Archives du séminaire Development Economics Seminar

Development Economics Seminar

Le 24/04/2024 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


We study the direct and indirect effects of randomized entry into local service industries. We implement a three-step design, randomizing the entry of new retail mobile money vendors — drawn from existing microenterprises retailing other services across independent, distinct low-income localities in Ghana. We report preliminary evidence of (i) mixed business stealing and market expansion in sector A: mobile money, and (ii) market expansion in sector B: microenterprises. Yet, local industry revenues and profits increased overall, suggesting positive externalities on microenterprises and producer surplus. Randomized entry increases both firm conduct and service quality and decreases prices, suggesting positive consumer surplus. These effects are not only important for welfare and policy but are key ingredients for advancing basic and applied knowledge on firm entry in industry equilibrium.

Annan Francis () Equilibrium Effects of Entry in Digital Financial Markets; () ;

La séance est annulée

Development Economics Seminar

Le 03/04/2024 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


Poverty reduction programs modeled on BRAC's graduation approach build up both tangible productive assets and intangible psychosocial assets such as self-confidence and the aspiration for upward mobility. The goal of this paper is to better understand how psychosocial factors operate and shape the impact of graduation programs. After deriving a set of hypotheses about the impacts of psychosocial constraints from a dynamic optimization model of the choice between a low income, casual wage-labor occupation and a higher earning entrepreneurial activity, this paper exploits a randomized controlled trial of a graduation program implemented in the pastoralist regions of Northern Kenya. Key empirical findings include that the estimated highly favorable average treatment effects disguise substantial heterogeneity, with beneficiaries who began with severe depressive symptoms gaining little from the program. The RCT's saturation design also allows us to identify substantial spillover effects onto the asset accumulation of women who were not enrolled in the graduation program. Spillovers are also estimated to positively affect non-beneficiary women's preference for upward economic mobility, providing a plausible explanation for their accumulation of capital despite no direct support from the graduation program. The paper draws out the implications of these findings for the cost-effective design and implementation of graduation programs.

CARTER Michael () Psychosocial Constraints, Impact Heterogeneity and Spillovers in a Multifaceted Graduation Program in Kenya

Development Economics Seminar

Le 27/03/2024 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


Rural, low-income households often face high income volatility, and women are disproportionately affected by negative shocks to production. Can entrepreneurship improve the economic status of rural, low-income women? We randomize access to an entrepreneurship training program in rural Uganda. The program significantly improves women's earnings. Treated women are 19% more likely to run profitable businesses 18 months post-program and profits are 15% higher. The program also bolsters women's ability to cope with large, negative shocks: high-frequency data shows that treated women fare significantly better during the first COVID-19 lockdown than women in the control group. Exploiting social network data, we detect significant, positive spillovers to the control group and adjust estimates accordingly. Our findings highlight a new role for entrepreneurship training programs as a tool for equitable rural development.

LANG Meghan () Economic Inclusion through Entrepreneurship: Evidence on Building Skills for Women

Megan Lang (Development Research Group, The World Bank) and Julia Seither (Universidad del Rosario)

Development Economics Seminar

Le 20/03/2024 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


Welfare states rely on human resources to provide the social services available. Social workers are often responsible for linking services provided and the families in need. In this paper we quantify the differences in effectiveness across social workers and study the implications of these estimates for their optimal allocation across families. To do so, we use data from a two-year home visitation program for the most deprived in Chile, where social workers were (quasi)-randomly assigned across families. We start by estimating the social workers’ fixed effects, that reveal substantial heterogeneity in the value-added by social workers. Second, we find that there is heterogeneity in performance within social workers, across different families. Third, we find a weak correlation between the supervisors and own social worker evaluation and her estimated value added. Finally, a high value-added social worker has a small but significant impact which lasts up to four years after the home-visitation program.

GALASSO Emanuela, GALASSO Emanuella () The Heterogeneous Quality in Delivery of Welfare: Evidence from Social Workers in the Chile Solidario Program

Pedro Carneiro (University College London, CEMMAP and IFS), Barbara Flores (University of Chile), Emanuela Galasso (Development Research Group, The World Bank), Rita Ginja (University of Bergen), Lucy Kraftman (Institute of Fiscal Studies)

Development Economics Seminar

Le 13/03/2024 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


Using a field experiment implemented in Sierra Leone we examine the joint effects of local selection, local monitoring, and incentivized payment mechanisms. We find evidence consistent with past literature that social pressure improves quality. These gains however are no better than gains from simple direct payment mechanisms that involve similar direct but lower social costs. There is weak evidence of crowding out effects. We find no effects of varying selection mechanisms. Analysis of a structural model identifies conditions under which social or economic incentives are more or less likely to be effective.

VOORS Maarten () Effects of economic and social incentives on bureaucratic quality: Experimental Evidence from Sierra Leone

Development Economics Seminar

Le 06/03/2024 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


One way to advance our understanding of individual differences in decision-making is to study the development of children’s decision-making. This paper studies the causal effects of daycare attendance on children’s economic preferences and decision-making abilities, exploiting a lottery system that randomized admissions into oversubscribed daycare centers in Rio de Janeiro. Overall, daycare attendance had no effect on either economic preferences or decision-making abilities. It did increase, however, aversion to disadvantageous inequality (i.e., having less than one’s peer). This increase is driven mostly by girls, a result that reproduces in a different study that randomized admissions into preschool education.

DE WALQUE Damien () Early Education, Preferences, and Decision-Making Abilities

Joana Cardim (Education Policy Institute) Pedro Carneiro (University College of London, IFS, CEMMAP, FAIR-NHH) Leandro S. Carvalho (University of Southern California) Damien de Walque (Development Research Group, The World Bank)[

Development Economics Seminar

Le 28/02/2024 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


This paper examines the impact of progressive radio programming on societal change during the early period of desegregation in post-World War II U.S. We investigate the influence of the popular radio show “The Adventures of Superman” on promoting tolerance and exposing the bigotry of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) in 1946. Using state-of-the-art radio propagation models, we map the broadcast’s exposure and analyze its effects on various socioeconomic outcomes. We find that counties with higher exposure to the broadcast experienced a significant decrease in support for segregationist political candidates. Individuals potentially exposed to the Superman program during their childhood exhibited more progressive attitudes towards racial desegregation and African Americans later in life. These individuals were also more likely to be in interracial marriages and less likely to participate in the Vietnam war. Additionally, we uncover significant and progressive long-term effects of the radio coverage on county-level outcomes such as the presence of active KKK branches, civil rights organizations, and accessibility of non-discriminatory services for African Americans listed in the “Green Books.” These results underscore the potential of progressive radio programming as a catalyst for social change and contribute to our understanding of how media shapes societal attitudes and beliefs.

GOMES Joseph Flavian () It’s a Bird, it’s a Plane, it’s Superman! Using Mass Media to Fight Intolerance

Alex Armand, Paul Atwell, Joseph F. Gomes, Giuseppe Musillo, Yannik Schenk

Development Economics Seminar

Le 14/02/2024 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


What would be the consequences of a long-term commitment to provide everyone enough money to meet their basic needs? We examine this hotly debated issue in the context of a unique eld experiment in rural Kenya. Communities receiving UBI experienced substantial economic expansion|more enterprises, higher revenues, costs, and net revenues|and structural shifts, with the expansion concentrated in the non-agricultural sector. Labor supply did not change overall, but shifted out of wage employment and towards self-employment. We also compare the eects to those of shorter-term transfers delivered either as a stream of small payments or a large lump sum. The lump sums had similar, if not larger, economic impacts, while the short-term transfers had noticeably smaller eects, despite having delivered the same amount of capital to date. These results are consistent with a simple model of forward-looking lumpy investment, and more generally with a role for savings constraints, credit constraints, and some degree of (locally) increasing returns, among other factors.

BANERJEE Abhijit () Universal Basic Income: Short-Term Results from a Long-Term Experiment in Kenya

Abhijit Banerjee,Michael Faye,Alan Krueger,Paul Niehaus,Tavneet Suri

Development Economics Seminar

Le 20/12/2023 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


This paper examines informal redistribution in the form of work in small and medium enterprises in Kampala, Uganda and its drivers. Using a field experiment, we show that employers and workers systematically choose giving/receiving work over cash transfers. Decisions imply a large willingness to pay for work on both sides of the labor market. Work redistribution choices are unaffected by the economic and training value of the task, and employers pay for zero marginal product work. Removing stakes in the game also does not affect decisions, ruling out signaling and relational personal benefits as drivers. Employers and workers motivate work redistribution mostly with fairness considerations and, secondly, with the psychosocial value of work for workers. Results appear externally valid, as giving via work predicts increased hiring in the firm, but it does not lead to higher revenues, sales, or profits, confirming that work redistribution is unlikely to be productive.

Macchi Elisa () Work Over Just Cash: Informal Redistribution Among Employers and Workers in Kampala, Uganda

Development Economics Seminar

Le 13/12/2023 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


Making markets is central to theories of development. In our rural Malian study setting, seventy percent of smallholder farmers did not have village-level access to an ag-input dealer in the twelve previous months. We create rural input markets with a village input fair (VIF). Our experiment estimates the effect of forward or commitment contracts depending on the market timing when inputs can be purchased or ordered (at planting or post-harvest season), the up-front deposit a farmer pays an ag-input dealer to order inputs for delivery during the planting season (the level of commitment), and whether credit is offered during the village input fairs (to test the implications of liquidity). We estimate the intention-totreat effects of differences in these market structures on prices, market volume, consumer demand, and agricultural production and revenue. The results suggest that ordering inputs in advance substantially raise market sales when deposit amounts are low (10 percent versus 50 percent deposit). The credit offers increase sales by USD 63 in the 10 percent deposit group which increases fertilizer purchased by 140 kg at market prices. Village input fairs led to increases in input utilization at the extensive and intensive margin. We conclude that innovations in market organization resulted in farmer intensification rather than diversification of production with strong effects on farmer revenue. We do not observe price discrimination in VIFs relative to control group or spot market prices.

DILLON Andrew () Making Markets: Experiments in Agricultural Input Market Formation

Andrew Dillon Northwestern University , Nicol´o Tomaselli University of Florence

Development Economics Seminar

Le 06/12/2023 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


We evaluate secure survey methods designed for the ongoing monitoring of harass- ment in organizations. To do so, we partner with a large Bangladeshi garment manu- facturer and experiment with different designs of phone-based worker surveys. “Hard” garbling (HG) responses to sensitive questions, i.e., automatically recording a random subset as complaints, increases reporting of physical harassment by 290%, sexual harass- ment by 271%, and threatening behavior by 45%, from reporting rates of 1.5%, 1.8%, and 9.9%, respectively, under the status quo of direct elicitation. Rapport-building and removing team identifiers from responses do not significantly increase reporting. We show that garbled reports can be used to consistently estimate policy-relevant statistics of harassment, including: How prevalent is it? What share of managers is responsible for the misbehavior? and, How isolated are its victims? In our data, harassment is widespread, the problem is not restricted to a minority of managers, and victims are often isolated within teams.

