Hongdi Zhao - PhD, Applied Economics and Management, Cornell Dyson

Hi! I am a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in Applied Economics and Management at Cornell University, with a minor in Data Science.

My research interests are in applied microeconomics and development economics, with a focus on human well-being in low-income settings. I am particularly interested in combining econometric and machine learning methods to study poverty dynamics, child nutrition, and livestock insurance incentive design for agents. More broadly, I am interested in how data and quantitative tools can inform policies aimed at improving welfare. See my working papers and publications.

You can reach me at hz399@cornell.edu.

selected papers

Aspirations
Aspirations and women’s empowerment: Evidence from Kyrgyzstan

Katrina Kosec, Kamiljon Akramov, Bakhrom Mirkasimov, and 2 more authors

Economics of Transition and Institutional Change, 2022

Abs DOI Bib HTML PDF Code

There is an enormous interest in development interventions aimed at reducing behavioural poverty traps, including by raising women’s and girls’ aspirations, or future-oriented goals. However, little is known about how women’s aspirations influence their gender attitudes, the marriages into which they select and their involvement in intra-household decision-making. We find that women in Kyrgyzstan with higher aspirations are more likely to espouse egalitarian gender attitudes, as are their husbands, and their husbands have higher aspirations. They also live in households in which women play a greater role in decision-making, and in which spouses are more likely to agree about women’s roles in decision-making.
@article{kosec2022aspirations, title = {Aspirations and women's empowerment: Evidence from Kyrgyzstan}, author = {Kosec, Katrina and Akramov, Kamiljon and Mirkasimov, Bakhrom and Song, Jie and Zhao, Hongdi}, journal = {Economics of Transition and Institutional Change}, volume = {30}, number = {1}, pages = {101--134}, year = {2022}, publisher = {Wiley Online Library}, doi = {10.1111/ecot.12302}, }