Recent cega_wps items

Measuring What Matters: A Guide to Index Creation in Applied Microeconomics

Mon, 4 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Research in development, labor, and health economics increasingly relies on indices to summarize the complex dimensions of human well-being—such as health, wealth, aspirations, and social inclusion—into single measures. Yet too often index construction is often driven by convention and precedent rather than by a clear conceptual framework, leaving little guidance on selecting the appropriate type of index for a given context, the data used to construct it, or the variables included. This paper provides a guide to index construction in applied microeconomics. It categorizes different index types and their appropriate uses, clarifies the tradeoffs between measurement and statistical power, and offers a decision tree to guide selection among approaches such as factor analysis, principal components, and aggregation-based indices. The paper also outlines principles for variable selection via machine learning in high dimensional settings and concludes with an example of index construction...

Beyond Basics: Whole-School Reform and Early Adolescent Development

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This study investigates whether a government-led, whole-school reform in public lower secondary schools can simultaneously reduce dropout and improve both academic and socioemotional outcomes. We employ a prospective difference-in-differences design, using machine learning on nationwide administrative data to match 200 reform schools in Morocco to 100 comparable schools. The analysis uses primary assessment data for 20,036 students and administrative enrollment records for 637,587 observations. After one year, the reform reduced end-of-year dropout by 1.6 percentage points (a 31.4 percent decline), increased learning by 0.52 standard deviations (a 3.3-fold acceleration), and improved a pre-specified index of socioemotional skills by 0.22 standard deviations. These findings demonstrate that government-led interventions can deliver multidimensional benefits during the critical lower secondary school years and highlight the potential of whole-school reform to support adolescent developmen...

Targeting Foundational Skills at Scale: Skill Specificity and Transfer

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Whether targeted foundational instruction yields broad, long-term human capital gains is central to education policy but largely untested. We provide causal evidence from Zambia’s government-run foundational skills program in public primary schools. After two years, a randomized trial shows the program increases literacy by 0.10 and numeracy by 0.15 standard deviations. In mathematics, effects on targeted skills are 2.6 times larger than on comprehensive assessments, without detectable transfer to adjacent domains. Adding professional development doubles per-pupil costs without additional learning gains. Despite limited short-run transfer, event-study estimates show positive effects on grade-7 language and mathematics exam scores in early adolescence.

Cohort profile: Kenya Life Panel Survey

Mon, 9 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

• The Kenya Life Panel Survey (KLPS) is a multigenerational longitudinal dataset originally designed to assess the impacts of a school-based deworming program in Busia District, Kenya initially implemented in 1998-2001.

• Individuals in the original cohort were students attending one of 75 primary schools in Busia District in 1998. This cohort of 7,527 individuals was later expanded to also include 5,153 children of the original cohort members.

• In 2025, members of the original cohort were aged 34 to 45, and second-generation members were aged 7 to 15. Baseline data was collected from original cohort participants between 1998 and 2001, with five rounds of follow-up data collected between 2003 and 2025. Baseline data on second-generation cohort members were collected in 2017-2021, with follow-up data collected in 2023-2025.

• Data include information about education, employment, health, migration, cognition, and expenditures, among other outcomes. Each follow-up...

Why Does Height Pay? Evidence from the Kenya Life Panel Survey

Thu, 29 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Taller people earn more, especially in low- and middle-income countries. We present among the first evidence of this phenomenon in Africa, using longitudinal microdata on a cohort of middle-aged Kenyan adults. We document a substantial height/earnings premium: controlling for gender, age, and other socio-demographics, monthly earnings increase by 1.07% per centimeter (or 2.72% per inch). Nearly half this effect can be explained by differences in cognition, measured from an unusually rich battery containing 27 modules. Additional shares of the premium can be attributed to measures of physical strength and non-cognitive ability. In contrast to prior work, we find little role for occupational sorting: conditional on cognitive and non-cognitive ability, taller people do not appear more likely to work in higher paid sectors. Leveraging repeated measures of height and an instrumental variables specification, we find suggestive evidence that measurement error may be attenuating the estimated...

Self-Detrimental Avoidance of Rest

Mon, 12 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Across many cultures, resting instead of working is viewed as a barrier to higher earnings. This belief is also reflected in many canonical economic models. Recent empirical evidence highlighting the productivity benefits of rest challenges this belief. Yet, existing work tends to ignore individuals’ demand for restful activities and whether it aligns with their returns. In the context of an online labor market experiment in South Africa, we explore whether workers capitalize on the returns to short rest periods. After eliciting demand for rest, we estimate returns to rest for the same individuals and find that mandated rest boosts productivity by 0.3 standard deviations, thus making up for forgone earnings from resting. At the same time, only 19% of workers voluntarily choose to rest. Contrary to the notion of selection on returns, workers with high financial returns to rest do not select into rest. We provide suggestive evidence that misperceived financial returns are driving...

Impacts of Contemporaneous Air Pollution Exposure on Cognitive Performance in Kenya

Mon, 12 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We estimate the short-term cognitive effects of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) exposure using highly time-resolved, individual-level data collected during cognitive testing in Kenya. By linking real-time portable monitor readings to Harmonized Cognitive Assessment Protocol (HCAP) scores, we identify acute impacts of pollution on general and domain-specific cognition. Higher PM2.5 exposure during testing is associated with lower cognitive performance, particularly in memory, executive function, and visuospatial tasks. Nonlinear models suggest threshold effects, with larger declines at higher exposure levels. Notably, effects are significantly larger among more educated individuals, possibly due to greater task demands or lower chronic exposure that limits physiological adaptation. Given that cognitive impairment is evident even at PM2.5 levels below Kenya’s annual regulatory threshold of 35 μg/m3, the findings suggest that short-term exposure may impose underappreciated human...

Hitting Rock Bottom: Economic Hardship and Cheating

Mon, 12 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This paper investigates whether economic hardship undermines preferences for honesty. We use controlled, high-stake measures of cheating for private benefit in a large sample of 5,664 Kenyans, exploiting three complementary sources of variation: experimentally manipulated monetary incentives to cheat, a randomized increase in the salience of one’s own financial situation, and the Covid‐19 income shock (exploiting randomized survey timing, with respondents interviewed before vs. during the crisis). We find that cheating behavior is highly responsive to financial incentives in the experiment. Covid-19 economic hardship—marked by a 51% drop in monthly earnings—leads to a sharp increase in the prevalence of cheating, and the effect increases gradually with prolonged hardship. The effects are largest among the most economically impacted and are amplified when the salience of one’s own financial situation is experimentally increased. The results demonstrate that while most individuals...

Mapping on a Budget: Optimizing Spatial Data Collection for ML

Wed, 8 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In applications across agriculture, ecology, and human development, machine learning with satellite imagery (SatML) is limited by the sparsity of labeled training data. While satellite data cover the globe, labeled training datasets for SatML are often small, spatially clustered, and collected for other purposes (e.g., administrative surveys or field measurements). Despite the pervasiveness of this issue in practice, past SatML research has largely focused on new model architectures and training algorithms to handle scarce training data, rather than modeling data conditions directly. This leaves scientists and policymakers who wish to use SatML for large-scale monitoring uncertain about whether and how to collect additional data to maximize performance. Here, we present the first problem formulation for the optimization of spatial training data in the presence of heterogeneous data collection costs and realistic budget constraints, as well as novel methods for addressing this...

Navigating Business Interactions: Female Entrepreneurs’ Preferences over Gender, Timing, and Harassment Reputation

Thu, 18 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This paper examines an underexplored determinant of women’s business performance: the preferences female entrepreneurs hold over the types of customers and suppliers they want to engage with and the environments they seek to avoid. We study how female entrepreneurs trade off profit against attributes of potential business interactions - specifically the gender of a counterpart, the timing of meetings, and whether potential partners have a reputation for harassment. Using both incentivized and hypothetical discrete choice experiments (DCEs) with 903 female entrepreneurs in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, we find that women are willing to accept lower profits to work with other women, meet during the day, and avoid counterparts known for harassing behavior. These preferences cannot be explained by expectations of higher productivity and are consistent with broader patterns of business behavior. Survey data confirm the prevalence of harassment and the relevance of these trade-offs:...

Financial Literacy and Entrepreneurial Aspirations: Results from Pilot Experiments in India, Peru, and Uganda

Wed, 17 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Much recent research has sought ways to raise the impact of microcredit in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). One set of interventions has addressed hard skills, often aimed at promoting business skills and financial literacy among microentrepreneurs. Another set of interventions has addressed socio-emotional skills such as the development of self-efficacy, entrepreneurial confidence, and aspirations. We present results from three small randomized controlled trials in India, Peru, and Uganda, each with four treatment arms in which we randomized a mobile-phone-based app designed to teach financial literacy, a video documentary intervention designed to boost entrepreneurial aspirations and goal-setting, the combination of these two interventions, and a control group. Results show positive and significant effects from both interventions, where the financial literacy app increased overall financial literacy by approximately 0.28σ both as a solo intervention and when combined...