Heath Rachel () Monitoring Harassment in Organizations

Laura Boudreau (Columbia University), Sylvain Chassang (Princeton University), Ada González-Torres (Ben Gurion University)

Development Economics Seminar

Le 29/11/2023 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


We employ an at-scale randomized experiment to evaluate how one of the world's largest citizen-led monitoring efforts, India's ``social audits'' initiative, impacted corruption and access to social protection in one of India's poorest states. A unique feature is the program's reliance on female auditors drawn from village self-help groups. Combining administrative data on program expenditures with survey data, we document how the nature of corruption varies across the two distinct schemes linked to India's workfare program. Submitting names of villagers who did not work was the main form of leakage in the public works scheme, whereas kickbacks dominated in the national housing scheme, which provides a conditional cash transfer for home construction. Audits reduced corruption in both programs, with differing implications for participants by program. Reduced corruption in public works was accompanied by lower levels of implementation and therefore less access -- survey data show the share of citizens participating reduced by more than 50% in audited communities. Conditional on participating, amounts received by citizens did not change. In contrast, audits reduced kickbacks paid to local leaders under the national housing program by 28% and as a result income retained by participants increased by 7%.

Schaner Simone () Accountability at a Cost? The Impact of Citizen-Led Auditing on Social Protection Provision

Charity Troyer Moore and Rohini Pande

Development Economics Seminar

Le 22/11/2023 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


Agriculture is the main income source for over half of households in Sub-Saharan Africa, yet markets for its key input, land, function poorly. While incomplete land markets are considered an obstacle to agricultural productivity growth and to economic development, experimental evidence on land market participation is virtually non-existent. We randomly allocate subsidies for agricultural rentals in Kenya, and study who selects into land markets, what renters do differently from owners, and the resulting effects on agricultural outcomes. The induced rentals reallocate plots to farmers who own fewer plots and are younger and more market-oriented, and they persist beyond the subsidy. Renters increase output and value added on the rented plot, by more than owners under an equivalent unconditional cash transfer, and they do so by increasing commercial crop cultivation and non-labor inputs, rather than labor. Although owners cultivate less land under the rental subsidy, their non-agricultural labor decreases. The results shed light on the sources and magnitudes of both land market frictions and gains from trade.

WILLIS Jack () Land Rental Markets: Experimental Evidence from Kenya", with Michelle Acampora and Lorenzo Casaburi

Development Economics Seminar

Le 18/10/2023 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


We study the effects of information frictions on gender gaps in matching and hiring in online labor markets. Administrative data from a large online job platform in Nigeria suggest significant gender differences in job applications, hiring and potential mismatch by gender. Women are less likely to apply to senior level jobs, despite being equally qualified for positions. Women are also less likely to be hired. We implement randomized experiments that provide information on these patterns, along with diversity encouragement information, separately, to applicants and hiring managers. The results so far demonstrate the importance of providing information to both sides of the online labor market and suggest that information can reduce gender gaps in employment by correcting misinformation among misinformed applicants and hiring managers

Archibong Belinda () Information Frictions and Gender Inequality in Online Labor Markets

Development Economics Seminar

Le 04/10/2023 de 16:00:00 à 18:30:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


Organized crime groups (OCGs) invest substantial sums in legal economic activities worldwide. Evidence on these investments is limited due to data scarcity. We introduce a model differentiating contaminated (OCG benefits from connecting legal firm to illegal activities increasing the risk of detection) from pure investment (legal firm and OCG's illegal activities remain separate). The model clarifies how to distinguish these motives in the data and delivers predictions which we test using new and highly confidential records from the Bank of Italy's Financial Intelligence Unit. Among infiltrated firms, we distinguish born-clean (that are later infiltrated) from born-infiltrated firms. In born-clean firms, infiltration is associated with a change in the sources of finance and increased liquidity, but no changes in operational outcomes, consistent with a pure investment motive. Born-infiltrated firms, instead, present traits consistent with the contaminated motive. As born-clean firms attract more OCG capital, our results suggest OCGs mainly use legal firms to invest in assets and possibly acquire valuable connections. These results challenge existing literature and policy narratives.

Macchiavello Rocco () Mafia & Firms

Development Economics Seminar

Le 20/09/2023 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


We posit that labor supply is not a function of stable preferences for leisure, but rather is also determined by one's past habituation to work. In existing data, we show that exogenously induced transitory changes in labor supply increase supply in subsequent days - indicating that the inter-temporal labor supply elasticity can actually be positive, rather than negative. To further examine this phenomenon, we undertake a field experiment with casual urban stand workers in Chennai, India, where appearance at the stand in the morning provides a revealed preference measure of labor supply. We randomly provide some workers incentives for attendance over 2 months (phase 1), and examine persistence after incentives are removed for another 2 months (phase 2). We find that a 23% increase in labor supply in phase 1 generates a persistent 16% increase in supply in phase 2 - leading to a 22% increase in employment found at the stand. These findings have relevance for understanding the reasons for irregular work attendance and high worker turnover in formal firms, which impede the transition to formal work in this setting. They also suggest that the effects of unemployment spells may go beyond income loss: unemployment itself can lower a worker's productivity - offering a potential justification for the unemployment scar'' phenomenon documented in the labor literature, where employers prefer not to hire workers out of unemployment. Overall, they suggest that work ethic is an endogenous feature of human capital stock.

Shamdasani Yogita () Habit Formation in Labor Supply (joint with Luisa Cefala, Supreet Kaur and Heather Schofield)

Development Economics Seminar

Le 07/06/2023 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


We study the internal organization of firms in developing countries and how it affects their productivity and optimal size. We collect detailed time use data for 1,000 manufacturing firms in urban Uganda and document limited within-firm labor specialization. Even in relatively large firms, entrepreneurs and their employees work on similar tasks. As such, firms resemble a collection of self-employed individuals who share a production location. To interpret the empirical evidence, we develop an equilibrium model of task assignment, firm size, and occupational choice. We find that barriers to labor specialization generate decreasing returns to scale at the firm level, which reduces the returns to entrepreneurial ability and keeps firms small in equilibrium. Given the internal organization of firms we document, benefits from alleviating any other frictions that constrain firm growth are muted

Bassi Vittorio () Self-employment within the firm”, joint with Jung Hyuk Lee, Alessandra Peter, Tommaso Porzio, Ritwika Sen and Esau Tugume

Development Economics Seminar

Le 24/05/2023 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


Search costs may be a barrier to market integration in developing countries, harming both producers and consumers. We present evidence from the large-scale experimental rollout of a mobile phone-based marketplace intended to reduce search costs for agricultural commodities in Uganda. We find that market integration improves substantially: trade increases and excess price dispersion falls. This reflects price convergence across relative surplus and deficit markets, with no change on average. Using our experimental results to calibrate a trade model we can correct our reduced form estimates for the spillovers on the control, as well as simulating the impact that the intervention would have had if it were universally implemented. Our results suggest that the intervention reduced fixed trade costs by 10% and increased overall welfare in the study area by 1%. Contrary to the stated goals of the marketplace, but consistent with the existence of economies of scale in search or other trade costs, almost all activity on the platform is among larger traders, with very little use by smallholder farmers. Nevertheless, the benefits of improved arbitrage by traders appears to pass through to farmers in the form of higher revenues in surplus markets, as trader entry increases and measured trader profits decrease in response to falling search costs.

Bergquist Lauren () Search Costs, Intermediation, and Trade: Experimental Evidence from Ugandan Agricultural Markets (joint with Craig McIntosh and Meredith Startz)

Development Economics Seminar

Le 17/05/2023 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


This paper considers how far private adaptation may reduce future vulnerability to climate change. Firms’ climate risk exposure depends not only on the location of production, but also on network effects via the flood risk profile of suppliers and transportation links connecting trading partners. We use data on monthly firm-to-firm transactions for the near-universe of formal sector manufacturing firms in Pakistan and more than six billion observations from commercial trucks traveling on the road network from 2011 to 2018 to study adaptation of firms in production networks. We find that firms affected by major floods relocate to less flood-prone areas, diversify their supplier base, and shift the composition of their suppliers towards those located in less flood-prone regions and reached via less flood-prone roads. Identification strategies that exploit both firm- and route-level flooding suggest that these responses reflect forward-looking actions to reduce future vulnerability to flood risk rather than direct effects of flooding, and are consistent with experience-based updating. We develop a quantitative spatial model of endogenous production network formation among firms that learn about flood risk from realized flood events. We estimate the model to quantify the importance of the adaptive responses identified for the aggregate vulnerability of the economy to future flood risk. The results suggest that the impacts of climate change will be mediated as firms learn from the experience of increasingly frequent climate disasters

Balboni Clare (MIT) * Firm Adaptation in Production Networks: Evidence from Extreme Weather Events in Pakistan

Johannes Boehm & Mazhar Waseem

Development Economics Seminar

Le 10/05/2023 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


This paper provides novel evidence on the mechanisms driving the combination of poor-quality public services and high prevalence of non-payment (free riding) in low- and middle-income countries. We implement a field experiment in the slums of two major Indian cities and in the context of a fee-funded public service provided by community toilets. Collecting original surveys, behavioral and objective measurements, we show that an exogenous boost in the maintenance quality of the service improves delivery and reduces free riding in a static and dynamic way, but excludes a share of residents from using the service. Providers react strategically to external rewards by shifting their efforts towards monitoring activities. Excluded users are forced to dispose human waste in common-property, generating large health externalities. Residents demand more public intervention in the service provision.

