Reshmaan N. Hussam
Adebayo O. Ogunlesi Associate Professor of Business Administration
Adebayo O. Ogunlesi Associate Professor of Business Administration
Regular handwashing with soap is believed to have substantial impacts on child health in the developing world. Most handwashing campaigns have failed, however, to establish and maintain a regular practice of handwashing. Motivated by scholarship that suggests handwashing is habitual, we design, implement and analyze a randomized field experiment aimed to test the main predictions of the rational addiction model. To reliably measure handwashing, we develop and produce a novel soap dispenser, within which a time-stamped sensor is embedded. We randomize distribution of these soap dispensers as well as provision of monitoring (feedback reports) or monitoring and incentives for daily handwashing. Relative to a control arm in which households receive no dispenser, we find that all treatments generate substantial improvements in child health as measured by child weight and height. Our key test of rational addiction is implemented by informing a subset of households about a future boost in monitoring or incentives. We find that (1) both monitoring and incentives increase handwashing relative to receiving only a dispenser; (2) these effects persist after monitoring or incentives are removed; and (3) the anticipation of monitoring increases handwashing rates significantly, implying that individuals internalize the habitual nature of handwashing and accumulate habit stock accordingly. Our results are consistent with the key predictions of the rational addiction model and shed light on an underdeveloped dimension of decision-making essential to sustained behavioral change.
Reshmaan Hussam is an associate professor of business administration in the Business, Government and International Economy Unit, a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), and a faculty affiliate at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) and the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD).
Her research explores questions at the intersection of development and behavioral economics, with research in three areas: migration, health, and finance. Her most recent work engages refugee populations including the Rohingya in Bangladesh, examining the psychosocial value of employment in contexts of mass unemployment, the role of home in migration decisionmaking, and refugee preferences for repatriation, integration, and resettlement. In her work in health, which involves field experiments across South Asia, she considers the puzzle of the ubiquitously low adoption of low cost, high return goods, behaviors, and technologies in the developing world, exploring the role of learning and habit formation in behavior change. Her work in finance explores how to identify high-return microentrepreneurs using local community knowledge in India and how to increase credit access and returns to capital among refugee communities in Uganda.
Prior to joining HBS, Professor Hussam was a postdoctoral fellow at the Economic Growth Center at Yale University. She received her SB and PhD in economics from MIT.
- Featured Work
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Evidence from a Refugee CampIn settings where employment opportunities are scarce, the inability to work may generate psychosocial harm. This paper presents a causal estimate of the psychosocial value of employment in the Rohingya refugee camps of Bangladesh. We engage 745 individuals in a field experiment with three arms: (1) a control arm, (2) a weekly cash arm, and (3) a gainful employment arm, in which work is offered and individuals are paid weekly the approximate equivalent of that in the cash arm. We find that employment confers significant psychosocial benefits beyond the impacts of cash alone, with effects concentrated among males. The cash arm does not improve psychosocial wellbeing, despite the provision of cash at a weekly amount that is more than twice the amount held by recipients in savings at baseline. Consistent with these findings, we find that 66% of those in our work treatment are willing to forego cash payments to instead work for free. Our results have implications for social protection policies for the unemployed in low income countries and refugee populations globally.The late 20th century saw a dramatic shift in the criminal justice system of the United States. While incarceration rates had remained stable through the 1960s, they quintupled by the 2000s to 707 per 100,000, far exceeding that of all other nations in the world. By 2020, nearly 2.3 million individuals were locked up in U.S. prisons, jails, and detention centers. Of these, 60% were Black or Latinx. Why the mass incarceration, and why such disparities by race? Were they responses to recent political and economic shifts, or part of a deeper social and cultural history? And what could be done to address what was now widely recognized by policymakers as a crisis of the criminal justice system in the United States?Evidence from Handwashing in West Bengal
Regular handwashing with soap is believed to have substantial impacts on child health in the developing world. Most handwashing campaigns have failed, however, to establish and maintain a regular practice of handwashing. Motivated by scholarship that suggests handwashing is habitual, we design, implement and analyze a randomized field experiment aimed to test the main predictions of the rational addiction model. To reliably measure handwashing, we develop and produce a novel soap dispenser, within which a time-stamped sensor is embedded. We randomize distribution of these soap dispensers as well as provision of monitoring (feedback reports) or monitoring and incentives for daily handwashing. Relative to a control arm in which households receive no dispenser, we find that all treatments generate substantial improvements in child health as measured by child weight and height. Our key test of rational addiction is implemented by informing a subset of households about a future boost in monitoring or incentives. We find that (1) both monitoring and incentives increase handwashing relative to receiving only a dispenser; (2) these effects persist after monitoring or incentives are removed; and (3) the anticipation of monitoring increases handwashing rates significantly, implying that individuals internalize the habitual nature of handwashing and accumulate habit stock accordingly. Our results are consistent with the key predictions of the rational addiction model and shed light on an underdeveloped dimension of decision-making essential to sustained behavioral change.