Can Cash Transfers Save Lives? Evidence from a Large-Scale Experiment in Kenya

Tue, 9 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We estimate the impacts of large-scale unconditional cash transfers on child survival. One-time transfers of USD 1000 were provided to over 10,500 poor households across 653 randomized villages in Kenya. We collected census data on over 100,000 births, including on mortality and cause of death, and detailed data on household health behaviors. Unconditional cash transfers (accounting for spillovers) lead to 48% fewer infant deaths before age one and 45% fewer child deaths before age five. Detailed data on cause of death, transfer timing relative to birth, and the location of health facilities indicate that unconditional cash transfers and access to delivery care are complements in generating mortality reductions: the largest gains are estimated in neonatal and maternal causes of death largely preventable by appropriate obstetric care and among households living close to physician-staffed facilities and those who receive the transfer around the time of birth, and treatment leads...

Assessing Reproducibility in Economics Using Standardized Crowd-sourced Analysis

Wed, 6 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This paper presents a framework to standardize crowd-sourced computational reproductions in economics through the Social Science Reproduction Platform (SSRP). The approach address four main challenges for computational reproductions: a lack of standardization, aggregation issues,existing incentives for “adversarial” interactions, and the loss of knowledge from analyses that are never published. We then summarize the first 487 reproductions uploaded on the SSRP. The results show substantial heterogeneity in the ability to successfully reproduce empirical results in economics research, with approximately 30% of recent studies meeting at least a basic definition of being computationally reproducible.

Housing subsidies for refugees: Experimental evidence on life outcomes and social integration in Jordan

Thu, 30 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Refugees require assistance for basic needs like housing but local host communities may feel excluded from that assistance, potentially affecting community relations. This study experimentally evaluates the effect of a housing assistance program for Syrian refugees in Jordan on both the recipients and their neighbors. The program offered full rental subsidies and landlord incentives for housing improvements, but saw only moderate uptake, in part due to landlord reluctance. The program improved short-run housing quality and lowered housing expenditures, but did not yield sustained economic benefits, partly due to redistribution of aid. The program unexpectedly led to a deterioration in child socio-emotional well-being, and also strained relations between Jordanian neighbors and refugees. In all, housing subsidies had limited measurable benefits for refugee well-being while worsening social cohesion, highlighting the possible need for alternative forms of aid.

Beliefs, Signal Quality, and Information Sources: Experimental Evidence on Air Quality in Pakistan

Wed, 29 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We study how information sources as a signal of service quality shape consumers’ beliefs about and demand for air quality forecast services. We provide day-ahead SMS forecasts in Lahore, Pakistan, randomiz- ing whether the forecast is attributed to the government or an NGO. Respondents do not have differential demand by the assigned source but believe the government’s forecasts are worse than the NGO’s. The results demonstrate that consumers expect lower accuracy from the gov- ernment, have a limited willingness to pay for accuracy, and prefer the assigned source as they learn about its service quality.

A Comparison of Contests and Contracts to Deliver Cost-Effective Energy Conservation

Wed, 29 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A long-standing economic problem is how to incentivize costly but unobservable effort. Contests and contracts have been used in various settings where output, rather than effort, is contractible. We conduct a field experiment to compare the effectiveness of contests and tiered contracts in promoting energy conservation among households. While both mechanisms achieve similar energy savings relative to a control group (7 to 9 percent reductions), contests reduce energy use at half the cost. We develop and structurally estimate a model of energy consumption based on our experimental data. For the same budget, we show that an optimal contest dominates optimal contracts. We calculate the marginal abatement cost at USD 59.45-76.72/Mt CO2 not accounting for utility savings or social value of avoided blackouts from peak demand reduction. Our findings contribute to the design of demand-side management policies in the residential electricity sector, particularly in low- and middle-income...

Does signaling college-level human capital matter? An experimental study in India

Mon, 11 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

We measure the impact of two main signals of tertiary-level human capital accumulation, college quality and certification, on hiring in India. Using a correspondence experiment, we send 16,944 resumes to 1,412 job postings for recent engineering graduates at small and medium firms. We do not find evidence that either of the two signals that we consider have effects on callbacks separately. Specifically, the impact of having graduated from a mid-tier college ranked in the top 300 relative to an unranked college outside of the top 1000 is close to zero and precisely estimated, despite significant government investment in ranking colleges in India. There is also a precisely estimated null effect of scoring in the highest as opposed to the lowest quartile of a post-tertiary certification test that has been taken by millions of graduating students. Resumes with female names modestly benefit in this first stage of the hiring process.

Slack and Economic Development

Tue, 22 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Slack – the underutilization of factors of production – varies systematically with economic development. Using novel and detailed measures of the utilization of labor and capital from a large representative sample of firms in rural and urban Kenya, we show that utilization is increasing in firm size, market access, and economic activity. We present a model of firm capacity choice where indivisibility in at least one input is a key driver of slack. We embed the model in spatial general equilibrium, with features characteristic of low-income settings – including many small firms and high transport costs – and show that it rationalizes both the endogenous emergence of slack in steady-state and elastic aggregate supply curves. We empirically validate model predictions using reduced-form estimates of the general equilibrium effects of cash transfers from a large-scale RCT in Kenya. The parsimonious model replicates much of the experimental evidence, predicting a large real multiplier...

Digital Financial Services and Women’s Empowerment: Experimental Evidence from Tanzania

Thu, 26 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Can increasing women’s use of digital financial services raise their empowerment? We test this hypothesis using a randomized control trial with 152 female microfinance groups in Tanzania, where treated groups were randomly switched to repay their loan using mobile money instead of cash. This exogenous shift in women’s use of mobile money for loan repayment substantially increases their use for other types of transactions. Women’s control over their finances increases, they have higher levels of empowerment in the household and expenditures shift towards goods plausibly aligned with their preferences. These findings highlight the benefits of greater use of digital technologies for women.

Enabling Humanitarian Applications with Targeted Differential Privacy

Wed, 4 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The proliferation of mobile phones in low- and middle-income countries has suddenly and dramatically increased the extent to which the world’s poorest and most vulnerable populations can be observed and tracked by governments and corporations. Millions of historically “off the grid” individuals are now passively generating digital data; these data, in turn, are being used to make life-altering decisions about those individuals — including whether or not they receive government benefits, and whether they qualify for a consumer loan. This paper develops an approach to implementing algorithmic decisions based on personal data, while also providing formal privacy guarantees to data subjects. The approach adapts differential privacy to applications that require decisions about individuals, and gives decision makers granular control over the level of privacy guaranteed to data subjects. We show that stronger privacy guarantees typically come at some cost, and use data from two real...

Searching with Inaccurate Priors in Consumer Credit Markets

Mon, 26 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

How do inaccurate priors about the distribution of interest rates affect search and outcomes in consumer credit markets? Consumer credit markets feature large amounts of within-borrower price dispersion in interest rates; if consumers are unaware of the extent of this price dispersion, they may shop less and take out loans at higher interest rates than they would otherwise. We conducted a randomized controlled trial with 112,063 loan seekers in Chile where we showed treated participants a price comparison tool that we built using administrative data from Chile’s financial regulator. The tool shows loan seekers a conditional distribution of interest rates based on similar loans obtained recently by similar borrowers, using data on the universe of consumer loans merged with borrower characteristics. We also cross-randomized whether we asked participants their priors about the distribution of interest rates. We find that consumers thought interest rates were lower than they actually...

More than particulates matter: Multiple pollutants and productivity in Indian call centers

Thu, 6 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

We measure the impact of three components of air pollution on daily labor productivity in call centers in five Indian cities. We find that a one standard deviation increase in fine particulate matter (PM_2.5), a pollutant that has been the primary focus of the literature on the harms of air pollution, has a large negative effect of 0.15σ on an index of intensive margin productivity. Notably, we find a comparable negative effect for a one standard deviation increase in carbon monoxide (CO) of 0.14σ as well as a negative effect of 0.09σ from ozone (O₃). For one of our main productivity variables, the number of calls per shift, one standard deviation increases in PM_2.5, CO and O₃ lead to declines relative to the mean of 11.8%, 10.6% and 6.0%, respectively. In summing air pollution harms across our sample, CO is responsible for more than half of the total productivity lost, which is more than double the losses attributable to PM_2.5....

Incentives and Endorsement for Technology Adoption: Evidence from Mobile Banking in Ghana

Tue, 2 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

How can we encourage the adoption of new digital financial services? We use an RCT with 115 microfinance groups in Ghana to understand the respective roles of individual incentives to adopt a new technology and endorsement of the technology from a trusted peer. We study this in the context of mobile banking services, a technology allowing transfers between a mobile phone and bank account, dramatically lowering the costs of accessing the bank account. We find that while individual incentives increase adoption of mobile banking services by 50%, adding endorsement by a peer doubles the impact of the individual subsidy alone. Peer endorsement is particularly effective at increasing confidence in dealing with fraud and peer interaction around mobile banking. The increased use of mobile banking services leads to 30% higher savings in the linked bank account 6 months later. Our study highlights the importance of peers in encouraging technology adoption and facilitating formal financial...

Implementer Desirability Bias in Program Evaluation

Wed, 20 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Development interventions are commonly piloted by organizations with strong community ties. Reminding beneficiaries that a pilot is being evaluated may prompt them to take costly actions that reflect favorably on the implementer. We test for this form of desirability bias in an evaluation of an unsuccessful agricultural extension pilot that ultimately drove treated farmers away from the target crops. Making the evaluation salient during endline data collection led participants to neutralize this negative treatment effect by altering input purchases and cultivation patterns. Participants’ desire to support implementers can help explain why promising pilot results frequently fail to replicate at scale.