Bancalari Antonella (MIT) "Public Service Delivery and Free Riding: Experimental Evidence from India"

Alex Armand, Britta Augsburg and Maitreesh Ghatak

Development Economics Seminar

Le 19/04/2023 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


Market-based environmental regulations are seldom used in developing countries, where pollution is the highest but state capacity is often low. We experimentally evaluate a new particulate matter emissions market, the first in the world, covering industrial plants in a large Indian city. There are three main findings. First, the market functioned well: permit trade was active and plants obtained permits to meet their compliance obligations almost perfectly. Second, treatment plants, randomly assigned to the emissions market, reduced pollution emissions by 20% to 30%, relative to control plants. Third, the market, holding emissions constant, reduces abatement costs by 11% to 14%. These cost estimates are based on a model that estimates heterogeneous plant marginal abatement costs from plant bids for emissions permits. More broadly, we find that emissions can be reduced at small increases in abatement costs. The pollution market therefore has health benefits that exceed costs by at least twenty-five times

SUDARSHAN ANAT (University of Warwick) Can Pollution Markets Work In Developing Countries? Experimental Evidence from India

Development Economics Seminar

Le 05/04/2023 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


Many governments have engaged in policy experimentation in various forms to resolve uncertainty and facilitate learning. However, little is understood about the characteristics of policy experimentation, and how the structure of experimentation may affect policy learning and policy outcomes. We aim to describe and understand China's policy experimentation since 1980, among the largest and most systematic in recent history. We collect comprehensive data on policy experimentation conducted in China over the past four decades. We find that, while experimentation outcomes strongly predict whether policies roll out nationally, the experimentation exhibits two characteristics that complicate policy learning. First, about 90% of the experiments exhibit positive sample selection in terms of a locality’s economic development. Second, promotion-driven local politicians allocate more resources to ensure the experiments' success, and such effort is not replicable when policies roll out to the entire country. The presence of sample selection and strategic effort is not fully accounted for by the central government, affecting policy learning and distorting national policies originating from the experimentation. Taken together, these results suggest that, while China’s bureaucratic and institutional conditions make policy experimentation possible at an unparalleled scale, the complex political environments can also limit the scope and bias the direction of policy learning

YANG David (University of Warwick) Policy Experimentation in China: the Political Economy of Policy Learning

Development Economics Seminar

Le 22/03/2023 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


Do people worried about their personal finances experience lower quality sleep? Using a regression discontinuity research design, we find that eligible household heads surveyed just after the disbursement of an unconditional cash transfer in Indonesia report a 0.3 standard deviation improvement in sleep quality as compared to those surveyed just before the cash disbursement. The cash transfer appears to have alleviated financial concerns amongst household heads, who are responsible for satisfying the daily necessities of the household. Immediately after disbursement, eligible households report an increase in savings, and eligible household heads report feeling less worried, frustrated, and tired. Consistent with evidence from sleep medicine, eligible household heads displayed improved performance on memory and attention tests but not on reasoning or problem-solving tests. These patterns of results are not observed for household heads ineligible for the cash transfer, which suggests that our results are not driven by seasonal confounders or aggregate shocks. These results are also not observed for other members of eligible households, who are not responsible for satisfying the households’ financial needs. We also argue that nutrition, time in bed, and labor supply cannot explain our results.

Jagnani Maulik (University of Warwick) Financial Concerns and Sleeplessness

Claire Duquennois and Maulik Jagnani*

Development Economics Seminar

Le 15/03/2023 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


We develop a political agency model in which office holders are motivated by re-election as well as reputation motives, and are incentivized to curb corrupt behavior through elections, formal audits, as well as norms regarding the appropriateness of corruption that prevail in their peer group. The model formalizes the notion that anti-social behavior is governed by both formal and informal rules of conduct. We show that, while the formal institutions of audits and elections have the desired direct effect of reducing corruption, the presence of norms and their interaction with the direct incentives can have unintended effects. We examine the model's predictions in the context of Puerto Rico's anti-corruption municipal audits program over the period 1987-2014. Specifically, using a quasi-experimental design based on the exogenous timing of audits relative to elections, we show that the model helps explain peculiar patters in the data: mayors respond positively to audits in their own community, but negatively to audits - and the corresponding reduction in corruption - in neighboring municipalities. Our estimates suggest a large negative spillover effect: communities where two-thirds of adjacent jurisdictions undergo a (timely) audit experience a 30 percent increase in reported corruption levels.

Bobonis Gustavo (University of Warwick) Norms of Corruption in Politicians’ Malfeasance

Anke Kessler and Xin Zhao

Development Economics Seminar

Le 01/03/2023 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


This paper examines the impact of ethnic networks on product demand and firm growth in rural India. We use changes in regional rainfall intensity as a proxy for local demand shocks and find that demand is segmented along caste lines. We find that consumers in historically disadvantaged communities experience a positive income shock due to good rainfall and that this translates into higher per-capita consumption for them. Further, this demand shock translates into higher revenue for the firms owned by members of the same caste category, relative to others. In terms of input misallocation, LC firms exhibit 16% higher MRPV (marginal revenue product of intermediate input) than HC firms. The demand shock reduces this cross-caste dispersion in MRPV by 5%. We rationalize these observations using a framework of cash-flow based borrowing constraints for firms. The paper suggests, in the short run, that input misallocation and borrowing constraints for firms are caused by limited product demand, rather than the other way around.

Goraya Sampreet (University of Warwick) Product Demand, Misallocation and Firm Growth

Development Economics Seminar

Le 07/12/2022 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


Community Health Workers (CHWs) are central to health systems. Still, they are typically unpaid volunteers in Sub-Saharan Africa. This paper follows all the CHWs in the capital city of Guinea-Bissau and tests the impact of different types of non-financial incentives on health indicators. We analyze two randomized interventions for CHWs: (i) an honorific award aimed at raising their social status; (ii) a video treatment aimed at increasing their perceived task significance. While employing administrative and survey data, we find that the social status intervention, differently from the task significance one, causes clear improvements in household health, particularly for young children.

Vicente Pedro (University of Warwick) Motivating Volunteer Health Workers in an African Capital City

Mattia Fracchia, Teresa Molina-Milla´n,

Development Economics Seminar

Le 30/11/2022 de 16:00:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


Lars Ivar Oppedal Berge, Kjetil Bjorvatn, Fortunata Makene, Linda Helgesson Sekei, Vincent Somville, Bertil Tungodden We report from a large-scale randomized controlled trial of women empowerment in Tanzania investigating how two different empowerment strategies, economic empowerment and reproductive health empowerment, shape the economic and fertility choices of young women when they transition into adulthood. The analysis builds on a rich data set (survey, experimental, and medical data) collected over more than five years. The economic empowerment reduces poverty, while teenage pregnancy increases with both economic and reproductive health empowerment. The increase in fertility comes from a positive income effect and by women entering earlier into a relationship. We also provide evidence of the importance of social norms and labor market flexibility in explaining the income and relationship effects on fertility. The findings provide new insights on the economics of fertility, and show the importance of a comprehensive approach to women empowerment.

Somville Vincent (University of Warwick) On the Doorstep of Adulthood: Empowering Economic and Fertility Choices of Young Women


Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 23/11/2022 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4

BANERJEE Abhijit (University of Warwick) The (many) million dollar question: Experimental Evidence from Kenya on Universal Basic Income

Development Economics Seminar

Le 09/11/2022 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


How will private adaptation reduce future vulnerability to climate change? We study this question in the context of Pakistani manufacturing firms, which are exposed to increasingly frequent and severe floods as the global climate changes. Using detailed georeferenced data on monthly firm-to-firm transactions for the near-universe of formal sector manufacturing firms over 2011-2018 as well as flood exposure and underlying flood risk, we document that these shocks have both direct impacts on firms and effects through their position in the production network. We also harness more than six billion observations from commercial trucks traveling on Pakistan’s road network to document the importance of supply chain disruptions from flooding disrupting roads. We find that firm behavior in the aftermath of major floods is consistent with firms undertaking adaptation in order to reduce their vulnerability to future natural disasters. Flood-affected firms relocate to less flood-prone areas, diversify their supplier base, and shift the composition of their suppliers towards suppliers located in less flood-prone regions and reached via less flood-prone roads. Responses are persistent even where the flood disruptions are short-lived, and consistent with Bayesian firms affected by floods updating their priors over flood risk.

Balboni Clare (University of Warwick) Firm adaptation in production networks: Evidence from extreme weather events in Pakistan

Johannes Boehm, Mazhar Waseem

Development Economics Seminar

Le 19/10/2022 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


This paper provides evidence on how to effectively build basic state capacity during active internal conflict. We report results from a randomized evaluation of a major reform intended to improve the Afghan government’s ability to pay its employees, which involved over 30,000 employees of the Ministry of Education between 2018 and 2020. The first element of the program, designed to eliminate ‘ghost’ workers, required employees to register for a mobile money wallet with biometric identification. This helped eliminate ghosts from the payroll (1.3% of employees), and allows estimation of the true share of ghosts (8.4% - 20.4%). The second element transitioned employees from receiving their salary in cash to receiving it via direct mobile money transfers. This led to a 26 percentage point increase in support for the reform to be scaled nationally, reduced salary delays, and caused employees to dramatically increase activity on the mobile money network, demonstrating a potential pathway toward expanding Afghanistan’s formal financial system. Because the experiment spanned both secure cities and contested rural regions, we can examine whether state control complemented the reform. While the reform brought benefits everywhere, improvements materialized faster in cities. Our results highlight the importance of long-term horizons in state-building efforts and provide evidence that progress toward a modern bureaucracy is possible, even in the shadow of war and while the broader state is under threat.

Callen Michael (University of Warwick) Modernizing the State During War: Experimental Evidence from Afghanistan

Joshua E. Blumenstock (U.C Berkeley), Anastasiia Faikina (U.C San Diego), Stefano Fiorin (Bocconi, LEAP, CEPR), Tarek Ghani (Washington University)

Development Economics Seminar

Le 12/10/2022 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


Can decentralizing demonstration accelerate diffusion of new technologies? We randomize approaches to demonstration of a new flood-saline-resilient seed in Bangladesh, led either by a single farmer or with expanded participation holding fixed village-level demonstration scale. Decentralization increases the impacts of demonstration on adoption: more farmers learn by demonstrating, and additional demonstrators strengthen social learning. However, in the long run, the impacts of demonstration fall and additional impacts of decentralization strikingly vanish. We estimate a Bayesian model of learning the returns to a new technology; adoption is nonmonotonic in learning, and decentralizing demonstration increases expected gains from demonstration.

