Paper Abstracts
Liz Shroeder (Oregon State University)
Incentives for Teacher Relocation: Evidence from the Gambian Hardship Allowance
We evaluate the impact of the Gambian hardship allowance, which provides a salary premium of 30-40% to primary school teachers in remote locations, on the distribution and characteristics of teachers across schools. A geographic discontinuity in the policy’s implementation and the presence of common pre-treatment trends between hardship and non-hardship schools provide sources of identifying variation. We find that the hardship allowance increased the share of qualified (certified) teachers by 10 percentage points. The policy also reduced the pupil-qualified teacher ratio by 27, or 61% of the mean, in recipient schools close to the distance threshold. Further analysis suggests that these gains were not merely the result of teachers switching from non-hardship to hardship schools. With similar policies in place in more than two dozen other developing countries, our study provides an important piece of evidence on their effectiveness.
Diana Kruger (Universidad Adolfo Ibañez)
Children's Time in School and Female Labor Force Participation
Lack of adequate childcare is one of the main reasons Chilean women cite for not participating in the labor force, partially explaining the country’s low female labor force participation rate. We investigate the effect of a reform that lengthened school schedules from half to full days— essentially providing zero-cost childcare—on women’s decision to participate in the labor force. We identify the effect of the policy from its gradual implementation across municipalities over time and rule out alternative explanations, finding evidence of positive and important effects on mothers’ labor force participation and employment stability.
Shankha Chakraborty (University of Oregon)
The Culture of Entrepreneurship
This paper studies the cultural process through which a society inculcates an entrepreneurial spirit. People either work for a wage or operate riskier but high return businesses. Paternalistic parents prefer their offspring to choose occupations like theirs and accordingly indoctrinate them into their types. Specifically, entrepreneurial parents, having themselves developed business acumen try to endow their children with knowledge that makes entrepreneurship more attractive. Such biological indoctrination may not be successful, in which case children take cultural cues from society at large. Cultural offspring may also choose an occupation different from the one they have been indoctrinated in. We examine the effect of family background on occupational choice and how society’s appetite for risk-taking is shaped by culture and institution. A focus on safe production, for example from post-colonial policies, results in stagnation, with entrepreneurs not upgrading technology because of their proficiency with existing methods. Sudden access to disruptive technologies, due to liberalization for instance, sees the emergence of new entrepreneurial families who overtake established ones, spurring growth.
Alfredo Burlando (University of Oregon)
Savings and Borrowing Behavior Among the Poor: Evidence from Savings Groups in Uganda
It is often thought that providing the very poor with access to financial instruments–particularly savings and loans–could improve their wellbeing. We study Savings and Loans Associations (SLA), a community-based financial organization that is increasingly popular in rural Africa among those with no other access to financial instruments. SLAs are self-selected groups of people who save and lend to each other. We identify marginalized households in 90 Ugandan villages, and we randomly assign these households to two different types of SLAs. In the first type at least 50% of the SLA members was identified as marginalized. In the second type the quota is lowered to 25%.
Our intervention generates an exogenous variation in the composition of SLAs, the value of SLA participation, and on its effectiveness in providing credit and savings for its vulnerable members. We build a theoretical model of SLA functioning and we test its empirical prediction using the data. We show that the benefit of SLA participation for vulnerable households depends on the composition of the group. In particular, we argue that vulnerable households are net savers, and hence are better off when in a group with many non-vulnerable households, who are net borrowers.
Rachel Heath (University of Washington)
Intrahousehold Bargaining, Female Autonomy and Labor Supply: Theory and Evidence from India
Standard models of labor supply predict that unearned income decreases labor supply. In contrast, we propose a model in which a woman’s unearned income increases her autonomy within the household, which increases her utility of working and can lead to a positive correlation between unearned income and labor supply. We find empirical support for this prediction, using the Hindu Succession Act (HSA) in India as a source of exogenous variation in woman’s unearned income. The HSA was phased in across states and over time, and applied only to Hindu women who were unmarried at the time of the reform. We estimate its effects using an instrumental variable strategy that uses variation in a women’s year of birth, religion and state to predict her exposure. We find that the reform increases women’s labor supply, particularly into jobs likely to be high-paying, such as jobs working for non-family members, earning cash, and that take place outside of the home. We argue that these results cannot be explained by changes in pre-marital human capital investments, marital matching, or selective migration.