Expected Discrimination and Job Search

Wed, 20 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The ultimate impact of labor market discrimination depends not only on whether employers discriminate but also on job seekers’ responses to (expected) discrimination. We ran three field experiments with 2,200 job seekers to study these responses in the context of Rio de Janeiro’s favelas. In this sample, over 80% of job seekers overestimate anti-favela discrimination, as we measure it in a new audit study. We partnered with a private firm with real job openings to estimate how expected discrimination affects job application behavior and interview performance. Interview performance is 0.13 SD higher for job seekers randomly told that their interviewer would know only their name, as opposed to their name and address. In contrast, average job application rates are unaffected by (i) removing the need to declare an address at the application stage, and (ii) information that we did not find evidence of discrimination in our audit study. White job seekers are an exception since removing...

Improving livelihoods outcomes for forcibly displaced populations: a Rapid Review

Wed, 20 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Globally, the number of forcibly displaced individuals has surpassed 100 million, with approximately80 percent situated in low- or middle-income countries. In these resource-constrained settings the magnitude and protracted nature of displacement poses an increasing challenge. Recent policy discourse has begun to shift away from emergency response interventions towards those that promote investments inthe human capital and self-reliance of displaced populations. This paper reviews evidence of the impacts and costs of eleven interventions designed to improve the livelihoods of forcibly displaced people in low-and middle-income settings. The study team finds suggestive evidence that graduation-style approaches and cash transfers can improve people’s self-employment, wages, engagement in paid work and wellbeing. However, too few studies have been conducted among the exact populations and settings of interest to discern clear strategies for adapting interventions for success in every...

Discrimination and Access to Capital: Experimental Evidence from Ethiopia

Fri, 3 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Access to capital is critical to business growth and productivity, yet female business owners are less likely to receive formal financing. Using a large-scale field experiment in Ethiopia, we show that gender discrimination by financial providers is unlikely to be a key contributor to this gap, and that there is no meaningful trade-off between gender equity and allocating capital to high-performing businesses. We study whether finan- cial providers discriminated against female owners in a high-stakes capital allocation decision affecting real businesses in a national business plan competition. In a sample of 3,696 evaluations, we find no evidence that randomly assigned business-owner gender affected capital allocation decisions, neither for the competition prizes nor for consid- eration for a loan. Our confidence intervals are tight enough to exclude any meaningful gender discrimination in these decisions. Consistent with the lack of discrimination, an incentivized belief elicitation...

The Fine Line between Nudging and Nagging: Increasing Take-up Rates through Social Media Platforms

Fri, 3 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This study assesses if nudges in the form of informational videos sent via WhatsAppare effective in boosting take-up rates among vulnerable populations, specifically in the context of a regularization program for Venezuelan forced migrants in Colombia. The study randomly assigned 1,375 eligible migrants to receive one of three informational videos or be in a control group. The videos aimed at solving issues related to awareness, trust, and bottlenecks in the step-by-step registration. The main results indicate that program take-up rates for individuals who received any video, were eight percentage points lower compared to the control group. The effects are mostly driven by the treated individuals who received the links but did not watch the videos, who are older, busier, and with less internet access relative to other treated individuals. Additionally, the study evaluates the effectiveness of iterative WhatsApp surveys in collecting data from hard-to-reach populations. It finds...

Unintended Consequences of Youth Entrepreneurship Programs: Experimental Evidence from Rwanda

Mon, 23 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The persistently high employment share of the informal sector makes entrepreneurship a necessity for youth in many developing countries. We exploit exogenous variation in the implementation of Rwanda’s entrepreneurship education reform in secondary schools to evaluate its effect on student economic outcomes up to three years after graduation. Using a randomized controlled trial, we evaluated a three-year intensive training for entrepreneurship teachers, finding pedagogical changes as intended and increased entrepreneurial activity among students. In this paper, we tracked students following graduation and found that increased entrepreneurship persisted one year later, in 2019. Students from treated schools were six percentage points more likely to be entrepreneurs, an increase of 19 percent over the control mean. However, gains in entrepreneurship faded after three years, in 2021. Employment was six percentage points lower in the treatment group. By some measures, income and profits...

Preparing for an Aging Africa: Data- Driven Priorities for Economic Research and Policy

Tue, 10 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The over-60 population in Sub-Saharan Africa is expected to grow rapidly in the coming decades, tripling between 2020 and 2050. Despite this explosive projected growth, few countries in the region have implemented policies designed to support older populations. Further, little research in economics has specifically examined aging in Sub-Saharan Africa, though many opportunities exist for economists to generate research evidence to inform the design of effective policies in this area. This paper combines insights from a cross-disciplinary review with original data analysis to characterize the challenges and opportunities facing older Sub-Saharan Africans in domains such as health and financial security. Informed by these findings, the paper identifies directions for future economic research and discusses policy recommendations, including the need to reform health care systems and expand pension and other public support programs to prepare for an aging Africa.

The spread of (mis)information: A social media experiment in Pakistan

Tue, 19 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This study examines how controlling misinformation on a social media platform in Pakistan affects users’ exposure to both accurate and false information. It combines an intervention to disseminate official information about the COVID-19 pandemic across the platform with a randomized experiment that measures the impact of fully controlling access to pandemic-related misinformation. The treatments rely on a higher-intensity, ex ante approach to moderating misinformation on the platform relative to the control, which relies on a typical ex post approach to moderation. Fully controlling misinformation, as in the treatments, reduces the number of daily users by 19%, indicating a distaste for moderation. Furthermore, the treatments reduce exposure to official information by 29% more than they reduce exposure to misinformation. A conceptual framework posits that these findings can be explained by the fact that, in this setting, official information is more trusted, and thus is more widely...

Big Data Privacy in Emerging Market Fintech and Financial Services: A Research Agenda

Tue, 22 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The data revolution in low- and middle-income countries is quickly transforming how companies approach emerging markets. As mobile phones and mobile money proliferate, they generate new streams of data that enable innovation in consumer finance, credit, and insurance. Already, this new generation of products are being used by hundreds of millions of consumers, often to use financial services for the first time. However, the collection, analysis, and use of these data, particularly from economically disadvantaged populations, raises serious privacy concerns. This white paper describes a research agenda to advance our understanding of the problem and solution space of data privacy in emerging market fintech and financial services. We highlight five priority areas for research: conducting comprehensive landscape analyses; understanding local definitions of “data privacy”; doc-umenting key sources of risk, and potential technical solutions (such as differential privacy and homomorphic...

The Electoral Consequences of Mass Religious Events: India’s Kumbh Mela

Mon, 21 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Mass ritualized gatherings like pilgrimages are central to religious practice globally. Do they generate votes for religious parties? The events may heighten religiosity, enlarging support for parties seen as owning religious policy issues. Such parties might also co-opt the events to organize and campaign. We evaluate the electoral impact of India’s Kumbh Mela, a Hindu festival considered the world’s biggest human assembly, leveraging its astrologically determined timing combined with districts’ proximity by rail to the festival sites. The Kumbh Mela boostsHindu nationalists’ vote share. Mechanisms tests suggest it does so by increasing religious orthodoxy—seen in the adoption of Brahminical dietary practices—and by strengthening Hindu nationalist party infrastructure. Communal violence is unaffected, but the events are electorally polarizing; they cause India’s main secular-leaning party to perform better in regions with denser concentrations of religious minorities. Our study...

Pathways to Choice: A Bundled Intervention against Child Marriage

Wed, 16 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

We undertake a randomized evaluation of “Pathways to Choice”, which provides mentored girls’ clubs, life skills, and vocational training to empower adolescent girls to delay marriage and pursue education in Northern Nigeria. Two years post-intervention, adolescent girls in treated communities are 65 percentage points less likely to be married, estimates an order of magnitude larger than comparable interventions. An important channel is the program’s effects on educational uptake, which increases by 69 percentage points among the treated. However, the effects on education are themselves insufficient to fully explain the effects on child marriage, suggesting the bundled nature of the program is essential to its success. We argue that the whole community focus of the program reduces the likelihood of social backlash, allowing Pathways to produce large effects on entrenched, normative behavior.

How Syrian Refugees Engage with Online Information

Mon, 14 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Despite an emergent body of literature examining refugees’ use of online tools to access information, little is known about what types of information refugees encounter or engage with. Analyzing 143,201 posts and 802,173 comments on public Arabic-language Facebook pages targeting Syrian refugees from 2013 to 2018, we systematically describe one of Syrian refugees’ most popular online information ecosystems. Additionally, we use engagement and comment data to develop organic measures of refugees’ interactions with different information sources. We find that posts linking to official sources of information garnered more engagement than those containing unofficial information or news media content, regardless of the topic or tone of the message. Disaggregating our data over time reveals that official sources did not receive higher levels of engagement until early 2016, when new official sources created by govern-ments and NGOs became active online and began to more consistently provide...

Poverty and Prejudice Before Genocide

Mon, 14 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Genocides rank among the darkest episodes in our history. What drives prejudice against targeted outgroups in the lead-up to mass killings? We theorize the role played by democratization, ethnoreligious threat perceptions, and economic discontent in generating antiminority hatred. We assess these factors’ predictive strength using a new 22,000-person survey of Islamophobia in Myanmar, fielded shortly before the 2017 ethnic cleansing of the country’s Muslim Rohingya population. Integrating survey responses with administrative data, events data, and geodata, we document a robust association between poverty and anti-Muslim attitudes among members of Myanmar’s Buddhist majority. The relationship holds ecologically and by individual. Further tests point to scapegoating rather than resource competition as the most likely mechanism. Other commonly cited drivers of intolerance receive little empirical support. By leveraging a critical contemporary case, our paper sheds light on the material...