Kondylis Florence (University of Warwick) Learning from self and learning from others: Experimental evidence from Bangladesh

with John Loeser, Mushfiq Mobarak, Maria Jones, and Daniel Stein

Development Economics Seminar

Le 28/09/2022 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


We study how signaling skills specific to the major affects labor market outcomes of college graduates. We rely on census-like data and a regression discontinuity design to study the impacts of a well-known award given to top performers on a mandatory nationwide exam, which constitutes a graduation requirement for college seniors in Colombia. Students who can rely on the signal when searching for a job have a wage premium of 7 to 12 percent compared to otherwise identical students. This positive return persists even five years after graduation. The signal mostly benefits workers who graduate from low-reputation colleges, and allows workers to find jobs in more productive firms and in sectors that better use their skills. We rule out that the positive wage returns are explained by human capital. The signal favors mostly less advantaged groups, implying that less information frictions about students' skills could potentially reduce earnings gaps. Our results imply that information policies like those that formally certify specific skills can improve the efficiency in talent allocation of the economy and level the playing field for workers who come from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Munoz-Morales Juan (University of Warwick) Signaling Specific Skills and the Labor Market of College Graduates


Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 21/09/2022 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


We evaluate the effectiveness of two interventions designed to reduce the incidence of female genital cutting (FGC) among adolescent girls in Sierra Leone. In this setting, FGC is part of a ritual called “Bondo”, which marks a girl's transition into womanhood. We randomly assigned over 3,500 mothers from 150 villages to three experimental arms: (i) a control group; (ii) an information arm, where we held community-wide discussions on the differences in outcomes between cut and uncut girls (e.g., in terms of health); and (iii) a norm-replacement arm, aimed at substituting the traditional ritual with an alternative that does not involve cutting “Bondo without cutting''. We measure FGC status both through mother's reports and through direct observation by medical personnel during health checks. Both treatments resulted in a 35%-38% increase in the probability that girls were not cut and that their mothers reported the intention not to cut them two years after the intervention. Our results underline the importance of designing culturally-sensitive policies when trying to change harmful traditions.

Corno Lucia (University of Warwick) Norms Replacement. A Field Experiment on Ending Female Genital Cutting”

with E. La Ferrara

Development Economics Seminar

Le 01/06/2022 de 16:30:00 à 17:45:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


Alcohol abuse is a risk factor for Intimate Partner Violence (IPV), though less is known about the causal relationship between them. We estimate the causal effect on IPV of a randomized-control trial (RCT) designed to mitigate alcohol consumption in rural Kenya, where IPV rates are higher than the global average. Treated households attended a series of group counseling and couples' therapy sessions. Non-treated households in close proximity may benefit from treatment spillovers, and are part of a spillover control group, while pure control households were in separate villages. Treatment substantially lowered sexual IPV, with smaller or no effects on physical and emotional IPV. Incidence of sexual violence decreased by 0.33 standard deviations relative to the control mean, while the frequency of aggression decreased by 0.3 standard deviations. Interestingly, men were also 11 percentage points less likely to agree that wife-beating is justified when a wife refuses sex. Counselor notes from treatment sessions reveal that alcohol abuse and IPV were commonly mentioned together by couples, suggesting a program to lower alcohol abuse may reduce IPV as well.

Castilla Carolina (University of Warwick) Tipples and Quarrels in the Household: The Effect of an Alcohol Mitigation Intervention on Intimate Partner Violence

Development Economics Seminar

Le 25/05/2022 de 16:30:00 à 17:45:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


Electrification is crucial for economic development. However, where and how it may have transformative effects remains unclear. In light of recent microeconomic evidence on electrification’s disappointing effects, we study the potential sources of heterogeneity underlying these results in the context of Zambia, where a large, country-wide rural electrification program is being rolled out. We develop a novel measure of electrification with high temporal and spatial coverage derived from administrative records on the universe of Zambian primary schools and health centres. We can confirm, first, that hundreds of localities have gained access to the electric grid since 2006. Second, our best estimate of a local average treatment effect derived from accidentally electrified localities is indeed virtually zero across a wide range of outcomes. Third, exploiting two full rounds of the Zambian Population & Housing Census, we uncover two relevant sources of heterogeneity: variation in pre-existing locality size and productive capacity. Electrification’s effects are most pronounced in localities with between 2,000 and 5,000 inhabitants, and any beneficial effects of electrification are concentrated on localities that have at least one non-residential building in commercial use before electrification, even conditional on locality size. In line with classic theories of agglomeration, we conclude that indivisible investments, such as pre-existing productive building capacity, may determine if rural electrification will cause economic development.

Moneke Niclas (University of Warwick) The Heterogeneous Effects of Rural Electrification: Evidence from Zambia

with Torsten Figueiredo Walter)

Development Economics Seminar

Le 17/05/2022 de 16:30:00 à 17:45:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


Distribution of goods often involves chains of multiple intermediaries engaged in sequential buying and reselling. Why do such chains arise, and how will changes in their structure due to changes in policy or trade costs affect consumers? We show that internal economies of scale in trade costs naturally generate chains with multiple intermediaries, and that this suggests developing country markets are more likely to be served via long chains. Contrary to common wisdom, cutting middlemen out can, but does not necessarily, benefit consumers. Instead, there is a fundamental tradeoff between costs and entry that means even pure reductions in trade costs can have perverse effects. The proposed mechanism is simple, but can account for empirical patterns in wholesale firm size, prices and markups that we document using original survey data on imported consumer goods in Nigeria. We estimate a structural version of the model for distribution of Chinese-made apparel in Nigeria, and describe endogenous restructuring of chains and the resulting impacts on consumer welfare in response to counterfactual changes in regulation and e-commerce technologies. We find that cutting out middlemen has heterogeneous impacts across locations, but often harms more remote consumers.

Startz Meredith (University of Warwick) Cutting out the middleman: The structure of chains of intermediation

with Matthew Grant

Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 04/05/2022 de 16:30:00 à 17:45:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


We show that Malawian healthcare staff save lives by tracking down HIV patients lapsed from care – even against their wishes – using data made accessible with the implementation of an electronic medical records (EMR) system. HIV patients in Malawi receive antiretroviral therapy (ART), a highly effective treatment that also prevents transmission, for free at clinics. Yet patients frequently lapse from care, resulting in increased community transmission and unnecessary deaths. The introduction of EMR allowed health providers to manage patient data, trace lapsed patients, and encourage lapsed patients to reinitiate treatment. We implement an event study analysis using data from 106 clinics that adopted EMR between 2007 and 2019 and find that the introduction of EMR leads to an immediate increase in the number of patients actively in care and to a decline in patient deaths. After five years of implementation, facilities with EMR have approximately 34 percent more patients in care and 28 percent fewer patient deaths than facilities without EMR. These effects are concentrated among patients under 50, and are larger among young children. Effects are also concentrated among patients who do not wish to be traced; these patients are in fact more likely to lapse from care and require tracing. Robust to additional specifications and supported by interview findings, the results demonstrate that an initial preference for privacy gives way to patient reinstatement in care when the health consequences are critical.

Derksen Laura (University of Warwick) Privacy at What Cost? Using Electronic Medical Records to Recover Lapsed Patients into HIV Care

with Anita McGahan and Leandro Pongeluppe

Development Economics Seminar

Le 20/04/2022 de 16:30:00 à 17:45:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


Anti-personnel landmines are one of the main causes of civilian victimization in conflict-affected areas and a significant obstacle for post-war reconstruction. Demining campaigns are therefore a promising policy instrument to promote long-term development. We argue that the economic and social effects of demining are not unambiguously positive. Demining may have unintended negative consequences if it takes place while conflicts are ongoing, or if they do not lead to full clearance. Using highly disaggregated data on demining operations in Colombia from 2004 to 2019, and exploiting the staggered fashion of demining activity, we find that post-conflict humanitarian demining increases economic activity and students’ performance in test scores, especially in areas with better market access. In contrast, economic activity does not react to post-conflict demining events carried out during military operations, and it decreases if demining takes place while the conflict is ongoing. Rather, demining events that result from military operations are more likely to exacerbate extractive activities and promote deforestation.

PREM Mounu (University of Warwick) Landmines: The local effects of demining

with Miguel E. Purroy and Juan F. Vargas

Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 06/04/2022 de 16:30:00 à 17:45:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


This paper studies the effects of India’s main school-integration policy — a 25% quota in private schools for disadvantaged students, whose fees are reimbursed by the state — on direct beneficiaries. Combining survey and administrative data from the state of Chhattisgarh, with lottery-based allocation of seats in oversubscribed schools, we show that receiving a quota seat makes students more likely to attend a private school (by 24 percentage points). However, within eligible caste groups, quota applicants are drawn disproportionately from more-educated and economically better-off households and over three-quarters of the applicants who were not allotted a quota seat also attended a private school as fee-paying students. Consequently, we estimate that  70% of the total expenditure on each quota seat is inframarginal to school choice. The policy delivers clear gains for direct beneficiaries but is unlikely to affect school integration without broadening the pool of applicants.

Singh Abhijeet (University of Warwick) The incidence of affirmative action: Evidence from quotas in private schools in India

with Mauricio Romero

Development Economics Seminar

Le 30/03/2022 de 16:30:00 à 17:30:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


Scientific progress is more important than ever in tackling many challenges the world faces. Recently, the momentum for new developments has shifted eastward, in particular as China has dramatically expanded its scientific output. Today, China trails only the US as the world’s leading producer of high-quality scientific research. Understanding how China’s ascent has affected worldwide production of scientific knowledge is therefore of key importance. To shed light on the causal impact of China’s rise in science on research productivity elsewhere, we focus on the evolution of scientific publications at world-leading universities over 1996-2016, exploiting patterns of research collaborations between institutions. We find that non-Chinese universities that have stronger historical links to China collaborate substantially more with China in the late 2000s and also produce more scientific output in general. These effects are heterogeneous across research fields and also across the quality of research publications. We explore the movements of Chinese students going abroad and returning to China as a possible mechanism driving these findings.

KU Hyejin (University of Warwick) The Rise of China and the Global Production of Scientific Knowledge

Joint with Tianrui Mu (UCL)

Development Economics Seminar

Le 23/03/2022 de 16:30:00 à 17:45:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


We conducted an experiment to test one mechanism through which community monitoring of public services may operate. Working with the Government of Uganda, we randomly assigned schools and their management committees to two variants of a score card. Community based score cards are found to have higher impact than standardised ones on teacher absenteeism and pupil enrolment, presence and learning, by individual or joint testing employing randomisation inference. They also induce higher cooperation, measured directly through a public goods game. Further analysis rules out information as an alternative channel. Mediation analysis confirms that a substantial share of impact stems from collective action.

Serneels Pieter (University of Warwick) The collective action mechanism in community-based monitoring of public services.

with Abigail Barr, Frederick Mugisha, Andrew Zeitlin

Development Economics Seminar

Le 15/12/2021 de 16:30:00 à 17:45:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


When parents want a specific number of children of a given gender (boys, in general), they can use two methods: the "stopping rule" and sex selective abortion. The stopping rule refers to a behaviour by which parents continue child bearing till they reach their desired number of boys. Sex selective abortion refers to the choice of aborting foetuses of a specific gender. In societies in which gender preferences are prevalent, these methods can heavily affect fertility practices. We propose two novel theory based measures of detection of these practices. Taking the perspective of the child rather than that of the family, these measures are easily implementable, precise, and rely on fewer assumptions than other measures in use. We first show that, under the stopping rule, girls are, on average, exposed to a larger number of younger siblings than boys. We then propose a new method to detect the prevalence of the stopping rule in a given society. This method allows us to identify countries in which the stopping rule prevails, some of which have been largely ignored in the literature. We also identify countries in which the stopping rule targets a desired number of girls rather than boys. Second, we show that sex selective abortion leads to boys have on average more elder daughters than girls. We then propose a new method to detect the prevalence of sex selective abortion in a given society and implement it at the world level.

