Market Integration and Inequality

My research in Matlab, Bangladesh, examines how market integration—the expansion of cash-based livelihoods and wage labor—has altered the ways people cooperate and manage risk, producing new forms of social inequality emerging through everyday exchange. 

Through multilayered network analysis and field experiments, I found that as cash becomes the dominant medium of exchange, traditional mutual aid increasingly takes the form of unequal patron–client relationships, where salaried households provide money in return for labor or goods (preprint; under review). 

In addition, a field experiment on risk preference showed that households well connected through monetary exchange were more willing to take risks, while those relying on neighbors for food or household items tended to avoid them, revealing how unequal access to cash-based support networks leads to divergent strategies for managing uncertainty (preprint; revised and resubmitted).

Finally, I further examined how economic inequality within social networks feeds back to influence their ability to respond to shocks. In areas with low inequality, experience of shocks tended to expand social networks, while in high-inequality areas, people’s ability to mobilize support in response to shocks was severely limited, showing that inequality weakens the very networks needed to cope with crisis (manuscript in revision). 

Collaborators: Mary Shenk, Neil MacLaren, David Nolin, Nurul Alam