Impact of Facilitating Ntegration in Migrant's Fertility Decisions

Wed, 9 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

How does facilitating the economic integration of migrants change migrant’s fertility decisions? We leverage a panel survey representative of Venezuelan irregular migrants in Colombia to compare the fertility decisions of eligible and ineligible households before and after a large migratory amnesty was launched in Colombia in 2018. The amnesty granted irregular migrants a labor permit and access to full social services. Our results suggest that the amnesty lowered the likelihood of having a child among program beneficiaries, possibly driven by better labor market opportunities for women and better access to family planning through health services.

Privacy Guarantees for Personal Mobility Data in Humanitarian Response

Wed, 9 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Personal mobility data from mobile phones and other sensors are increasingly used to inform policymaking during pandemics,natural disasters, and other humanitarian crises. However, even aggregated mobility traces can reveal private informationabout individual movements to potentially malicious actors. This paper develops and tests an approach for releasing privatemobility data, which provides formal guarantees over the privacy of the underlying subjects. Specifically, we (1) introduce an algorithm for constructing differentially private mobility matrices, and derive privacy and accuracy bounds on this algorithm; (2) use real-world data from mobile phone operators in Afghanistan and Rwanda to show how this algorithm can enable the use of private mobility data in two high-stakes policy decisions: pandemic response and the distribution of humanitarian aid; and (3) discuss practical decisions that need to be made when implementing this approach, such as how to optimally balance privacy...

Improving school management in low and middle income countries: A systematic review

Tue, 18 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Improving school quality in low and middle income countries (LMICs) is a global priority. One way to improve quality may be to improve the management skills ofschool leaders. In this systematic review, we analyze the impact of interventionstargeting school leaders’ management practices on student learning. We begin bydescribing the characteristics and responsibilities of school leaders using data from large, multi-country surveys. Second, we review the literature and conduct a meta-analysis of the causal effect of school management interventions on student learning, using 39 estimates from 20 evaluations. We estimate a statistically significant improvement in student learning of 0.04 standard deviations. We show that effect sizes are not related to program scale or intensity. We complement the meta-analysis by identifying common limitations to program effectiveness through a qualitative assessment of the studies included in our review. We find three main factors which mitigate...

Intergenerational Child Mortality Impacts of Deworming: Experimental Evidence from Two Decades of the Kenya Life Panel Survey

Tue, 9 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

We assess the impacts of a randomized school-based deworming intervention in Kenya on the mortality of recipients’ children using a 23-year longitudinal data set of over 6,500 original participants and their offspring. The under-5 mortality rate fell by 22% (17 deaths per 1000 live births) for children of treatment group individuals. We find that a combination of improved health, education, and living standards, increased urban residence, delayed fertility, and greater use of health care in the parent generation contributed to the reduction. The results provide evidence for meaningful intergenerational benefits of child health investments

Donor Contracting Conditions and Public Procurement: Causal Evidence from Kenyan Electrification

Mon, 17 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

There is limited causal evidence on the effects of different public procurement regulations on project quality and value-for-money for projects funded by national governments and foreign aid donors. This paper uses policy and experimental variation to study how two key contracting features—namely, contract bundling and monitoring—affect outcomes of a large economic development project. We leverage an unusual feature of Kenya’s nationwide electrification program: the quasi-random allocation of multilateral funding sources across nearby villages. African Development Bank (AfDB) projects used bundled contracts while the World Bank (WB) employed unbundled contracts together with strengthened inspections. To measure impacts, we collect on-the-ground engineering assessments, power quality data, household surveys, and analyze original contracts. The analysis suggests a stark trade-off: WB procedures delayed construction completion by 16 months relative to AfDB sites but improved construction...

Competitive Model Selection in Algorithmic Targeting

Mon, 3 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

We study how market competition influences the algorithmic design choices of firms in the context of targeting. Firms face a general bias-variance trade-off when choosing the design of a supervised learning algorithm in terms of model complexity or the number of predictors. Each firm has a data analyst who uses the chosen algorithm to estimate demand for multiple consumer segments, based on which, it devises a targeting policy to maximize estimated profits. We show that competition induces firms to strategically choose simpler algorithms which involve more bias but lower variance. Therefore, more complex/flexible algorithms may have higher value for firms with greater monopoly power.

Searching for Customers, Finding Pollution

Wed, 22 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In developing countries, most manufacturing firms are small and located in high-density urban areas, often near congested streets. To study the determinants and implications of this location choice, we collect a novel firm survey and detailed air pollution measurements within Ugandan cities. We find that firms locate on the busiest roads searching for customer visibility, but in doing so they expose their workers to substantial pollution. This sorting pattern increases profits, but with severe health costs: if firms were randomly located across space, annual profits would decrease by $195 for the average firm, but its workers’ life expectancy would increase by two months. ...

Expectations and Adaptation to Environmental Threats

Fri, 27 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Scarce information and human capital may make it difficult for residents of developingcountries to produce accurate forecasts, limiting responses to uncertain future eventslike air pollution. We study two randomized interventions in Lahore, Pakistan: 1)provision of air pollution forecasts; 2) general training in forecasting. Both reducedsubjects’ own air pollution forecast errors; the training effect suggests that modesteducational interventions can durably improve forecasting skills. Forecast receipt increased demand for protective masks and increased the responsiveness of outdoor time to pollution. Forecast recipients were willing to pay 60 percent of the cost of mobile internet for continued access.

High-resolution rural poverty mapping in Pakistan with ensemble deep learning

Fri, 27 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

High-resolution poverty mapping supports evidence-based policy and research, yet about half of countries lack the requisite survey data to generate useful poverty maps. To overcome this challenge, new non-traditional data sources and deep learning techniques are increasingly used to create small-area estimates of poverty in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) trained on satellite imagery are one of the most popular and effective approaches in this literature. However, the spatial resolution of poverty estimates has remained quite coarse, particularly in rural areas which are critical for governments to support. To resolve this, we use an ensemble transfer learning approach involving three CNN models to predict chronic poverty at a finer 1 km2 scale in rural Sindh, Pakistan. We train the model with spatially noisy georeferenced household survey containing poverty scores for 1.9 million anonymized households in Sindh Province using publicly...

Reducing Misinformation in a Polarized Context: Experimental Evidence from Côte d’Ivoire

Thu, 22 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Misinformation has deleterious and potentially destabilizing effects on democracy. As a result, scholars and practitioners alike are investigating strategies to reduce the belief in and dissemination of misinformation. A common strategy is a digital literacy intervention to increase individual capacity to identify misinformation online. This, we argue, ignores identity-based motivations to consume biased media. We offer a theoretical framework that highlights the limitations of strategies that ignore individuals’ directional motives. We propose three interventions that leverage insights on how social identity shapes behavior, and test each with an information experiment in Côte d’Ivoire, a polarized country. We find that a standard digital literacy intervention fails to curb the belief in and spread of misinformation, while our social-identity-based interventions limited both. Our findings confirm that misinformation spreads at least in part because individuals are motivated to...

Measuring Religion from Behavior: Climate Shocks and Religious Adherence in Afghanistan

Thu, 22 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Religious adherence has been hard to study in part because it is hard to measure. We develop a new measure of religious adherence, which is granular in both time and space, using anonymized mobile phone transaction records. After validating the measure with traditional data, we show how it can shed light on the natureof religious adherence in Islamic societies. Exploiting random variation in climate, we find that as economic conditions in Afghanistan worsen, people become more religiously observant. The effects are most pronounced in areas where droughts have the biggest economic consequences, such as croplands without access to irrigation.

Money (Not) to Burn: Payments for Ecosystem Services to Reduce Crop Residue Burning

Thu, 22 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Particulate matter significantly reduces life expectancy in India. We use a randomized controlled trial in the Indian state of Punjab to evaluate the effectiveness of conditional cash transfers (also known as payments for ecosystem services, or PES) in reducing crop residue burning, which is a major contributor to the region’s poor air quality. Credit constraints and distrust may make farmers less likely to comply with standard PES contracts, which only pay the participant after verification of compliance. We randomize paying a portion of the money upfront and unconditionally. Despite receiving a lower reward for compliance, farmers offered partial upfront payment are 8-12 percentage points more likely to comply than are farmers offered the standard contract. Burning measures derived from satellite imagery indicate that PES with upfront payments significantly reduced burning, while standard PES payments were inframarginal. We also show that PES with an upfront component is a cost-effective...

Political Organizations and Political Scope

Tue, 13 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Political checks and balances make different organs of government complementary in the exercise of power. We study how a party organization can seek and abuse these comple-mentarities to expand its influence. We combine data from the Indian state of West Bengal on elections across different levels of government. These are matched to 300 million pay-ments from a welfare scheme that requires approval from both state and local governments. Using a multidimensional close election design, we study the consequences of co-partisan alignment between these two tiers. The state government gives disproportionate funding to co-partisan local officials, who target core supporters to raise votes for co-partisan national candidates. Local officials are rewarded through diverted welfare payments, including a per-formance bonus immediately after the national election. The ruling party expands its power by recruiting opposition candidates in strategically important local councils, bringing even...