Cassan Guilhem (University of Warwick) Stopping rule and sex selective abortion: new measures and world evidence

Jean Marie Baland et François Woitrin (University of Namur)

Development Economics Seminar

Le 07/12/2021 de 16:30:00 à 17:45:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


Irregular migration from West Africa to Europe across the Sahara and Mediterranean is extremely risky for the migrants and a key policy concern. We conducted a cluster-randomized experiment with 3,641 young men from 391 settlements in The Gambia to test three different approaches designed to reduce risky, irregular migration. The first is to provide potential migrants with better information about the risks to be faced during the journey, including testimonials from those who have attempted the journey and statistics on the likelihood of experiencing negative events en route. The second intervention is to also provide a second safer migration alternative by adding information and assistance for migration to neighboring Senegal. The third approach is to provide vocational skill training in addition to the information about irregular migration. We evaluate the effect of these policies on actions towards migrating the “backway”, migration to Senegal, and overall well-being.

BATISTA Catia (University of Warwick) Can Information and Alternatives to Irregular Migration Reduce “Backway” Migration from the Gambia?

joint with Tijan Bah, Flore Gubert and David McKenzie

Development Economics Seminar

Le 24/11/2021 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


We report findings from a field experiment in Uganda where women with children aged 3-5 were randomly offered either (i) a childcare subsidy, (ii) a cash grant equivalent in value to the childcare subsidy (iii) both the childcare subsidy and the cash grant. A fourth group of households remain as the control group. After a year, we find that access to childcare has improved child development substantially and increased household income by more than 30 percent. Strikingly, the impact of the childcare subsidy on household income is as large as that generated by the cash transfer. In terms of mechanisms, our data suggest that childcare primarily addresses a time constraint, allowing women to work more effectively and their partners to work more hours, while the cash treatment eases a capital constraint, stimulating investment and women’s labor supply in self-employment. We do not find evidence of strong complementarities between the childcare subsidy and the cash transfer.

VANDEWALLE Lore (University of Warwick) Childcare for family welfare: Experimental evidence from Uganda

Development Economics Seminar

Le 10/11/2021 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


Traditionally female-dominated sectors are growing and male-dominated ones shrinking, yet sectorial male shares are not changing. Why? I embed a field experiment within the UK national recruitment program for social workers to analyze barriers to men’s entry and the nature of men’s sorting into female-dominated occupations. I modify the content of recruitment messages to potential applicants to exogenously vary two key drivers of selection: perceived gender shares and expectations of returns to talent. I find that perceived gender shares do not affect men’s applications, while increasing expected returns to talent encourages men to apply and improves the average quality of the applicants. This enables the employer to hire more talented men, who consistently perform better on the job and are not more likely to leave vis-á-vis men with lower expected returns to talent. I conclude by showing that there is no trade-off between men’s entry and women’s exit among talented applicants, both at hiring and on-the-job, and thus the net impact of raising expected returns to talent for the employer is positive.

DELFINO Alexia (University of Warwick) Breaking Gender Barriers: Experimental Evidence on Men in Pink-Collar Jobs

Development Economics Seminar

Le 03/11/2021 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4

SINGH Manpreet (University of Warwick) Annulé et reporté

Development Economics Seminar

Le 13/10/2021 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


We analyze Indonesia’s big-bang decentralization, which in the early 2000s translated into massive transfers of resources to local districts. Using the non-linearity of the allocation rule to circumvent the potential endogeneity that arises when regressing local outcomes on district revenues, we start by answering two questions. First, how does the level and composition of local government spending respond to additional revenues? Second, given this spending response, what is the impact on development outcomes of households and firms? Next, we use these results to perform structural estimates of the efficiency of spending across three categories of outcomes, namely infrastructure, health, and education, and evaluate its district-level determinants

STRAUB Stéphane (University of Warwick) Decentralization in Indonesia and Local Outcomes. Estimating Spending Efficiency

with Jonas Gathen, Toulouse School of Economics, Vitalijs Jascisens, Higher School of Economics, Moscow

Development Economics Seminar

Le 29/09/2021 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


Community development projects almost universally require communities to contribute collectively towards project costs in cash, materials, or labour. Despite their ubiquity, we know little with certainty about the consequences of such collective contribution requirements, either for the average impact of projects or the distribution of project benefits or costs, or whether these consequences differ when contribution requirements are in cash or labour. We experimentally evaluate the effects of community contribution requirements in cash and in labour in a project to provide safe sources of drinking water in rural Bangladesh. Cash contribution requirements lead to a large decline in take-up and impact, relative to a contribution waiver, while labour contribution requirements of the same nominal value do not. The difference appears primarily driven by the low real monetary value of time in the study communities. The results suggest that substantial welfare gains might be realized by replacing cash contribution requirements with labour contribution requirements in other contexts in which the monetary value of time is low.

TOMPSETT Anna (University of Warwick) Time is not money: an experiment with community contribution requirements in cash and labour

Development Economics Seminar

Le 15/09/2021 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


Climate change is likely to increase the risk of both transitory and prolonged water shortages in many developing countries. It is unclear how communities sharing joint water resources will respond to these shortages. This paper shows that water scarcity can have a different effect on cooperation over water, depending on whether the shortage is transitory or long term. Using daily outlet-level water theft data from Pakistan, I first show that an unexpected short-term water shortage increases the probability of over-extraction of surface water. Then, I examine how farmers respond to long-term scarcity by exploiting a natural experiment that decreases the effective availability of groundwater – the key substitute for surface water – through an increase in groundwater pollution. The instrumented difference-in-differences estimates show that, in contrast to a short-term shock, long term scarcity increases inter-village cooperation. Moreover, farmers experiencing long-term scarcity become better at managing water theft under transitory water shortages. Finally, I provide evidence that informal institutions and caste networks are important for managing water theft under prolonged scarcity. Taken together, these results suggest that long-term environmental change can push communities to adapt by investing in informal mechanisms that enforce cooperation.

MUHAMMAD Haseeb (University of Warwick) Resource Scarcity and Cooperation

Development Economics Seminar

Le 16/06/2021 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


Over the last few years there has been a widespread perception that democracy is under siege, and that the mere existence of electoral representation does not guarantee good government. Some of this skepticism is due to government failures associated with electoral democracy, including clientelism where goods and services are provided to sub-groups of the electorate for political support, that make the actions of government more inequitable. The question then is whether policy interventions can be designed as a corrective to these government failures, to improve the performance of elected officials, and motivate them to act more equitably? To investigate this, we randomly assigned elected village leaders in India to one of two incentive schemes: either a higher public budget, or a non-financial reward in the form of a public certificate that they can use in election campaigns. Both incentives improved the performance of elected leaders. More strikingly, the latter nonfinancial incentive also led to a more equitable within-village allocation of public resources. On the other hand, financial incentives did not affect within-village inequities. These results are consistent with the theoretical predictions from our voting model where the signal of unobserved politician quality varies across different voter sub-groups, and they provide strong evidence that policies that reduce such information asymmetries can lead to more equitable government action.

A. Shrestha Slesh (University of Warwick) Motivating Equity: The Impact of Incentives on Elected Local Politicians in India

Development Economics Seminar

Le 02/06/2021 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


We develop a non-cooperative bargaining model with incomplete information linking dowry payments, domestic violence, resource allocation between a husband and a wife, and separation. Our model generates several predictions, which we test empirically using amendments to the Indian anti-dowry law as a natural experiment. We document a decline in women’s decision-making power and separations, and a surge in domestic violence following the amendments. These unintended effects are attenuated when social stigma against separation is low and, in some circumstances, when gains from marriage are high. Whenever possible, parents increase investment in their daughters’ human capital to compensate for lower dowries.

Calvi Rosella (Rice Université) Til Dowry Do Us Part: Bargaining and Violence in Indian Families

with Ajinkya Keskar

Development Economics Seminar

Le 19/05/2021 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4

Karing Anne (Rice Université) The Social Multiplier from Visibility: Experimental Evidence from Deworming in Kenya

Karim Naguib

Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 05/05/2021 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


Western stakeholders are increasingly demanding that multinationals sourcing from developing countries be accountable for working conditions upstream in their supply chains. In response, many multinationals privately enforce labor standards in these countries, but the effects of their interventions on local firms and workers are unknown. I partnered with 29 multinational retail and apparel firms to enforce local labor laws on their suppliers in Bangladesh. I implemented a field experiment with 84 garment factories, randomly enforcing a mandate for safety committees. The intervention increases compliance with the law and improves measures of safety. My findings are consistent with a model of imperfect monitoring in which MNCs provide positive penalties for noncompliance. These improvements do not appear to come at significant costs to suppliers in terms of efficiency. Factories with better managerial practices drive the improvements, while those with poor practices do not improve, and in these factories, workers’ job satisfaction declines.

Boudreau Laura (Rice Université) Multinational enforcement of labor law: Experimental evidence from Bangladesh’s apparel sector

Development Economics Seminar

Le 21/04/2021 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4

Hardy Morgan (Rice Université) The Impact of Firm Downsizing on Workers: Evidence from Ethiopia's Ready-Made Garment Industry

Development Economics Seminar

Le 14/04/2021 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4

BANERJEE Abhijit (Rice Université) Trust and Efficiency in the Market for Healthcare in Low-income Countries

Development Economics Seminar

Le 31/03/2021 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


We test whether the provision of multiple labeled savings accounts affects savings and downstream outcomes in an experiment with 761 microentrepreneurs in urban Malawi. Treatment respondents received one or multiple savings accounts, in the form of lockboxes or mobile money. We find that while providing additional boxes increased savings by 40%, technical issues marred the efficacy of a second mobile money account. Data from novel high-frequency surveys suggests that both types of accounts had impacts on downstream outcomes, including farming decisions and credit extended to customers. We do not detect differential downstream effects by the number or modality of accounts.

Aggarwal Shilpa (Rice Université) Saving for Multiple Financial Needs: Evidence from Lockboxes and Mobile Money in Malawi

Development Economics Seminar

Le 24/03/2021 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


Do people forego otherwise profitable investments under civil conflict? Answering this question is crucial to our understanding of the costs of violence, but it is difficult to answer because it requires measuring willingness to invest and a source of exogenous variation in conflict intensity. We exploit a unique administrative dataset from Colombia’s largest agricultural bank and the 2016 demobilization agreement between the Colombian government and insurgent group FARC to overcome these challenges. A difference-in-difference strategy yields three main findings: First, credit to small producers increases in municipalities with historical FARC presence after the agreement. Higher loan applications drive this increase, with no change in supply-side variables. Second, a simple theoretical framework combined with rich information on characteristics of applicants and projects (including credit scores and loan outcomes) suggests that producers forego investments with a low return, but not riskier ones, amid conflict. Third, conflict is not the binding constraint on investment in areas with low access to markets. Higher investment, unchanged default rates, and increased nighttime luminosity suggest an overall positive economic impact of lower conflict intensity.