Nicholas Wilson (Reed College)
Can Antiretroviral Therapy at Scale Improve the Health of the Targeted in Sub-Saharan Africa?
The single largest item in the United States foreign aid health budget is antiretroviral therapy (ART) for the treatment of HIV/AIDS. Despite the central focus on ART in global health policy and a host of behavioral studies presuming ART expansion has directly improved the health of HIV positive individuals, there is little quasi-experimental evidence on the epidemiological effects of ART expansion in Sub-Saharan Africa. We provide quasi-experimental evidence on this question using the phased roll-out of ART in Zambia, a country where approximately 1 in 6 adults is HIV positive. Using anthropometric data from national household surveys and a spatially-based triple difference estimator, we find evidence suggesting that local ART introduction increased the weight of HIV positive adult women.
Sarah Reynolds (UC Berkeley)
Early Childhood Education in Chile: Are there Effects on Social, Physical and Cognitive Development?
Chile’s nationally representative Early Childhood Longitudinal Survey allows us to evaluate the impact of early childhood education on developmental outcomes, a topic not yet studied on a large scale within a developing nation. Using propensity score matching along parental characteristics, we find that participation in preschool increases scores of distress among children. Among the smaller sample of children in preschool, there is an increased stress level among those who have started before age one. Additionally, we find that children are more likely to be overweight and obese when starting preschool at or before age one. We do find cognitive gains among preschool attendees: children in preschool score better on a Chilean language assessment, and children who have been in preschool for a longer score better on the language assessment as well as on the Peabody vocab test. Children who start preschool at a later age score worse on the Chilean language assessment. We examine heterogeneous effects along sex, wealth, and urban/rural status and consider the mediating impact of parental involvement in various activities with their children. These findings suggest that early education does indeed provide developmental advantages in language acquisition, but policies need to consider the socio-emotional stress of enrollment on the child, especially at early ages.
Ben Fitch-Fleischmann (University of Oregon)
Migration as Adaptation to Extreme Storms: Evidence from Nicaragua
Climate change is predicted to increase the strength and frequency of the most severe tropical storms. Should we expect a migratory response to these storms in developing countries? How might the response differ across socio-economic conditions? While detailed data on migration are scarce, I address these questions using five individual-level data sets for Nicaragua - four cross-sectional surveys and a three-wave panel. The data span a period with several hurricanes, including one of the deadliest Atlantic hurricanes ever. I use geographic and time variation in exposure to hurricanes to estimate the migratory response and the economic conditions associated with migration.
Cesar Rodriguez (Portland State University)
What Makes Landlocked Countries Poorer?
Landlocked countries are much poorer, on average, than coastal countries. Coastal countries have an average 2010 GDP per capita 66% higher than landlocked countries. Excluding Europe, coastal countries have GDP per capital levels 211% higher than landlocked countries. What causes this disparity? It is not because landlocked countries happen to be in poor parts of the world; a clear disparity exists within every continent. What distinguishes landlocked countries are barriers to exporting goods by sea, due both to distance and to lack of sovereignty over the coastal territory. For instance in 2010, coastal countries account for 232% of the value of exports of landlocked countries, after accounting for the other factors. This paper measures the barriers to international trade in goods faced by developing countries, and tests two hypotheses. First, landlocked countries can overcome their isolation from the sea if they have high income neighbors which provide them direct access to lucrative export markets. Second, exportable natural resources are a substitute for exporting goods for landlocked countries, or allow them to overcome the barriers by financing infrastructure and encouraging cooperation from coastal neighbors.