Hope and Poverty in Development Economics: Emerging Insights and Frontiers

Tue, 6 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This paper describes emerging work in development economics at the intersection of hope, poverty and material prosperity. We blend Sen’s capability approach and Snyder’s hope theory to provide a conceptual framework for integrating hope into development eco-nomics. This framework emphasizes the interplay of internal and external constraints, belief updating and differential malleability of hope between children and adults. The paper then surveys the recent literature in development economics related to Snyder’s components of hope: aspirations, pathways and agency. This survey focuses primarily on the domains of education, employment and enterprise and uses the Sen-Snyder framework to synthesize patterns in these results. It concludes with a discussion of promising research frontiers for development economists, including the need to understand how complementarities between hope components shape realized outcomes and to accommodate distinctive features of hope as it is experienced...

Microequity and Mutuality: Experimental Evidence on Credit with Performance-Contingent Repayment

Tue, 6 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

We conduct the first field experiment of a performance-contingent microfinance contract. A large food multinational wishes to help micro-distributors in its supply chain with the financing of a productive asset. Working with the firm in Kenya, we compare asset financing under a traditional debt contract to three alternatives: (i) a novel equity-like financing contract, (ii) a hybrid debt-equity contract, and (iii) an index-insurance financing contract. Experimental results reveal large positive impacts from the contractual innovations. These findings demonstrate the economic appeal of microfinance contracts that leverage improved observability of performance to achieve a greater sharing of risk and reward.

Public Attention and Environmental Action: Evidence from Fires in the Amazon

Tue, 6 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

International agreements to reduce anthropogenic environmental disasters rely on public pressure driving local action. We study whether focused media and increased public outcry can drive local environmental action, reducing environmental damage. Although an annual affair, forest fires in the Brazilian Amazon received unprecedented public scrutiny in August 2019. Comparing active fires in Brazil versus those in Peru and Bolivia in a difference-in-differences design, we find that increased public attention reduced fires by 22% avoiding 24.8 million MtCO2 in emissions. Our results highlight the power of public attention to compel local action on pressing environmental issues.

Banking on Transparency for the Poor: Experimental Evidence from India

Mon, 15 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Do information frictions limit the benefits of financial inclusion drives for the rural poor? We evaluate an experimental intervention among poor Indian women receiving digital cash transfers. Treated women got automated voice calls detailing transactions posted to their accounts. Treatment increased knowledge of account balances and trust in local banking agents. Indicative of improved consumption-smoothing, administrative data show that treated women accessed transfers faster, with impacts dissipating once notifications were discontinued. Consistent with account information benefiting those with high transaction costs more, the intervention increased account use among women who lived more than an hour from the kiosk

Integrating Biometric Authentication in India’s Welfare Programs: Lessons from a Decade of Reforms

Mon, 1 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

India’s biometric unique ID Aadhaar has been at the forefront of the global revolution in digital identification, and India’s most significant investment in state capacity over the past decade. Yet, its application to social protection programs has been controversial. Proponents claim that the use of Aadhaar to identify and authenticate beneficiaries in these programs has led to considerable fiscal savings, while critics claim that it has led to denial of benefits to the marginalized and caused substantial harm. We review research on the use and impact of Aadhaar in social programs in India over the last decade. Our main takeaway from the review is that biometric authentication has reduced leakage in multiple settings, but its impact on beneficiaries depends crucially on the protocols and details of implementation. We conclude with a list of policy suggestions for obtaining the benefits of Aadhaar while minimizing the risk of harm to beneficiaries.

Targeting impact versus deprivation

Fri, 29 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Targeting is a core element of anti-poverty program design, with benefits typically targeted to those most “deprived" in some sense (e.g., consumption, wealth). A large literature in economics examines how to best identify these households feasibly at scale, usually via proxy means tests (PMTs). We ask a different question, namely, whether targeting the most deprived has the greatest social welfare benefit: in particular, are the most deprived those with the largest treatment effects or do the “poorest of the poor" sometimes lack the circumstances and complementary inputs or skills to take full advantage of assistance? We explore this potential trade-off in the context of an NGO cash transfer program in Kenya, utilizing recent advances in machine learning (ML) methods (specifically, generalized random forests) to learn PMTs that target both a) deprivation and b) high conditional average treatment effects across several policy-relevant outcomes. We found that targeting solely on...

Political Selection in Local Elections: Evidence from Rural Uganda

Fri, 29 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Political selection is crucial to the quality of governance. Yet our general knowledge of the individual characteristics that correlate with the political selection process is scant. Our paper contributes to this knowledge gap by collecting detailed data on the quality, perceptions, attitudes, and promises of all candidates involved in a recent local election in rural Uganda. Our context is unique - with two separate governing bodies for males and females. The paper demonstrates, that male and female political selection into these two parallel institutions share important similarities but also differ along several dimensions.

Graduation Programs Targeting Women: Evidence from the Democratic Republic of Congo

Fri, 29 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

We study the impact of a graduation program for ultra-poor women in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, a war-torn area. We cross-randomized the primary treatment–a holistic set of services and financial support–with a 16-week men’s engagement program (MEP) for spouses and male household members. The core treatment has large effects on consumption, employment and finances, women’s empowerment, and health, with most effects still significant two years after the program start and an internal rate of return of 19.9 percent. We find heterogeneous effects on intimate partner violence, which decreased for women at high risk of violence but increased for women at low risk. The MEP yields no lasting additional impacts. Multifaceted programs targeting women can be an effective way to lift people out of poverty and increase women’s empowerment, although care is needed to minimize backlash.

Risk Pooling and Precautionary Saving in Village Economies

Fri, 29 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

We propose a new method to test for eﬃcient risk pooling that allows for intertemporal smoothing, non-homothetic consumption, and heterogeneous risk and time preferences. The method is composed of three steps. The ﬁrst one allows for precautionary savings by the aggregate risk pooling group. The second utilizes the inverse Engel curve to estimate good-speciﬁc tests for eﬃcient risk pooling. In the third step, we obtain consistent estimates of households’ risk and time preferences using a full risk sharing model, and incorporate heterogeneous preferences in testing for risk pooling. We apply this method to panel data from Indian villages to generate a number of new insights. We ﬁnd that food expenditures are better protected from aggregate shocks than non-food consumption, after accounting for non-homotheticity. Village-level consumption tracks aggregate village cash-in-hand, suggesting some form of coordinated precautionary savings. But there is considerable excess sensitivity...

SMS Training and Micro-Entrepreneurship Performance

Wed, 25 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The paper provides evidence of the effectiveness of massively scalable automated SMS business training. The training has very low marginal costs and requires only basic cell phone coverage for enrollment. We conducted a large-scale Randomized Control Trial in which we randomly manipulated the timing of delivery of the training to small shopkeepers in Kenya. In particular, the treatment group obtained financial resilience training during the December 2020 holidays, while the control group obtained the same module in November 2020. This timing manipulation successfully led to a higher intensity of received training in the treatment group. We find that the treatment group reports larger monthly revenue, greater financial resilience, more extensive usage of formal book-keeping, and a better self-reported understanding of financial concepts.

The competitive effects of entry in the deregulated Mexican gasoline market

Wed, 25 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The success of market deregulation in low- and middle-income countries depends on the strength of price and non-price competition between firms. In this paper, we study the recently deregulated retail gasoline market in Mexico. During our sample period, nearly 650 new gasoline stations entered the market. We estimate the causal effect of entry on the prices and quality of incumbent firms. We find that the entry of a nearby station decreases markups by nearly 4% for regular gasoline and about 2% for premium gasoline and diesel. We validate these results using the structure of ownership in the market, showing near zero impacts when the incumbent and entrant have the same owner. In addition, we show that the effect of competition on markups attenuates with distance and driving time. We find no evidence that entry affects the quality of existing stations, as measured by online ratings and regulatory inspections.

Corruption Dynamics in International Trade: Evidence on Bribery and Tax Evasion from Tunisian Customs Transactions

Wed, 25 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Every year low- and middle-income countries import goods worth more than $7 trillion, and in many states these shipments must first pass through the hands of corrupt customs officials. With such high stakes, policymakers require a deep understanding of both the causes and the effects of customs fraud. In addition, researchers have the opportunity to use trade corruption as a laboratory to discover new insights about corruption as a whole. One previously unexplored complexity is that bribe payers and bribe receivers often have repeated interactions; given corruption’s characteristic contracting frictions, counterparty risks, and information asymmetries, these long-running relationships likely matter for a wide variety of outcomes across a wide variety of contexts. To pursue these learning objectives, we overcome the data and identification challenges inherent to investigating bribery: we build an original dataset on Tunisian customs transactions using an audit study to directly...

Panel Data Evidence on the Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Livelihoods in Urban Côte d'Ivoire

Fri, 22 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

In early March 2020, a few cases of COVID-19 were diagnosed in Abidjan, the capital city of Côte d’Ivoire. To combat the spread of the disease, large restrictions to mobility and gatherings were introduced between mid-March and late May 2020. We collected panel survey data on over 2,500 individuals from the Greater Abidjan area over the period immediately before and after the start of the pandemic. We document striking drops in employment, hours worked, income, and food consumption in the first months after the onset of COVID-19, when lockdown was in place. We also find that, in response, survey respondents received more private transfers from other parts of the country, at a time when remittances from abroad fell – and that some respondents moved either temporarily or permanently. In terms of recovery, we find that subjective well-being was lower on average in December 2020 than it was at baseline. Yet, despite schools being closed between mid-March and July 2020, school enrollment...