De ROUX Nicolas (Rice Université) Forgone Investments Amid Conflict: Evidence from Agricultural Credit in Colombia

with Luis R. Martínez, University of Chicago, Harris.

Development Economics Seminar

Le 17/03/2021 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


We design a field experiment to study how the allocation of authority between frontline procurement officers and their monitors affects performance both directly and through the response to incentives. In collaboration with the government of Punjab,Pakistan, we shift authority from monitors to procurement officers and introduce financial incentives to a sample of 600 procurement officers in 26 districts. We find that autonomy alone reduces prices by 9% without reducing quality and that the effect is stronger when the monitor tends to delay approvals for purchases until the end of the fiscal year. In contrast, the effect of performance pay is muted, except when agents face a monitor who does not delay approvals. Time use data reveal agents’ responses vary along the same margin: autonomy increases the time devoted to procurement and this leads to lower prices only when monitors cause delays. By contrast, incentives work when monitors do not cause delays. The results illustrate that organizational design and anti-corruption policies must balance agency issues at different levels of the hierarchy.

Best Michael (Rice Université) The Allocation of Authority in Organizations: A Field Experiment with Bureaucrats

Oriana Bandiera, Adnan Qadir Khan, & Andrea Prat

Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 03/03/2021 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4

DUFLO Esther (Rice Université) Encouraging Social Distancing: Evidence from Several Randomized Controlled Trials

Development Economics Seminar

Le 17/02/2021 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


Close-kin marriage, by sustaining tightly knit clan-like structures, may impede development. We use 19th and 20th century US state-level bans on cousin marriage to study the causal effect of tight kinship on economic outcomes. We show that these bans did reduce rates of in-marriage, and that affected descendants therefore have higher incomes and more schooling. We examine the following potential mechanisms, drawn from the literature: geographic mobility, female labor force participation, and genetic effects. Our results are most consistent with increased urbanization leading to the increase in income.

Squires Munir (Rice Université) Economic consequences of kinship: Evidence from US bans on cousin marriage

Development Economics Seminar

Le 10/02/2021 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


Farmers in Uganda grow substantially more crops per unit of land than their counterparts in developing countries. While specialization is often related to economic efficiency, a large ecological literature establishes the positive relationship between species diversity and productivity. Here, we model and estimate the private benefits of crop diversity in order to understand why Ugandan farmers are more diversified than their counterparts in developed countries. Based on empirical facts derived from 65,851 fields, we develop a model that combines the efficiency increasing mechanisms of specialization from the economics literature with economies of scope resulting from ecological interactions and other input complementarities. The model predicts that crop diversity enhances productivity in low input agriculture but also that these private benefits of diversity decline with increasing control over the production environment. We then test these predictions with plot level data from the low input agriculture of Uganda. We find that a 10 percent increase of farm size and a 10 percent increase of labor increases crop diversity by 1.6 and 1.8 percent respectively consistent with the presence of both economies of scale and economies of scope. Holding labor and land fixed, we also find that a 10 percent increase of crop diversity increases revenues by 3 percent, in line with economies of scope. Comparing harvest quantities of crops grown individually and in combination with other crops we show that the economies of scope are likely to result from ecological interactions. Planting a crop in combination with one other crop increases harvest quantities per unit of input by 14 % compared to monocultures. These results suggest that the high levels of crop diversity in Uganda are determined by the interaction between economies of scope and economies of scale. They also suggest that crop diversity is an important productivity enhancing input for agriculture of Uganda and not the result of uninsured risk.

Noack Claudia (Rice Université) Economies of scale and ecology of scope


Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 16/12/2020 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


This paper investigates the consequences of a locust plague that occurred in Mali in 2004. We provide evidence of substantial crop market effects that explain the space-time pattern of the estimated impact of this plague. We argue first that the plague has affected households in Mali through two channels: first, a speculative price effect that kicked in during the plague itself, followed by a local crop failure effect. We find that, in terms of health setbacks, children exposed in utero only to the speculative price effect suffered as much as those exposed to the actual crop failure effect. Once we account for the impact on local crop prices, the estimated speculative effect vanishes, whereas the crop failure effect persists. Children born in isolated areas suffer more from the crop failure effect. Our results suggest that addressing local market reactions to this type of agricultural shocks is crucial for policy design.

Tapsoba Augustin (Rice Université) The Power of Markets: Impact of Desert Locust Invasions on Child Health

Development Economics Seminar

Le 02/12/2020 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


The mechanization of production has become a primary feature of modern agriculture and is central to agricultural labor productivity. This paper estimates the returns to mechanization and its impact on labor using a randomized controlled experiment. Treatment farmers were given subsidy vouchers to access agricultural equipment from nearby custom hiring centers(CHC). In addition, a subset of treatment farmers were given cash transfers. The voucher treatment increases overall mechanization hours, with an intent to treatment effect size of about 0.13 standard deviations (a treatment on the treated effect size of 0.36 standard deviations). We find no significant improvements in productivity due to mechanization on average. However, family labor decreases in response to the subsidy in capital, and farmers reduce hired labor in all farming processes, including those not directly affected by mechanization. We document that family labor is mostly occupied in supervision activities, and that their lower engagement in farming is associated with higher non-agricultural income. The decline in supervision labor and the decline in hired labor across farming processes are interpreted as evidence of output standardization, which is beneficial in the presence of contracting frictions. We use key elasticities from the experiment and a structural model of task-replacement to infer the marginal return to mechanizable tasks, which we estimate at 35% per season.

Kala Namrata (Rice Université) Mechanizing Agriculture: Impacts on Labor and Productivity

Development Economics Seminar

Le 18/11/2020 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


We study the adoption of an environmental technology (demi-lunes) in Niger. Like many environmental technologies, demi-lunes require an upfront investment in exchange for medium-run benefits, which agronomists estimate to be substantial. We implement a cluster randomized control trial in 180 villages with treatments designed to relax informational, credit and labor constraints. Relative to a pure control, training increases the probability of adoption by 90 percentage points. Combining training with either unconditional or conditional cash transfers has no additional effect on the extensive margin of adoption, but increases the intensity of adoption by 35-50 percent relative to training alone. We also observe increases in agricultural output, consistent with agronomic descriptions of the costs and benefits of adoption, as well as other measures of household well-being. Over 90 percent of treatment households have operational demi-lunes two years later. Using the pattern of results and our experimental design, we investigate the mechanisms underlying our findings.

C.Aker Jenny (Tufst University ) Harvesting the rain:The adoption of environmental technologies in the Sahel*

Kelsey Jack

Development Economics Seminar

Le 04/11/2020 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


A distinctive feature of foreign affiliates of MNCs is that they are led by foreign managers (FMs) who supervise domestic middle managers (DMs) who supervise domestic production workers (PWs). Language differences between FMs and DMs increase the cost of communication, might hamper knowledge transfers to DMs and thus limit the beneficial impact of FDI for the host country. We develop a model that clarifies under which circumstances a social planner should intervene to reduce the communication barrier between FMs and DMs. This occurs when: (i) DMs learn management from FMs; (ii) communication is costly to FMs and non-contractible; and, (iii) knowledge gained by DMs from FMs is valued by domestic firms. We experimentally test the validity of these assumptions in the context of MNCs operating in Myanmar, a context in which communication between FMs and DMs occurs in English and yet the typical DM possesses low English proficiency. The first experiment provides English training to a random sample of DMs working at MNCs. At endline, treated DMs have higher English proficiency, communicate more frequently with their FMs, are more involvement in firm management, and perform better in simulated management tasks. Treated DMs also report higher WTP for additional meetings with FMs which supports the assumption that communication within firms is non-contractable. The second experiment recruits human-resource managers at domestic firms and asks them to rate hypothetical job candidates who randomly differ in their characteristics. Employers particularly value candidates with both higher English proficiency and MNC experience, and this is driven, in part, by a premium for frequent interactions with FMs. Overall, the evidence suggests an under-investment in language relative to the social optimum.

Macchiavello Rocco (Tufst University ) Language Barriers in MNCs and Knowledge Transfers

with Louise Guillouët (Columbia University), Amit K. Khandelwal (Columbia GSB & NBER) and Matthieu Teachout (IGC)

Development Economics Seminar

Le 21/10/2020 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


In areas where there is an insufficient supply of qualified teachers, delivering instruction through technology may be a solution to meet the demand for education. This paper analyzes the educational and labor market impacts of an expansion of junior secondary education in Mexico through telesecundarias - schools using televised lessons, currently serving 1.4 million students. To isolate the effects of telesecundarias, I exploit their staggered rollout from 1968 to present. I show that for every additional telesecundaria per 50 children, ten students enroll in junior secondary education and two pursue further education. Using the telesecundaria expansion as an instrument, I find that an additional year of education induced by telesecundaria enrollment increases average income by 17.6%. This increase in income comes partly from increased labor force participation and a shift away from agriculture and the informal sector. Since schooling decisions are sequential, the estimated returns combine the direct effect of attending telesecundarias and the effects of further schooling. I decompose these two effects by interacting the telesecundaria expansion with baseline access to upper secondary institutions. Roughly 84% of the estimated returns come directly from junior secondary education, while the remaining 16% are returns to higher educational levels.

Navarro-Sola Laia (IIES Stockholm) Secondary School Expansion through Televised Lessons: The Labor Market Returns of the Mexican Telesecundaria

Development Economics Seminar

Le 14/10/2020 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


Women are known to bear the largest share of health, time, and labor supply burden associated with a lack of modern energy. In this paper, we study the impact of clean energy access on adult health and labor supply outcomes by exploiting a nationwide rollout of clean cooking fuel program in Indonesia. This program led to a large-scale fuel switching, from kerosene, a dirty fuel, to liquid petroleum gas, a cleaner one. Using longitudinal survey data from the Indonesia Family Life Survey and exploiting the staggered structure of the program rollout, we find that access to clean cooking fuel led to a significant improvement in women's health, particularly among those who spend most of their time indoors doing housework. We also find an increase in women's work hours, suggesting that access to cleaner fuel can improve women's health and plausibly their productivity, allowing them to supply more market labor. For men, we find an increase in the work hours and propensity to have an additional job, particularly in households where women accrued the largest health and labor benefits from the program. These results highlight the role of clean energy in reducing gender-disparity in health and point to the existence of positive externalities from the improved health of women on other members of the household.

