Profile
Two children grow up in the same Indonesian village and finish the same number of years of school. Decades later, one earns far more from that education, often for no other reason than having grown up poor.
I work on why disadvantage outlasts the conditions that created it. I am a PhD candidate in economics at the University of Groningen (expected 2027), supervised by Prof. dr. Viola Angelini and Dr. Agnieszka Postepska. My research examines how childhood poverty shapes the returns to education in Indonesia, and how climate shocks, such as Mongolia’s extreme winters (dzud), affect poverty and inequality.
I came to research from the policy side: more than five years as a consultant economist with the World Bank, working on poverty assessments, crisis monitoring, and large-scale household surveys, from instrument design and fieldwork through to published microdata. I hold my work to two standards: it has to stand up methodologically, and it has to matter to the people it describes.
Primary fields: Development economics; Poverty & inequality; Labour & education economics; Climate shocks & household welfare.
Secondary fields: Behavioral & experimental economics; Applied microeconometrics.
Job Market Paper
The Long Shadow: Childhood Poverty and the Returns to Education
Abstract
This study documents substantial heterogeneity in returns to education by childhood poverty status among Indonesian wage workers aged 15–35. Individuals who grew up poor earn only 1.5 percent per additional year of schooling, less than one-fourth of the 6.8 percent earned by those who were never poor. We estimate these returns using a control-function approach that exploits conditional heteroskedasticity for identification in the absence of exclusion restrictions. The control-function coefficient is three times larger among the poor, indicating markedly stronger positive selection into schooling in this group: only individuals with exceptionally favorable unobserved characteristics attain higher levels of education. We also present descriptive evidence of lower skill accumulation per year of schooling and more limited access to high-paying jobs among disadvantaged individuals, patterns consistent with lower marginal returns. These findings highlight the limited equalizing role of education, measured here by years of schooling.
Research
Working Papers
The Cold Shock: Poverty Impacts of Extreme Winter in Mongolia
Abstract
Climate shocks threaten poverty reduction, yet evidence on the poverty effects of cold extremes remains limited. This paper studies Mongolia’s 2023/24 dzud, an extreme winter disaster that killed over eight million livestock in a setting where rural livelihoods remain deeply tied to pastoralism. Using the first nationally representative household panel survey to bracket a major dzud, we exploit spatial variation in winter severity to estimate its effects. Severe exposure prevented a 15.2 percentage-point decline in poverty in the most affected districts, despite a national poverty decline of more than 40 percent over the same period. The effect was concentrated among herders, whose poverty rose sharply while it declined for other groups. The main mechanism was asset destruction, with livestock income accounting for most of the herder income loss. Beyond herders, losses were smaller but concentrated among already-poor households through worsening food insecurity. The findings show that cold extremes can reverse poverty gains by destroying productive assets and weakening food security, even when aggregate poverty is falling.
Work in Progress
- In-Utero Exposure to Mongolia’s Dzud and Long-Term Labor Market Outcomes — a causal mediation analysis through educational attainment (design stage).
Selected Presentations
- The Long Shadow — Asian Economic Development Conference (AEDC), ADB & ADBI, HKUST, Hong Kong, Jun 2026.
- The Cold Shock (with L. Kim) — FEB PhD Conference, University of Groningen, Apr 2026.
- The Long Shadow — Dutch Economists Day (NED), Leiden University (The Hague), Oct 2025.
- The Long Shadow — Frontiers of Causal Inference & Machine Learning (CIML), IMT Lucca, Jul 2025.
Data & Survey Work
A core part of my work is running large household surveys end-to-end with World Bank teams: designing instruments, managing fieldwork across phone, face-to-face, and hybrid modes, and cleaning, documenting, and publicly disseminating the resulting microdata. Together we have carried this through multiple survey rounds covering thousands of households.
Software
Teaching
- Empirical Methods of Economics — University of Groningen, Fall 2026 (incoming). Delivering the empirical/computer-lab sessions of the course (course led by Prof. dr. Viola Angelini).
- Lecturer, Applied Econometrics — Prasetiya Mulya Business School (international undergraduate program), 2019–2022. Panel models, difference-in-differences, discrete-choice models, robust inference.
- Lecturer, Statistics for Business Decision — Gadjah Mada University (pre-MBA, international class), 2019–2020.
Curriculum Vitae
Contact
If you work on poverty, mobility, education, or climate and development, I would be glad to hear what you are working on, and to find where the work overlaps.
Faculty of Economics and Business, University of Groningen, The Netherlands
a.febriady@rug.nl · febriadyade@gmail.com
LinkedIn · ORCID · GitHub
References
- Viola Angelini — University of Groningen (PhD supervisor) — v.angelini@rug.nl
- Agnieszka Postepska — University of Groningen (PhD supervisor) — a.postepska@rug.nl
- Lydia Kim — The World Bank (coauthor) — ykim14@worldbank.org
- Ririn Purnamasari — The World Bank (supervisor at the World Bank) — rpurnamasari@worldbank.org
- Abigail Barr — University of Nottingham (MSc thesis supervisor) — Abigail.Barr@nottingham.ac.uk
- Sudarno Sumarto — SMERU Research Institute (supervisor at TNP2K) — ssumarto@smeru.or.id
- Elan Satriawan — Universitas Gadjah Mada (supervisor at TNP2K; BSc thesis advisor) — esatriawan@ugm.ac.id