Targeting impact versus deprivation

Fri, 22 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Targeting is a core element of anti-poverty program design, with benefits typically targeted to those most “deprived” in some sense (e.g., consumption, wealth). A large literature in economics examines how to best identify these households feasibly at scale, usually via proxy means tests (PMTs). We ask a different question, namely, whether targeting the most deprived has the greatest social welfare benefit: in particular, are the most deprived those with the largest treatment effects or do the “poorest of the poor” sometimes lack the circumstances and complementary inputs or skills to take full advantage of assistance? We explore this potential trade-off in the context of an NGO cash transfer program in Kenya, utilizing recent advances in machine learning (ML) methods (specifically, generalized random forests) to learn PMTs that target both a) deprivation and b) high conditional average treatment effects across several policy-relevant outcomes. We find that targeting solely on...

Instant Loans Can Lift Subjective Well-Being: A Randomized Evaluation of Digital Credit in Nigeria

Wed, 30 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Digital loans have exploded in popularity across low- and middle-income countries, providing short term, high interest credit via mobile phones. This paper reports the results of a randomized evaluation of a digital loan product in Nigeria. Being randomly approved for digital credit (irrespective of credit score) substantially increases subjective well-being after an average of three months. For those who are approved, being randomly offered larger loans has an insignificant effect. Neither treatment significantly impacts other measures of welfare. We rule out large short-term impacts – either positive or negative – on income and expenditures, resilience, and women’s economic empowerment.

Can Competition Reduce Conflict?

Wed, 30 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

We examine the effect of inter-group economic competition on within-group violent conflict in the context of Indonesia’s signature Community Driven Development (CDD) program. Using a triple difference design, we exploit exogenous variation in the degree to which villages in sub-districts compete for public funds. We find that higher competition between villages reduces conflict but only up to moderate levels of competition. The conflict-reducing effects of competition are largest in the most ethnically fractionalized and segregated villages and exist regardless of the eventual outcome of the competition. Our results are consistent with external competition favouring coordination within otherwise divided communities and boosting village identity relative to ethnic identity. We find no evidence that competition increases inter-group violence. Our results suggest that economic incentives to compete with out-groups can be beneficial policy mechanisms to favour cooperation and reduce...

The Syrian Refugee Life Study: First Glance

Wed, 16 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This paper presents descriptive statistics from the first wave of the Syrian Refugee Life Study (S-RLS), which was launched in 2020. S-RLS is a longitudinal study that tracks a representative sample of 2,500 registered Syrian refugee households in Jordan. It collects comprehensive data on socio-demographic variables as well as information on health and well-being, preferences, social capital, attitudes, and safety and crime perceptions. This study uses these novel data to document the socio-demographic characteristics of Syrian refugees in Jordan, and compare them to those of the representative Jordanian and non-Jordanian populations interviewed in the 2016 Jordan Labor Market Panel Survey. The findings point to lags in basic service access, housing quality, and educational attainment for the Syrian refugee population, relative to the non-refugee population. The impacts of the pandemic may serve to partially explain these documented disparities. The data also illustrate that most...

When Does Past Trauma Matter for Present Decision-making? Evidence from a Field Study on Myopia and Waiting Periods

Wed, 9 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

We document the relationship between prior exposure to violence and myopia using a field experiment in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. We endow study participants with an asset that grows over time, and find that direct exposure to violence during the Congolese wars strongly predicts redemption of the asset for its minimum value only if participants can redeem their asset on the same day they receive it. When we mandate an overnight waiting period before redemption is allowed (and before the asset begins to grow), there is no difference in myopic behavior by exposure to violence. Our results suggest that choice architecture is particularly important for vulnerable populations, even within a developing-country sample.

Traditional Supernatural Beliefs and Prosocial Behavior

Wed, 9 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

In sub-Saharan Africa, traditional supernatural beliefs, including belief in witchcraft, black magic, or fetishism, are widespread. Some have hypothesized that these beliefs help to sustain cooperative behavior in a setting where the state is often absent. Others have documented that, at least at a macro-level, such beliefs are negatively associated with prosocial behavior. We contribute to a better understanding of the causal effects of these traditional supernatural beliefs by using lab-in-the-field experiments in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Participants complete a range of experimental tasks where one player chooses whether to act in a prosocial manner towards another player. Participants are randomly assigned to another player that has either a strong or weak belief in witchcraft, and this information is known by the players. We find that participants act less prosocially towards randomly-assigned partners who believe more strongly in witchcraft. We also find that...

The Impact of Digital Credit in Developing Economies: A Review of Recent Evidence

Mon, 7 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

In recent years, a new generation of “digital credit” products have transformed the consumer lending landscape in many low- and middle-income countries. Offering short- term, high-interest loans via mobile phones or other digital platforms, these products have become wildly popular. This article reviews the small but emerging evidence on the welfare impacts of digital credit. These studies document very high rates of takeup – well in excess of traditional microcredit – despite the fact that customers often do not understand the terms of their loans. Overall, there is little evidence that access to credit has consistent positive impacts on borrower welfare, though two impact evaluations document positive effects on resilience and subjective well-being, respectively. No study finds statistically significant negative impacts of digital credit.

Evaluation Of A National Program To Distribute Free Masks For COVID-19 Prevention In Uganda: Evidence From Mbale District

Thu, 24 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The slow rollout of vaccines in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) and the emergence of new COVID-19 variants underscore the critical role masks continue to play two years into the pandemic. Given face masks’ low cost and relative ease of use, a key question facing policymakers is whether populations are heeding the advice to wear masks, and what strategies are especially effective to encourage mask take-up. We evaluated a national program to distribute masks in Uganda, which reached the Mbale District in March 2021, to assess whether distribution of free masks alone or distribution paired with education about masks and COVID-19 encourages mask use.

Warriors and Vigilantes as Police Officers: Evidence from a field experiment with body-cameras in Rio de Janeiro

Fri, 14 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

We present the first randomized experiment on police body-cameras in a high-violence setting: Brazil. Camera assignment reduced stop-and-searches and other forms of potentially aggressive interactions with civilians. Cameras also produced a strong de-policing effect, where police wearing cameras were significantly less likely to engage in any form of activity, including responding to requests of help. These changes in police behavior took place even when most officers refused to turn their cameras on when interacting with civilians. Low levels of compliance suggest that this technology in itself is no solution to police brutality. To address this problem, during part of the study we randomly assigned cameras to supervisors and this had a strong effect on frontline officer’s behavior, significantly increasing their policing activities. Police surveys, interviews, and focus group reveal that the organizational culture that perpetuates police violence is a strong factor explaining...

State-evading Solutions to Violence: Organized Crime and Governance in Indigenous Mexico

Fri, 14 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The monopoly of violence in the hands of the state is conceived as the principal vehicle to generate order. A problem with this vision is that parts of the state and its law enforcement apparatus often become extensions of criminality rather than solutions to it. We argue that one solution to this dilemma is to “opt out from the state.” Using a multi-method strategy combining extensive qualitative research, quasi-experimental statistical analyses, and survey data, the paper demonstrates that indigenous communities in Mexico are better able to escape predatory criminal rule when they are legally allowed to carve a space of autonomy from the state through the institution of “usos y costumbres.” We demonstrate that these municipalities are more immune to violence than similar localities where regular police forces and local judiciaries are in charge of law enforcement and where mayors are elected through multiparty elections rather than customary practices.

The Health Costs of Political Identity: Evidence from the U.S. during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Fri, 7 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

We estimate the impact of U.S. political identity on COVID-19 safety behaviors, cases, and deaths. Our data set merges U.S. county-level data on mask-wearing, cell-phone mobility, vaccination rates, county characteristics, and variables reflecting conservative political identity with COVID-19 cases and deaths from the first 12, 20, and 28 months of the pandemic in the United States. State-level fixed-effect estimations controlling for county characteristics indicate every 10 percentage point increase in the county popular vote for President Trump in the 2020 election to be associated with a 0.36σ reduction in a COVID-safety index, 1,798 additional COVID cases, and 31.9 COVID deaths per 100,000 county residents in the initial 28 months of the pandemic. Further, we ask whether differential behavioral responses during the pandemic can be explained by traditional strains of American conservatism, or are associated with a more specific Trumpian identity. We create state-level indices...

The Competitive Woman: Evolutionary Insights and Cross-Cultural Evidence into Finding the Femina Economica

Fri, 7 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

We propose to explain the gender gap in competitiveness often found in economic experiments with a theoretical framework rooted in evolutionary psychology: Women evolved adaptations to trade off the motivation to acquire resources in competitive environments for effort dedicated to investing directly into offspring, to attract and retain mates, and to not alienate potential allomaternal allies. Such a tradeoff does not appear similarly binding for men. To begin to test this idea, we conducted a series of experiments using cash and prizes (in-kind payments dedicated to either children’s needs, gender-specific interests, or gender-neutral interests for placebo tests) to reward subjects at different life stages (parents and non- parents) from countries differing in economic development and culture (novel data from Togo, Sierra Leone, Bosnia, Colombia plus China data from Cassar, Wordofa and Zhang (2016)). Our hypothesis is that different incentive types (cash or prize) may induce...