Imelda I. (IIES Stockholm) Clean Energy Access: Gender Disparity, Health, and Labor Supply

with Anjali P. Verma

Development Economics Seminar

Le 07/10/2020 de 17:00:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4

C.Aker Jenny (Tufst University) CANCELLED AND POSTPONED Let it Rain: What Drives the Adoption of Environmental Technologies in the Sahel ?

with B. Kelsey Jack.

Development Economics Seminar

Le 30/09/2020 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


Shall we encourage students to work while in school? We provide evidence by leveraging a one-year work-study program that randomizes job offers among students in Uruguay. Using social security data matched to over 120,000 applicants, we estimate an increase of 9% in earnings and of 2 percentage points in enrollment over the four post-program years for treated youth. Survey data indicate that enrolled participants reduce study time, but this does not translate into lower grades. Students mainly substitute leisure and household chores with work. A decomposition exercise suggests that work experience is the main mechanism behind the increase in earnings.

Ubfal Diego (Tufst University) The Effects of Working while in School: Evidence from Uruguayan Lotteries

Development Economics Seminar

Le 16/09/2020 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


Vocational training is commonly used to increase youth employment, but its effectiveness is often limited by the mismatch between youth expectations and jobs available to them. We provide information about job prospects to randomly chosen batches of DDU-GKY, a large-scale training programme in India. We find that better informed trainees are more likely to stay in the jobs in which they are placed. Our findings are consistent with two distinct mechanisms. First, information about job prospects improves selection into placement: it increases dropout of trainees with higher education (who have better outside options) and reduces dropout of trainees with lower education (who have worse outside options). Second, information improves trainees' job readiness: among males, and trainees with higher expectations at baseline, it increases employment unconditionally, i.e. independently from selection into placement. Our findings suggest that discussing job prospects during vocational training can enhance its effect on youth employment

Imbert Clément (Tufst University) Can information about job prospects improve the effectiveness of vocational training? Experimental evidence from a large training programme in India

with Bhaskar Chakravorty, Wiji Arulampalam and Roland Rathelot.

Development Economics Seminar

Le 03/06/2020 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4

Macchiavello Rocco (Tufst University) Séance annulée

Development Economics Seminar

Le 20/05/2020 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4

Calvi Rosella (Tufst University) Séance annulée

Development Economics Seminar

Le 13/05/2020 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4

Noack Claudia (Tufst University) Séance annulée

Development Economics Seminar

Le 06/05/2020 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4

Kala Namrata (Tufst University) Séance annulée

Development Economics Seminar

Le 01/04/2020 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4

Squires Munir (Tufst University) Séance annulée et reportée

Development Economics Seminar

Le 27/03/2020 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4

Genicot Garance (Tufst University) Séance annulée et reportée

Development Economics Seminar

Le 25/03/2020 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4

Best Michael (Tufst University) Séance annulée et reportée

Development Economics Seminar

Le 18/03/2020 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4

Shah Manisha (Tufst University) Séance annulée et reportée

Development Economics Seminar

Le 04/03/2020 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


Urban criminal groups rule tens to hundreds of millions of people worldwide. In Medellin, Colombia, gangs resolve disputes, police neighborhoods, enforce contracts, and tax businesses in their territories. The literature suggests that gang rule arises not only because governments fail to project their power, but also because they delegate governing to criminals. We first document and describe criminal governance, its correlates, and its origins in Medellin, qualitatively and quantitatively. We then look observationally at the effect of long-run state presence on criminal rule. Finally, we worked with the government to develop the first ever gang-level randomized trial. Most policy solutions are coercive and repressive. We identified a nonviolent approach to intensify municipal and community governance and attempt to displace gang rule. The city identified 80 neighborhoods where their governance is weak and gangs are strong. For 18 months the city intensified outreach and services to a random 40 of these neighborhoods—a 10-fold improvement in street-level staff plus an intensification of municipal services. The intervention had the expected effects in gang neighborhoods where gangs elect not to govern. In neighborhoods where gangs seek to govern, however, the city’s effort backfired, reducing citizens’ use of the state and state legitimacy. We conclude with paths forward

Blattman Chris (Tufst University) Gang Rule: Understanding and Countering Criminal Governance

Development Economics Seminar

Le 26/02/2020 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


Non farming enterprise might constitute an ex-post income smoothing device for uninsured households. So that the decision to initiate an enterprise is led by necessity rather than skills. We test such hypothesis and find that farmers become entrepreneurs in response to negative productivity shocks to farming, while credit constraints do not seem to play a substantial role. Importantly, and consistently with irreversible investment or learning-by-doing, these reluctant entrepreneurs do not revert to full farming following new positive productivity shocks. These reluctant entrepreneurs are typically “bad” entrepreneurs while they were above average farmers. This selection might contribute to the understanding of the dual phenomenon of low-productivity firms and farms coexisting in developing countries while speaking to the structural transformation of the economy.

Di Giorgi Giacomo (Tufst University) Farmers to Entrepreneurs

Development Economics Seminar

Le 18/12/2019 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


Abstract: This paper studies the Sustainable Quality Program in Colombia – a quality upgrading program implemented on behalf of a multinational coffee buyer. The Program is a bundle of contractual arrangements involving farmers, intermediaries, exporters and the multinational buyer. We tackle three questions. First, we inves- tigate the impact of the Program on the supply of quality coffee. Eligible farmers upgraded their plantations, expanded land under coffee cultivation, increased quality and received higher farm gate prices. Second, we quantify how the Program gains are shared between farmers and intermediaries along the chain. In regions in which the Program was rolled out surplus along the chain increased by ? 30%. Eligible farmers kept at least half of the gains and their welfare increased by ? 20%. Finally, we examine how the Program works conducting counterfactual exercises and comparing the Program price premia along the chain against two prominent non-buyer driven certifications. The Program achieved a better transmission of the export gate price premium for quality to the farm gate and curbed market failures that stifled quality upgrading. Contractual arrangements at the export gate significantly contributed to higher farmers welfare in rural areas.

Miquel - Florensa Pepita (Tufst University) Buyer-Driven Upgrading in GVCs: The Sustainable Quality Program in Colombia

R. Macchiavello

Development Economics Seminar

Le 04/12/2019 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


We measure the direct and indirect effects of access to finance using a randomized experiment with 3,100 firms in 78 local markets in China, which created variation in firms’ access to a new loan product both within and across markets. Our estimates imply that: (1) Financial access has large positive direct effects. Providing access to a firm increases its revenue by 9 percent, and also significantly increases profits, employment, the number of clients and the use of trade credit. The new loan does not crowd out existing loans. (2) Financial access has large negative indirect effects. Providing access to all of a firm’s competitors in the local market reduces its revenue by 7 percent, and also significantly reduces profits, employment, the number of clients and the use of trade credit. (3) In a model matched to the data in which the indirect effect reflects business stealing, treating all firms in a market would generate—despite nearly offsetting direct and indirect effects on firms—sizeable welfare gains to consumers who benefit from competition.

CAI Jing (Tufst University) Direct and Indirect Effects of Financial Access on SMEs.

Development Economics Seminar

Le 27/11/2019 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


Expanding public health insurance and enlisting private agents for service delivery are common policy strategies to meet the goals of universal health coverage, but there is limited evidence from developing countries to inform their design. This paper provides quantitative evidence on how insurance design affects program performance and incidence in the context of a government-funded health insurance program that aims to provide free care to 46 million people in Rajasthan, India. We exploit a policy-induced natural experiment, and use administrative claims linked to patient surveys, to provide the first large-scale evidence of private hospital behavior under public health insurance.

DUPAS Pascaline (Tufst University) The Incidence of Public Subsidies to Private Hospitals under Weak Governance: Evidence from India

with Radhika Jain

Development Economics Seminar

Le 20/11/2019 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


We hypothesize that many productive firms in poor countries stagnate due to informational barriers to accessing existing demand. To investigate, we gave a randomly chosen subset of Liberian firms the opportunity to participate in a seven day-long training program. The program exclusively teaches how to bid on contracts from large buyers that are awarded through a formal procurement process. Overall, the program increased the number of bids firms submit; the total number and quality of contracts won; and the number of contracts won through other channels than a formal bidding process. We then show via a regularization procedure that, relative to otherwise similar firms, the impact of the program is especially large for firms that use the Internet at baseline. We interpret these results through a simple theoretical framework in which a “keys-to-the-door” training program facilitates firms’ growth by boosting their ability to win contracts they bid on, and firms that face lower costs of finding and selecting appropriate contracts to bid on—for example those that use the Internet—benefit more. This interpretation is supported by the way in which the differential impact of the program for firms that use the Internet varies with the share of tenders for contracts published after treatment that are published online. In sum this paper’s findings suggest that, to grow, firms need both knowledge of how to win contracts and the technology necessary to cost-effectively access demand.

de Rochambeau Golvine (Tufst University) Access-to-demand Frictions and Firm Growth: Experimental Evidence from Liberia

Jonas Hjort and Vinayak Iyer

Development Economics Seminar

Le 06/11/2019 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


Behavioral constraints may explain part of low demand for preventive health products. We test the effects of two light-touch psychological interventions on water chlorination and related health and economic outcomes using a randomized controlled trial among 3750 women in rural Kenya. One intervention encourages participants to visualize alternative realizations of the future; one builds participants' ability to make concrete plans to achieve goals. Both interventions include information on health benefits of chlorination. After twelve weeks, both interventions increase the share of households who chlorinate drinking water and reduce child diarrhea episodes. Analysis of mechanisms suggests both interventions increase self-efficacy – beliefs about one's ability to achieve desired outcomes – as well as the salience of chlorination. They do not differentially affect beliefs and knowledge about chlorination (compared to a group who receive only information), nor affect lab measures of time preferences or planning ability. Results suggest simple psychological interventions can increase use of preventive health technologies.

JOHN Anett (Tufst University) Can Simple Psychological Interventions Increase Preventive Health Investment?

