students perform worse in STEM courses when their representation is low in a "stereotype-friendly" environment.