- Journal Articles
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- Hussam, Reshmaan, Erin M. Kelley, Gregory Lane, and Fatima Zahra. "The Psychosocial Value of Employment: Evidence from a Refugee Camp." American Economic Review 112, no. 11 (November 2022): 3694–3724. View Details
- Hussam, Reshmaan, Natalia Rigol, and Benjamin N. Roth. "Targeting High Ability Entrepreneurs Using Community Information: Mechanism Design in the Field." American Economic Review 112, no. 3 (March 2022): 861–898.
(Online Appendix with Corrigendum—Thanks to Isabella Masetto, Diego Ubfal, and The Institute for Replication for identifying a minor coding error in the production of Table 4.) View Details - Hussam, Reshmaan, Atonu Rabbani, Giovanni Reggiani, and Natalia Rigol. "Rational Habit Formation: Experimental Evidence from Handwashing in India." American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 14, no. 1 (January 2022): 1–41. (Lead Article.) View Details
- Hussam, Reshmaan, David Porter, and Vernon Smith. "'Thar' She Blows: Can Bubbles Be Rekindled with Experienced Subjects?" American Economic Review 98, no. 3 (June 2008): 924–937. View Details
- Das, Jishnu, Abhijit Chowdhury, Reshmaan Hussam, and Abhijit Banerjee. "The Impact of Training Informal Healthcare Providers in India: A Randomized Controlled Trial." Science 354, no. 6308 (October 7, 2016): 80. View Details
- Working Papers
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- Hussam, Reshmaan, and Dayea Oh. "Behavioral Transmission: Evidence from a Public Health Campaign in Bangladesh." Working Paper, April 2023. View Details
- Banerjee, Abhijit, Abhijit Chowdhury, Jishnu Das, Jeffrey Hammer, Reshmaan Hussam, and Aakash Mohpal. "The Market for Healthcare in Low Income Countries." Working Paper, July 2023. View Details
- Hussam, Reshmaan, Kailash Pandey, Abu Shonchoy, and Chikako Yamauchi. "Translating Information into Action: A Public Health Experiment in Bangladesh." Working Paper, February 2023. View Details
- Hussam, Reshmaan N. "Sex Selection and the Indian Marriage Market." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 18-029, September 2017. (Revised October 2020.) View Details
- Buchmann, Nina, Erica Field, Rachel Glennerster, and Reshmaan Hussam. "The Lifesaving Benefits of Convenient Infrastructure: Quantifying the Mortality Impact of Abandoning Shallow Tubewells Contaminated by Arsenic in Bangladesh." Working Paper, September 2022. View Details
- Cases
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- Hussam, Reshmaan, Trevor Fetter, and Grace Liu. "Amazon and the Future of Organized Labor." Harvard Business School Case 723-030, February 2023. (Revised October 2023.) View Details
- Hussam, Reshmaan N., Nadia Ahmad, and Grace Liu. "Indigenous Wisdom and the Climate Crisis." Harvard Business School Case 722-050, January 2022. (Revised November 2022.) View Details
- Hussam, Reshmaan N., and Holly Fetter. "Race and Mass Incarceration in the United States." Harvard Business School Case 720-034, April 2020. (Revised June 2020.) View Details
- Hussam, Reshmaan N. "The Rohingya Refugee: Past, Genocide, Future." Harvard Business School Case 719-068, April 2019. (Revised October 2021.) View Details
- Hussam, Reshmaan, Sophus A. Reinert, and Namrata Arora. "Bangladesh: Into the Maelstrom." Harvard Business School Case 719-008, November 2018. (Revised February 2023.) View Details
- Notes
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- Hussam, Reshmaan, Trevor Fetter, and Grace Liu. "Labor Unions in the United States." Harvard Business School Technical Note 723-031, January 2023. (Revised February 2023.) View Details
- Hussam, Reshmaan, and Grace Liu. "Colonialism and Imperialism." Harvard Business School Technical Note 719-035, November 2018. View Details
- Hussam, Reshmaan, Mattias E. Fibiger, and Grace Liu. "Human Rights." Harvard Business School Technical Note 719-036, November 2018. (Revised January 2021.) View Details
- Hussam, Reshmaan, Sophus A. Reinert, and Jordan Naylor. "Native American Incarceration." Harvard Business School Background Note 722-042, January 2022. View Details
- Cavallo, Alberto, Kristin Fabbe, Mattias Fibiger, Jeremy Friedman, Reshmaan Hussam, Vincent Pons, and Matthew Weinzierl. "The BGIE Twenty (2024 version)." Harvard Business School Technical Note 718-032, December 2017. (Revised November 2023.) View Details
- Teaching Notes
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- Hussam, Reshmaan, Sophus A. Reinert, and Jaya Y. Wen. "Bangladesh: Into the Maelstrom." Harvard Business School Teaching Note 723-050, February 2023. View Details
- Hussam, Reshmaan, Trevor Fetter, and Grace Liu. "Amazon and the Future of Organized Labor." Harvard Business School Teaching Note 723-049, February 2023. View Details