Liz Shroeder (Oregon State University)
Incentives for Teacher Relocation: Evidence from the Gambian Hardship Allowance
We evaluate the impact of the Gambian hardship allowance, which provides a salary premium of 30-40% to primary school teachers in remote locations, on the distribution and characteristics of teachers across schools. A geographic discontinuity in the policy’s implementation and the presence of common pre-treatment trends between hardship and non-hardship schools provide sources of identifying variation. We find that the hardship allowance increased the share of qualified (certified) teachers by 10 percentage points. The policy also reduced the pupil-qualified teacher ratio by 27, or 61% of the mean, in recipient schools close to the distance threshold. Further analysis suggests that these gains were not merely the result of teachers switching from non-hardship to hardship schools. With similar policies in place in more than two dozen other developing countries, our study provides an important piece of evidence on their effectiveness.
Diana Kruger (Universidad Adolfo Ibañez)
Children's Time in School and Female Labor Force Participation
Lack of adequate childcare is one of the main reasons Chilean women cite for not participating in the labor force, partially explaining the country’s low female labor force participation rate. We investigate the effect of a reform that lengthened school schedules from half to full days— essentially providing zero-cost childcare—on women’s decision to participate in the labor force. We identify the effect of the policy from its gradual implementation across municipalities over time and rule out alternative explanations, finding evidence of positive and important effects on mothers’ labor force participation and employment stability.
Shankha Chakraborty (University of Oregon)
The Culture of Entrepreneurship
This paper studies the cultural process through which a society inculcates an entrepreneurial spirit. People either work for a wage or operate riskier but high return businesses. Paternalistic parents prefer their offspring to choose occupations like theirs and accordingly indoctrinate them into their types. Specifically, entrepreneurial parents, having themselves developed business acumen try to endow their children with knowledge that makes entrepreneurship more attractive. Such biological indoctrination may not be successful, in which case children take cultural cues from society at large. Cultural offspring may also choose an occupation different from the one they have been indoctrinated in. We examine the effect of family background on occupational choice and how society’s appetite for risk-taking is shaped by culture and institution. A focus on safe production, for example from post-colonial policies, results in stagnation, with entrepreneurs not upgrading technology because of their proficiency with existing methods. Sudden access to disruptive technologies, due to liberalization for instance, sees the emergence of new entrepreneurial families who overtake established ones, spurring growth.
Alfredo Burlando (University of Oregon)
Savings and Borrowing Behavior Among the Poor: Evidence from Savings Groups in Uganda
It is often thought that providing the very poor with access to financial instruments–particularly savings and loans–could improve their wellbeing. We study Savings and Loans Associations (SLA), a community-based financial organization that is increasingly popular in rural Africa among those with no other access to financial instruments. SLAs are self-selected groups of people who save and lend to each other. We identify marginalized households in 90 Ugandan villages, and we randomly assign these households to two different types of SLAs. In the first type at least 50% of the SLA members was identified as marginalized. In the second type the quota is lowered to 25%.
Our intervention generates an exogenous variation in the composition of SLAs, the value of SLA participation, and on its effectiveness in providing credit and savings for its vulnerable members. We build a theoretical model of SLA functioning and we test its empirical prediction using the data. We show that the benefit of SLA participation for vulnerable households depends on the composition of the group. In particular, we argue that vulnerable households are net savers, and hence are better off when in a group with many non-vulnerable households, who are net borrowers.
Rachel Heath (University of Washington)
Intrahousehold Bargaining, Female Autonomy and Labor Supply: Theory and Evidence from India
Standard models of labor supply predict that unearned income decreases labor supply. In contrast, we propose a model in which a woman’s unearned income increases her autonomy within the household, which increases her utility of working and can lead to a positive correlation between unearned income and labor supply. We find empirical support for this prediction, using the Hindu Succession Act (HSA) in India as a source of exogenous variation in woman’s unearned income. The HSA was phased in across states and over time, and applied only to Hindu women who were unmarried at the time of the reform. We estimate its effects using an instrumental variable strategy that uses variation in a women’s year of birth, religion and state to predict her exposure. We find that the reform increases women’s labor supply, particularly into jobs likely to be high-paying, such as jobs working for non-family members, earning cash, and that take place outside of the home. We argue that these results cannot be explained by changes in pre-marital human capital investments, marital matching, or selective migration.