Is Digital Credit Filling a Hole or Digging a Hole? Evidence from Malawi

Wed, 5 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Digital credit has expanded rapidly in Africa, mostly in the form of short-term, high-interest loans offered via mobile money. Loan terms are often opaque and consumer financial literacy is low, providing opportunities for predatory lending. A regression discontinuity analysis shows no negative effect of access to digital loans on financial well-being, but the majority of borrowers fail to repay on time and incur high late fees. We randomize exposure to a short phone-based financial literacy intervention. The intervention improved knowledge and marginally improved loan repayment but increased loan demand, increasing overall default risk.

Unlocking the Benefits of Credit Through Saving

Tue, 16 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Access to microcredit has been shown to generate only modest average benefits for recipient households. We study whether other financial market frictions – in particular, lack of access to a safe place to save – might limit credit’s benefits. Working with Kenyan farmers, we cross- randomize access to a simple savings product with a harvest-time loan. Among farmers offered a loan, the additional offer of a savings lockbox increased farm investment by 11% and household consumption by 7%. Results suggest that financial market frictions can interact in important ways and that multifaceted financial access programs might unlock dynamic household gains.

Manipulation-Proof Machine Learning

Fri, 12 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

An increasing number of decisions are guided by machine learning algorithms. In many settings, from consumer credit to criminal justice, those decisions are made by applying an estimator to data on an individual’s observed behavior. But when consequential decisions are encoded in rules, individuals may strategically alter their behavior to achieve desired outcomes. This paper develops a class of estimator that is stable under manipulation, even when the decision rule is fully transparent. We explicitly model the costs of manipulating different behaviors, and identify decision rules that are stable in equilibrium. This approach also makes it possible to quantify the performance cost of making a decision algorithm transparent. Through a large field experiment in Kenya, we show that decision rules estimated with our strategy-robust method outperform those based on standard supervised learning approaches.

The Economics of the Public Option: Evidence from Local Pharmaceutical Markets

Thu, 28 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

We study the effects of competition by state-owned firms, leveraging the decentralized entry of public pharmacies to local markets in Chile. Public pharmacies sell the same drugs at a third of private pharmacy prices, because of stronger upstream bargaining and downstream market power in the private sector, but are of lower quality. Public pharmacies induced market segmentation and price increases in the private sector, benefiting the switchers to the public option but harming the stayers. The countrywide entry of public pharmacies would reduce yearly consumer drug expenditure by 1.6 percent, which outweighs the costs of the policy by 52 percent.

Rethinking Transparency: Corruption in Local Public Office in India

Tue, 19 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Governments and NGOs have invested heavily in fighting corruption by designing anti- poverty programs that maximize transparency and accountability. We analyze whether corruption is still widespread in the context of one such program, a massive make-work scheme in India where every job spell is posted publicly online. Linking millions of administrative job records to local election outcomes, we measure how many jobs they self-deal. In the year after the election, winners of close elections receive 3 times as many workdays as losers and typical villagers, a sum equal to two-thirds their official stipend. We find that corruption persists because of a gap between de jure and actual transparency. Only when citizens have tools to access information in a timely manner does corruption eventually vanish.

The Economics of the COVID-19 Pandemic in Poor Countries

Tue, 19 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The COVID-19 pandemic has upended health and living standards around the world. This article provides an interim overview of these effects, with a particular focus on low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Economists have explained how the pandemic is likely to have differential consequences for LMICs, and demand distinct policy responses, compared to rich countries. We survey the rapidly expanding body of empirical research that documents its many adverse economic and non-economic effects in terms of living standards, education, health, and gender equality, which appear to be unprecedented in depth and scale. We also review research on successful and failed policy responses, including the failure to ensure widespread vaccine coverage in LMICs, which is needed to end the pandemic. We close with a discussion of implications for public policy in LMICs, and for the institutions of international governance, given the likelihood of future pandemics and other major shocks (e.g., climate).

Incentives for Effort or Outputs? A Field Experiment to Improve Student Performance

Fri, 15 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This randomized experiment implemented with school children in India directly tests an input incentive designed to increase effort on learning activities against both an output incentive that rewards test performance and a control. Students in the input incentive treatment perform .58σ better than those in the control, and .34σ better than students in the output incentive treatment. Thus, the input incentive is approximately twice as cost-effective as the output incentive. The input incentive increases the intensive margin of student effort on the learning activity, and it is particularly effective for students that are present-biased as measured at baseline.

The Economic Impact of Depression Treatment in India

Tue, 5 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This study evaluates the impact of depression treatment on economic behavior in Karnataka, India. We cross-randomized pharmacotherapy and livelihoods assistance among 1000 depressed adults and evaluated impacts on depression severity, socioeconomic outcomes, and several potential pathways over 26 months. The pharmacotherapy treatments reduce depression severity, with benefits that persist after treatment concludes. They substantially increase child human capital investment, particularly for older children, and reduce risk intolerance and the incidence of negative shocks. These findings suggest two pathways through which depression may perpetuate poverty.

The Impact of Community Masking on COVID-19: A Cluster-Randomized Trial in Bangladesh

Wed, 29 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Mask usage remains low across many parts of the world during the COVID- 19 pandemic, and strategies to increase mask-wearing remain untested. Our objectives were to identify strategies that can persistently increase mask-wearing and assess the impact of increasing mask-wearing on symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infections. We conducted a cluster-randomized trial of community-level mask promotion in rural Bangladesh from November 2020 to April 2021 (N=600 villages, N=342,126 adults). We cross-randomized mask promotion strategies at the village and household level, including cloth vs. surgical masks. All intervention arms received free masks, information on the importance of masking, role modeling by community leaders, and in-person reminders for 8 weeks. The control group did not receive any interventions. Neither participants nor field staff were blinded to intervention assignment. Outcomes included symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 seroprevalence (primary) and prevalence of proper mask-wearing,...

Promotions and Productivity: The Role of Meritocracy and Pay Progression in the Public Sector

Wed, 29 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

We study promotion incentives in the public sector by means of a field experiment with the Ministry of Health in Sierra Leone. The experiment creates exogenous variation in meritocracy by linking promotions to performance for the lowest tier of health workers and in perceived pay progression by revealing to them the salary of higher-tier workers. We find that meritocratic promotions lead to higher productivity for workers who expect a steep pay increase and those who are highly ranked in terms of performance. When promotions are not meritocratic, increasing the pay gradient instead reduces worker productivity through negative morale effects. The findings highlight the importance of taking into account the interactions between different tools of personnel policy.

Effect of the Jamaica Early Childhood Stimulation Intervention on Labor Market Outcomes at Age 31

Wed, 29 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

We report the labor market effects of the Jamaica Early Childhood Stimulation intervention at age 31. The study is a small-sample randomized early childhood education stimulation intervention targeting stunted children living in the poor neighborhoods of Kingston, Jamaica. Implemented in 1987-1989, treatment consisted of a two-year home-based intervention designed to improve nutrition and the quality of mother-child interactions to foster cognitive, language and psycho-social skills. The original sample is 127 stunted children between 9 and 24 months old. Our study is able to track and interview 75% of the original sample 30 years after the intervention, both still living in Jamaica and migrated abroad. We find large and statistically significant effects on income and schooling; the treatment group had 43% higher hourly wages and 37% higher earnings than the control group. This is a substantial increase over the treatment effect estimated for age 22 where we observed a 25% increase...

Women's Well-Being During a Pandemic and its Containment

Wed, 25 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The COVID-19 pandemic brought the dual crises of disease and the containment policies designed to mitigate it. Yet, there is little evidence on the impacts of these policies on women, who are likely to be especially vulnerable, in lower-income countries. We conduct a large phone survey and leverage India's geographically-varying containment policies to estimate the association between both the pandemic and its containment policies, and measures of women's well-being, including mental health and food security. On aggregate, the pandemic resulted in dramatic income losses, increases in food insecurity, and declines in female mental health. While potentially crucial to stem the spread of COVID-19 cases, we find that greater prevalence of containment policies is associated with increased food insecurity, particularly for women, and with reduced female mental health. Average containment levels are associated with a 39-40% increase in the likelihood of sadness, depression, and hopelessness...

Experimentally Validating Welfare Evaluation of School Vouchers: Part I

Wed, 25 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

In this paper, we use a unique two-stage experiment that randomized access to school vouchers across both markets and students in rural India to estimate the revealed preference value of school choice. In the first step of the research design, we develop an empirical model of school choice subject to liquidity and credit constraints that is estimated using data from only the control markets. Based on this exercise, we estimate that the voucher generated welfare gains exceeding four times the average private school's annual tuition on average to the students induced into private schooling. The second step of the research design will validate the estimated welfare impacts by comparing model predictions for a simulated voucher program in control markets with the data from the treatment group. The results in this paper are based on the first step (using only control data) and this draft serves as a pre-commitment to the model estimates and predictions before examining the experimental...

Long Run Effects of Aid: Forecasts and Evidence from Sierra Leone

Tue, 24 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

We evaluate the long-run effects of a decentralized approach to economic development, called community driven development (CDD), a prominent strategy for delivering foreign aid. Notably we revisit a randomized CDD program in Sierra Leone 11 years after launch. We estimate large persistent gains in local public goods and market activity, and modest positive effects on institutions. There is suggestive evidence that CDD slightly improved communities’ response to the 2014 Ebola epidemic. We compare estimates to the forecasts of experts from Sierra Leone and abroad, working in policy and academia, and find that local policymakers are overly optimistic about CDD’s effectiveness.

