2026–2027
PhD Research Grant, ReCIPE Programme
“Crack Beneath and Between: Earthquakes and Communal Conflict in Indonesia’s Seismic Zone.” Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) and the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO).
Research
Development economics, urban and regional economics, and political economy. Applied empirical work on Indonesian microdata.
Research interests
Development Economics
Shocks, informal insurance, and household responses where formal insurance and state capacity are weak.
Urban & Regional Economics
Spatial distribution of economic activity, local public goods, and regional disparities in Indonesia.
Political Economy
Local order, collective action, and the institutions that govern public resources, including public procurement.
Methods
Causal inference on long administrative panels, and the measurement problems that come with changing administrative boundaries.
Damage-level earthquake exposure is staggered across two decades and scattered across the archipelago, not concentrated in a single disaster. Villages are coloured by the survey wave in which they were first exposed to MMI ≥ VI; stars mark the epicentre of the main earthquake behind each cohort.
Working papers
Motive Without Mobilization? Earthquakes and Communal Conflict in Indonesia
Do strong earthquakes increase or reduce communal conflict? We combine seven waves of Indonesia’s Village Potential Survey (PODES, 2005–2024) with village-level USGS ShakeMap intensities. Using a staggered difference-in-differences design, we estimate that first observed exposure to damage-level shaking (MMI ≥ VI) reduces reported communal conflict by 1.5 percentage points (Callaway–Sant’Anna overall ATT, SE 0.0043) against a baseline rate of 2.4 percent. The decline is robust to alternative staggered estimators, to a PGA-derived exposure measure that replaces ShakeMap intensity entirely (−1.3 percentage points), and to inference that treats the earthquake rather than the village as the unit of assignment: across 19 earthquakes the treated-village-weighted effect is −2.4 percentage points (SE 0.0102, p = 0.01). The decline is deepest where the scope for inter-group conflict is greatest: a one-standard-deviation increase in religious polarization adds a further 1.8 percentage points to it, and 0.8 percentage points on the definition-stable civilian-versus-civilian outcome. The sharper evidence is compositional. On identical villages and waves, theft rises by 5.8 percentage points against a 41 percent baseline while assault does not move, and the theft-versus-communal divergence survives earthquake-level resampling (p = 0.015). The pattern rejects a general improvement in local security. Although we do not identify the income or mobilization channels directly, it is consistent with a large physical shock raising the economic incentive for individual predation while degrading the capacity to organize collective violence.
Draft (PDF) This version: 26 July 2026. The figures on this page come from a later estimation run than the draft, which is being revised to match.
Work in progress
Faith after the Shock: Earthquakes, Religious Expenditure, and the Insurance Value of Religion in Indonesia
Does religion function as informal insurance against uninsured risk? The existing evidence rests largely on stated religiosity measured at district level or on aggregate shocks. This project instead observes what households actually pay: religious and ceremonial expenditure in rupiah, drawn from the consumption module used for Indonesia’s official poverty statistics, matched to village-level earthquake exposure on constant 2005 boundaries. The design separates three channels with opposing predictions — the income effect, the club-good or mutual-insurance channel, and the coping channel — using a within-block placebo that isolates the income effect and a continuous exposure measure built from exact event timestamps against the survey’s twelve-month recall window.
Publications
Kompetisi dan Efisiensi pada Pengadaan Pemerintah: Bukti Empiris pada Kementerian/Lembaga di Indonesia
Does competition make government procurement cheaper? Using more than 82,000 procurement records from Indonesian line ministries and agencies, we find that each additional bidder lowers the winning bid by about 3.35 percent of the official cost estimate.
Grants
Dissertation
Shaking Land and Shaking Lives: Essays on the Economic Impacts of Seismic Disasters. Department of Economics, Faculty of Economics and Business, Universitas Indonesia. Expected completion February 2028. Supervisor: M. Halley Yudhistira, Ph.D. Co-supervisor: Jahen F. Rezki, Ph.D.
The dissertation asks how large, plausibly exogenous physical shocks propagate through village-level social and economic life in a setting where formal insurance is thin and local order is largely self-enforced. The chapters share a common empirical infrastructure: a long village panel harmonised onto constant 2005 boundaries, and earthquake exposure constructed from USGS ShakeMap intensity surfaces.
Chapter 1
Motive Without Mobilization?
Earthquakes and communal conflict. Complete.
Chapter 2
Faith after the Shock
Earthquakes, religious expenditure, and the insurance value of religion. In progress.
Data and code
I am committed to reproducible empirical work. Replication packages for the dissertation chapters will be posted here as each paper is released: cleaning code, analysis do-files, and the village boundary crosswalk used to harmonise PODES waves onto constant 2005 boundaries.