- Hussam, Reshmaan. "Indigenous Wisdom and the Climate Crisis." Harvard Business School Teaching Note 722-051, April 2022. View Details
- Hussam, Reshmaan. "Race and Mass Incarceration in the United States." Harvard Business School Teaching Note 721-034, February 2021. View Details
- Hussam, Reshmaan N. "The Rohingya Refugee: Past, Genocide, Future." Harvard Business School Teaching Note 722-025, November 2021. View Details
- Research Summary
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Engaged with field work in South Asia and East Africa, Professor Hussam places a focus on exploring questions with strong theoretical motivation in the economics literature as well as relevant downstream policy implications. Her research spans four broad interests. First, demand for health: how households perceive, engage with, and organize around health-promoting behaviors and technologies. Second, supply of healthcare: how the informal healthcare market is structured and the malleability of quality offered by informal providers. Third, the lived experience and psychosocial wellbeing of migrants who are forcibly displaced. And finally, capital allocation to and financial inclusion of microentrepreneurs in the developing world.
Currently, Professor Hussam is working in rural Bangladesh to estimate the informational and behavioral spillovers of hygiene campaigns from school to home, asking a critical policy question on the patterns of informational transfer between community institutions and the household. The size of these spillovers in turn has motivated an exploration of where in a community third-party monitoring and the inculcation of social norms can be most effective. A second project, set in the particularly impoverished river basin regions of Bangladesh, distributes a hygiene information campaign through the unique medium of mobile SD-card entertainment and evaluates the behavioral and health impacts of this scalable intervention; the role of parent versus child agency in hygiene behavioral change; and the process of information retention and response motivated by the theoretical framework of limited attention. A third project in Pakistan examines how households decide to engage in water treatment decisions, comparing the implications of habit formation and learning on sustained behavior change.
In a second stream of research involving informal healthcare practitioners (RHCPs) in rural West Bengal, Professor Hussam and coauthors are exploring the effects of a training program on the quality of care offered by RHCPs and considering how the price of healthcare services are mediated by practitioner competency, confidence, and knowledge.
Her third area of focus has been shaped by four years observing the evolving livelihoods of the Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh. Her current projects explore the costs of forced idleness, communal cohesion in post-conflict spaces, and the psychosocial and economic implications of the loss of home. These features of the refugee experience receive little attention in existing economic models of migration and policy discussions of the same, but have significant implications for the welfare of the 67 million (and counting) FDPs globally.
In a fourth stream of research around financial inclusion, Professor Hussam and coauthors are examining the role of community information in the allocation of resources and business growth. They employ techniques from mechanism design to elicit truthful responses from microentrepreneurs in peri-urban Maharashtra about one another’s entrepreneurial ability with the aim of advancing policy design regarding the optimal allocation of capital and credit in poor households and communities. A second project explores the entrepreneurial ability of refugee versus host community members in Uganda, where refugees are both considered a 'flight risk' by microfinance institutions but have the potential to generate high marginal returns given their demand for credit and unique skill sets. A third project set in Rwanda asks how savings products may help reduce domestic violence by lengthening women's control over resources following their seasonal employment in coffee mills.
- Awards & Honors
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Recipient of a United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Research and Innovation Fellowship, 2014-2015.Recipient of a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, 2010-2015.Recipient of a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans, 2010-2012.Selected as a Burchard Scholar in the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at MIT, 2007-2008.
- Additional Information
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EmailCurriculum Vitae
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