UC Berkeley

This manuscript features three independent applications of contemporary

techniques in applied economics conducted in collaboration with three different

governments. In the first essay, I present findings from an experimental

intervention conducted in collaboration with the government of the Dominican

Republic in which the government varies whether front-line volunteer

community workers are recruited through a public advertisement or through

local staff referrals. I find that governments likely face tradeoffs in selecting

optimal recruiting mechanisms as publicly recruited candidates demonstrate

superior observable characteristics to referred candidates across a wide variety of

indicators except for the key indicator of cognitive skills. I also find public

candidates are more likely to accept job offers and attend trainings conditional

on being hired. To my knowledge, this is the first study to rigorously test the

impacts of an open public recruitment process versus a private targeted

recruitment process.

In the second essay, my co-author and I evaluate impacts of a World Bank

funded road improvement and employment generation intervention in

Nicaragua. We employ a difference-in-difference research design, matching

proprietary road building data from the government of Nicaragua’s Ministry of

Transportation with three rounds of a publicly available household survey. We

find strong evidence that the World Bank’s Fourth Roads Rehabilitation and

Maintenance Project fulfilled its primary goal of improving road infrastructure

and suggestive evidence of select economic and social impacts. Notably, we do

not observe impacts on the likelihood of employment or incidence of poverty.

In the third essay, I collaborate with the City of San Francisco’s Office of

the Treasurer to investigate mechanisms that potentially mediate household

decisions to save for distant future expenditures with particular relevance for

education-oriented savings. Employing a randomized experiment in the natural

setting of the Kindergarten-to-College school district-wide college savings

program, I vary the messages of postcard savings reminders with information

about either the availability of college financial aid or the increasing cost of

tuition. My results suggest that savings reminders may overcome inattention to

lumpy future expenditures, but only among those who intended to save. I find

no evidence that manipulating the salience of college cost affects savings

behavior.