Money or power? Financial infrastructure and optimal policy

Tue, 24 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

In response to the Covid-19 crisis, 186 countries implemented direct cash transfers to households, and 181 introduced in-kind programs that lowered the cost of utilities such as electricity, water, transport, and mobile money. Do cash or in-kind transfers generate greater welfare improvements? And, does a country’s financial infrastructure affect optimal aid disbursement? Through a parallel set of surveys in two urban regions in Africa—with comparable education, cell phone ownership, and electricity connectivity—we show that optimal government aid disbursement hinges on financial infrastructure. In line with economic theory favoring direct cash transfers, in a randomized experiment in Kenya 95% of urban recipients prefer mobile money over electricity transfers of a similar monetary value. But Kenya is an outlier with high mobile money adoption: this increases its value and reduces transaction costs of buying electricity credit. By contrast, in Ghana—where mobile money is less...

Does Decentralization Encourage Pro-Poor Targeting Evidence from Kenya’s Constituencies Development Fund

Wed, 18 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Decentralization is thought to facilitate poverty reduction by giving power overresource distribution to officials with local knowledge about where resources are mostneeded. However, decentralization also implies less oversight and greater opportunities for local officials to divert resources for political or personal ends. We investigate this tradeoff by exploring the degree to which Kenya’s premier decentralized development program—the Constituency Development Fund—–targets the poor. Using a detailed spatial dataset of 32,000 CDF projects and data on the local distribution of poverty within Kenyan constituencies, we find that most MPs do not target the poor in their distribution of CDF projects. In places where they do, this tends to be in constituencies that are more rural, not too large, and, in keeping with the findings in Harris and Posner (2019), where the poor and non-poor are spatially segregated from one another. These factors all point to the feasibility of poverty-based...

Search Cost, Intermediation, and Trade: Experimental Evidence from Ugandan Agricultural Markets

Mon, 16 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

High search costs weaken market integration in developing country agricultural markets, harming both farmers and consumers. We present evidence from a large-scale experiment designed to reduce search costs in randomly selected subcounties in Uganda by introducing a mobile phone-based marketplace for agricultural commodities. The intervention drives increases in trade ows and reductions in price divergence across treated markets. Entry by traders into treated markets increases, and profits of incumbents decrease. However, small-scale farmers find it diffcult to reach the scale necessary to find buyers on the platform; only the largest farmers use the platform. As a result, we are only able to detect significant increases in revenues among the farmers most likely to use the platform. Point estimates suggest effects that are meaningful in magnitude, but not statistically significant for the majority of farmers. Since farmers are so numerous and the cost per-farmer is low, these income...

An Adaptive Targeted Field Experiment: Job Search Assistance for Refugees in Jordan

Tue, 3 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

We introduce an adaptive targeted treatment assignment methodology for field experiments. Our Tempered Thompson Algorithm balances the goals of maximizingthe precision of treatment effect estimates and maximizing the welfare of experimentalparticipants. A hierarchical Bayesian model allows us to adaptively target treatments. We implement our methodology in Jordan, testing policies to help Syrian refugees and local jobseekers to find work. The immediate employment impacts of a small cash grant, information and psychological support are small, but targeting raises employment by 1 percentage-point (20%). After four months, cash has a sizable effect on employment and earnings of Syrians.

Machine Learning and Mobile Phone Data Can Improve the Targeting of Humanitarian Assistance

Mon, 2 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The COVID-19 pandemic has devastated many low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), causing widespread food insecurity and a sharp decline in living standards. In response to this crisis, governments and humanitarian organizations worldwide have mobilized targeted social assistance programs. Targeting is a central challenge in the administration of these programs: given available data, how does one rapidly identify the individuals and families with the greatest need? This challenge is particularly acute in the large number of LMICs that lack recent and comprehensive data on household income and wealth. Here we show that non-traditional “big” data from satellites and mobile phone networks can improve the targeting of anti-poverty programs. Our approach uses traditional survey-based measures of consumption and wealth to train machine learning algorithms that recognize patterns of poverty in non-traditional data; the trained algorithms are then used to prioritize aid to the poorest...

Marketing Fortified Rice: Effects of Aspirational Messaging and Credibility of Health Claims

Wed, 21 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Studies assessing the impact of information on uptake of preventive health products among the poor have shown mixed results, and little is known about what type of messages are most effective. Drawing on insights from the literature on marketing and consumer behavior, we argue that messages which position a product as aspirational or establish the credibility of its health benefits can increase consumer demand for the product. We test the individual and joint impacts of such messages through a field experiment eliciting willingness to pay for fortified rice in Chandpur District, Bangladesh. We find that the combination of these approaches increases the proportion of participants willing to pay a premium at least equal to the cost of fortification by 18 percentage points. In sharp contrast to the existing literature on welfare stigma, we also show that awareness of free distribution of fortified rice through government programs does not negatively affect consumer demand, but rather...

Grow the pie or have it? Using machine learning for impact heterogeneity in the Ultra-poor Graduation Model

Wed, 21 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Anti-poverty interventions often face a trade-off between immediate reduction in poverty, measured by consumption, and building assets for longer-term gains. An “Ultra-poor Graduation” model, found effective on both dimensions, generally leans towards asset building. By using data from a large-scale RCT in Bangladesh, we find significant variation in impact on assets where the top quintile of gainers had an impact of 3.44 on their log of assets compared to the impact of 1.92 observed by the bottom quintile. We also find heterogeneity in household expenditure although the estimates are less robust across different estimation methods. Importantly, we find contrasts in characteristics of beneficiaries who made the most in assets vs. consumption. The results identify beneficiary characteristics that can be used in targeting households either to maximize impact on the desired dimension and/or to customize interventions for balancing the asset and consumption trade-off.

Pollution in Ugandan Cities: Do Managers Avoid it or Adapt in Place?

Mon, 19 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Developing countries suffer from rising urban pollution levels, with associated negative effects on health and worker productivity. We study how managers in developing country cities cope with the polluted environment. We collect high resolution pollution measurements within Ugandan cities and match these with a novel firm survey. We find that firms locate in close proximity to major polluted roads, which bundle a bad (exposure to pollution) with a good (market demand). Higher ability managers do not avoid polluted areas, but better adapt to the pollution by protecting their workers through both provision of equipment and exibility in work schedules.

Maternal Mortality Risk and Spousal Differences in the Demand for Children

Wed, 14 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Fertility decisions are often made by partners who may disagree. We develop a model in which conflicting interests prevent effective communication between spouses about the costs of childbearing incurred by women. This mechanism is likely to further widen the spousal disagreement over fertility in environments where maternal health risk is high and imperfectly observed. We design an intervention to experimentally vary exposure to information about maternal health costs to either the husband or the wife among approximately 500 couples in Lusaka, Zambia. At baseline, husbands exhibit lower knowledge of maternal health risk compared to their wives. One year after the intervention, husbands significantly update their beliefs about maternal risk but only if the information is delivered directly to them, whereas wives update their beliefs about risk regardless of who in the household is treated. The intra-household asymmetry in information spillovers is strongest among men with more...

The Electoral Consequences of Mass Religious Events

Wed, 14 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Mass ritualized gatherings like pilgrimages are central to religious practice globally. Do they generate votes for religious parties? Theoretically, the events may heighten religiosity, enlarging support for parties seen as “owning” religious policy issues. Such parties might also engage in “platform co-optation,” piggybacking on the events to organize and campaign. We evaluate the electoral impact of India’s Kumbh Mela, a Hindu festival considered the world’s largest human assembly, leveraging its astrologically determined timing combined with districts’ proximity by rail to the festival sites. The Kumbh Mela boosts Hindu nationalists’ vote share. Tests of mechanisms suggest it does so by fomenting identity change—evidenced by increases in communal violence and the adoption of orthodox dietary practices—and by bolstering party infrastructure. India’s main secular-leaning party loses support, but not in regions with denser concentrations of religious minorities. Our study offers...

Micro-Estimates of Wealth for all Low- and Middle-Income Countries

Thu, 8 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Many critical policy decisions, from strategic investments to the allocation of humanitarian aid, rely on data about the geographic distribution of wealth and poverty. Yet many poverty maps are out of date or exist only at very coarse levels of granularity. Here we develop the first micro-estimates of wealth and poverty that cover the populated surface of all 135 low and middle-income countries (LMICs) at 2.4km resolution. The estimates are built by applying machine learning algorithms to vast and heterogeneous data from satellites, mobile phone networks, topographic maps, as well as aggregated and de-identified connectivity data from Facebook. We train and calibrate the estimates using nationally-representative household survey data from 56 LMICs, then validate their accuracy using four independent sources of household survey data from 18 countries. We also provide confidence intervals for each micro-estimate to facilitate responsible downstream use. These estimates are provided...

Public Trust, Policing, and the COVID-19 Pandemic: Evidence from an Electoral Authoritarian Regime

Thu, 8 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

We examine how trust shapes compliance with public health restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic in Uganda. We use an endorsement experiment embedded in a mobile phone survey to show that messages from government officials generate more support for public health restrictions than messages from religious authorities, traditional leaders, or international NGOs. We further show that compliance with these restrictions is strongly positively correlated with trust in government, but only weakly correlated with trust in local authorities or other citizens. The relationship between trust and compliance is especially strong for the Ministry of Health and—more surprisingly—the police. Building on this latter result, we use a field experiment to show that an intervention designed to improve police–community relations increases trust in the police, but that the effects are small and do not result in greater public health compliance. We conclude that trust is crucial but difficult to change.