Nicholas Wilson (Reed College)
Can Antiretroviral Therapy at Scale Improve the Health of the Targeted in Sub-Saharan Africa?
The single largest item in the United States foreign aid health budget is antiretroviral therapy (ART) for the treatment of HIV/AIDS. Despite the central focus on ART in global health policy and a host of behavioral studies presuming ART expansion has directly improved the health of HIV positive individuals, there is little quasi-experimental evidence on the epidemiological effects of ART expansion in Sub-Saharan Africa. We provide quasi-experimental evidence on this question using the phased roll-out of ART in Zambia, a country where approximately 1 in 6 adults is HIV positive. Using anthropometric data from national household surveys and a spatially-based triple difference estimator, we find evidence suggesting that local ART introduction increased the weight of HIV positive adult women.
Sarah Reynolds (UC Berkeley)
Early Childhood Education in Chile: Are there Effects on Social, Physical and Cognitive Development?
Chile’s nationally representative Early Childhood Longitudinal Survey allows us to evaluate the impact of early childhood education on developmental outcomes, a topic not yet studied on a large scale within a developing nation. Using propensity score matching along parental characteristics, we find that participation in preschool increases scores of distress among children. Among the smaller sample of children in preschool, there is an increased stress level among those who have started before age one. Additionally, we find that children are more likely to be overweight and obese when starting preschool at or before age one. We do find cognitive gains among preschool attendees: children in preschool score better on a Chilean language assessment, and children who have been in preschool for a longer score better on the language assessment as well as on the Peabody vocab test. Children who start preschool at a later age score worse on the Chilean language assessment. We examine heterogeneous effects along sex, wealth, and urban/rural status and consider the mediating impact of parental involvement in various activities with their children. These findings suggest that early education does indeed provide developmental advantages in language acquisition, but policies need to consider the socio-emotional stress of enrollment on the child, especially at early ages.
Ben Fitch-Fleischmann (University of Oregon)
Migration as Adaptation to Extreme Storms: Evidence from Nicaragua
Climate change is predicted to increase the strength and frequency of the most severe tropical storms. Should we expect a migratory response to these storms in developing countries? How might the response differ across socio-economic conditions? While detailed data on migration are scarce, I address these questions using five individual-level data sets for Nicaragua - four cross-sectional surveys and a three-wave panel. The data span a period with several hurricanes, including one of the deadliest Atlantic hurricanes ever. I use geographic and time variation in exposure to hurricanes to estimate the migratory response and the economic conditions associated with migration.
Cesar Rodriguez (Portland State University)
What Makes Landlocked Countries Poorer?
Landlocked countries are much poorer, on average, than coastal countries. Coastal countries have an average 2010 GDP per capita 66% higher than landlocked countries. Excluding Europe, coastal countries have GDP per capital levels 211% higher than landlocked countries. What causes this disparity? It is not because landlocked countries happen to be in poor parts of the world; a clear disparity exists within every continent. What distinguishes landlocked countries are barriers to exporting goods by sea, due both to distance and to lack of sovereignty over the coastal territory. For instance in 2010, coastal countries account for 232% of the value of exports of landlocked countries, after accounting for the other factors. This paper measures the barriers to international trade in goods faced by developing countries, and tests two hypotheses. First, landlocked countries can overcome their isolation from the sea if they have high income neighbors which provide them direct access to lucrative export markets. Second, exportable natural resources are a substitute for exporting goods for landlocked countries, or allow them to overcome the barriers by financing infrastructure and encouraging cooperation from coastal neighbors.