Johannes Haushofer and Kate Orkin

Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 17/10/2019 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4

LAMBERT Sylvie, Sylvie.Lambert@ens.fr () TBA; () ;

La séance est annulée

Development Economics Seminar

Le 02/10/2019 de 14:00:00 à 15:30:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


Assessing unemployment levels is empirically challenging. Economists currently rely on survey self-reports, whose reliability is unknown and which make it difficult to disentangle those who have exited the labor force and the self-employed from rationed workers. In this paper, we develop an approach to obtain the first revealed preference estimates of labor rationing. We generate large transitory hiring shocks in Indian local labor markets — hiring up to 35% of the male labor force for month-long work in external factories. We examine the impact of these transitory shocks on the local labor market to diagnose the extent of rationing. We find evidence for severe labor rationing during lean seasons, which account for 6 months of the year. Specifically, “removing” a large portion of workers leads to (i) no change in the local wage, and (ii) no change in local aggregate employment levels (excluding our exter- nal jobs); this is due to one-for-one positive employment spillovers on the remaining workers who benefit from decreased competition for job slots. We further decompose rationing into involuntary unemployment and disguised unemployment (self-employed workers who would prefer wage labor). In contrast, we detect limited evidence for labor rationing during peak employment seasons: in these months, transitory exter- nal hiring shocks increase local wages and reduce local aggregate employment. In addition, we show that traditional government surveys substantively underestimate unemployment in this setting. This approach can be extended to obtain revealed preference bounds on involuntary unemployment in diverse settings.

Breza Emily () LABOR RATIONING: A REVEALED PREFERENCE APPROACH FROM HIRING SHOCKS

Supreet KAUR and Yogita SHAMDASANI

Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 18/09/2019 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


If parents do not perfectly observe whether their children attend school, (i) cash transfers conditional on an attendance target may increase school attendance in part through an information effect and (ii) incentivizing children directly could be more cost effective than incentivizing parents. We isolate experimentally and for the first time the information effect of a CCT and find that it is large. Incentivizing children is at least as effective as incentivizing parents––and importantly, not because parents were able to appropriate conditional transfers made to children. These results imply the possibility of large savings relative to traditional CCTs.

Valente Christine, Shah Manisha () Incentivizing School Attendance in the Presence of Parent-Child Information Frictions

Damien de Walque (World Bank)

Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 19/06/2019 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


Studies of microcredit show positive and negative treatment effects at certain quantiles of household outcome distributions. I develop new Bayesian hierarchical models to aggregate the evidence on these effects and assess their generalizability. I provide a broadly-applicable limited-information model enforcing quantile monotonicity via variable transformation. Partially discrete outcomes such as profit are aggregated using full-data mixture models. Across all outcomes I find a precise, generalizable zero effect from the 5th to 75th quantiles, and large yet heterogeneous and uncertain effects on the right tails.Households who had previously operated businesses account for the majority of the impact and the uncertainty.

MEAGER Rachael () Aggregating Distributional Treatment Effects: A Bayesian Hierarchical Analysis of the Microcredit Literature


Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 05/06/2019 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


Inter-ethnic attitudes between the Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda and Burundi are associated with differences in the historical subjugation of the Hutu to forced labour by the Tutsi. Analysis using data combining lab-in-the field trust games with survey, land characteristics, and archival data suggest that Hutu with a family history of forced labour are less trusting of Tutsi today and prefer to partner with other Hutu. Because Hutu are more agrarian and Tutsi are more pastoral, this has implications for agriculture insurance agreements. The evidence suggests that the Hutu with a family history of forced labour are more likely to make agreements with other Hutu, whose agricultural shocks are more correlated with their own, and as a result they experience more default in these agreements.

BLOUIN Arthur () Culture and Contracts: The Historical Legacy of Forced Labour


Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 22/05/2019 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


How efficient is the targeting of foreign aid to populations in need? A long literature has focused on the impacts of foreign aid, but much rarer are studies that examine how such aid is allocated within countries. We examine the extent to which donors efficiently respond to exogenous budget shocks by shifting resources toward needier districts within a given country, as predicted by theory. We use recently geocoded data on the World Bank’s aid in 23 countries that crossed the lower-middle income threshold between 1995 and 2010 and thus experienced sharp aid reductions. We measure locations’ need along a number of dimensions, including nighttime lights emissions, population density, conflict exposure, and child mortality. We find little evidence that aid project siting is increasingly concentrated in worse-off areas as budgets shrink; the only exception appears to be a growing share of funding in more conflict-affected areas. We further analyze the relationship of health aid to child mortality measures in six key countries, again finding little evidence of efficient responses to budget shocks. Taken together, these results suggest that large efficiency gains may be possible in the distribution of aid from the World Bank and other donors.

Ben Yishay Ariel (College of William & Mary) The Economic Efficiency of Aid Targeting

Development Economics Seminar

Le 24/04/2019 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


Why do religious politics thrive in some societies but not others? This paper explores the institutional foundations of this process in Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim democracy. We show that a major Islamic institution, the waqf, fostered the entrenchment of political Islam at a critical historical juncture. In the early 1960s, rural elites transferred large amounts of land into waqf—a type of inalienable charitable trust—to avoid expropriation by the government as part of a major land reform effort. Although the land reform was later undone, the waqf properties remained. We show that greater intensity of the planned reform led to more prevalent waqf land and Islamic institutions endowed as such, including religious schools, which are strongholds of the Islamist movement. We identify lasting effects of the reform on electoral support for Islamist parties, preferences for religious candidates, and the adoption of Islamic legal regulations (sharia). Overall, the land reform contributed to the resilience and eventual rise of political Islam by helping to spread religious institutions, thereby solidifying the alliance between local elites and Islamist groups. These findings shed new light on how religious institutions may shape politics in modern democracies.

MARX Benjamin (College of William & Mary) The Institutional Foundations of Religious Politics: Evidence from Indonesia

Samuel Bazzi and Gabriel Koehler-Derrick

Development Economics Seminar

Le 17/04/2019 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


Welfare programs, such as conditional cash transfers, have expanded widely in Latin America in the past 15 years, and have been credited for a sizable reduction in poverty rates. Yet, the potential unintended consequences of these programs for labor markets have spurred a heated debate over their future. There is a concern that they lower efficiency by creating disincentives to work, particularly in the formal sector, as many programs condition continued eligibility on reported income levels. However, such disincentive effects at the individual level could be overturned by general equilibrium effects. Welfare programs also inject funds into local economies, potentially raising labor demand, equilibrium wages, and employment, including in the formal sector. This paper links administrative records on the universe of Bolsa Familia recipients and formal workers in Brazil to provide evidence on the partial and general equilibrium effects of the program on formal labor markets. We find evidence of disincentive effects in formal labor supply at the individual level, and positive aggregate effects on local labor markets. These results highlight the importance of accounting for both individual and aggregate effects of welfare programs.

NARITOMI Joanna (College of William & Mary) Welfare Programs and Formal Labor Markets in Middle-Income Countries: Evidence from Conditional Cash Transfer in Brazil

François Gerard

Development Economics Seminar

Le 03/04/2019 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


How should the design of incentives vary with the time preferences of agents? We formulate predictions for two incentive contract variations that should increase efficacy for impatient agents relative to patient ones: increasing the frequency of incentive payments, and making the contract “dynamically non-separable” by only rewarding compliance in a given period if the agent complies in a minimum number of other periods. We test the efficacy of these variations, and their interactions with time preferences, using a randomized evaluation of an incentives program for exercise among 3,200 diabetics in India. On average, providing incentives increases daily walking by 1,300 steps or roughly 13 minutes of brisk walking, and decreases the health risk factors for diabetes. Increasing the frequency of payment does not increase e?ectiveness, suggesting limited impatience over payments. However, making the payment function dynamically non-separable increases cost-e?ectiveness. Consistent with our theoretical predictions, agent impatience over walking appears to play a role in non-separability’s efficacy: both heterogeneity analysis based on measured impatience and a calibrated model suggest that the non-separable contract works better for the impatient.

DIZON-ROSS Rebecca (College of William & Mary) Incentivizing Behavioral Change:The Role of Time Preferences

Shilpa Aggarwal (Indian School of Business), Ariel Zucker (UC Berkeley)

Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 27/03/2019 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


Ethnic riots broke out in Malaysia in 1969, prompting a national effort at affirmative action favoring the poorer (majority) of “Bumiputera” (mainly Malays). Since then, Malaysia’s official poverty measures indicate one of the fastest long-term rates of poverty reduction in the world, due to both economic growth and falling inequality. Did ethnic inequality fall since 1969 and was that a key factor in the country’s success in reducing poverty and in managing inequality? New measures in this paper indicate a substantial decline in relative ethnic inequality. This brought down national relative inequality, though not enough to prevent rising absolute inequality, given the initial disparities. A new analytic decomposition of the rate of poverty reduction reveals that ethnic redistribution helped reduce poverty, although it was not as important as the overall rate of growth in household incomes. Despite past progress in reducing ethnic inequality, the responsiveness of the national poverty rate to ethnic redistribution remains high even today.

RAVALLION Martin (Georgetown University) Ethnic Inequality and Poverty in Malaysia Since 1969


Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 21/03/2019 de 11:00:00 à 12:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4

SCHOFIELD Heather (Georgetown University) *

Development Economics Seminar

Le 20/03/2019 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4

CAI Jing (Georgetown University) TBA; () ;

La séance est annulée

Development Economics Seminar

Le 06/03/2019 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


A growing literature associates resource scarcity with biases in decision-making. We investigate this link in a sample of over 3,000 small-scale farmers in Zambia, who completed a total of 5,842 decision experiments involving the opportunity to exchange randomly assigned household items for alternative items of similar value. We observe large exchange asymmetries– the so-called endowment effect – with an average trading probability of 34 percent, 16 percentage points below the trading rate predicted by neoclassical theory. Consistent with both increased attention and larger potential trading losses with higher value items, exchange asymmetries are smallest when the value of the traded items is high and when participants are relatively resource constrained. In our sample, both cross-sectional and seasonal scarcity improves the quality of decision-making, moving behavior closer to standard economic predictions. We find no corresponding systematic relationship between scarcity and performance on cognitive tasks.

JACK Kelsey (Georgetown University) Poverty, Seasonal Scarcity and Exchange Asymmetries: Evidence from Small-Scale Farmers in Rural Zambia

Dietmar Fehr, Günther Finkz

Development Economics Seminar

Le 20/02/2019 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


We examine the economic impact of high-yielding crop varieties (HYVs) in developing countries in 1960-2000. We use time variation in the development and diffusion of HYVs of 10 major crops, spatial variation in agro-climatically suitability for growing them, and a differences-in-differences strategy to identify the causal effects of adoption. In a sample of 84 counties, we estimate that a 10percentage points increase in HYV adoption increases GDP per capita by about 15 percent. This effect is fully accounted for by the direct effect on crop yields, factor adjustment, and structural transformation. We also find that HYV adoption reduced both fertility and mortality.

GOLLIN Douglas (Georgetown University) Two Blades of Grass: The Impact of the Green Revolution

Casper Worm Hansen and Asger Wingender, University of Copenhagen.

Development Economics Seminar

Le 06/02/2019 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


Bureaucratic performance is a crucial determinant of economic growth. Little is known about how to improve it in resource-constrained settings. This study describes a field trial of a social recognition intervention to improve record keeping in clinics in two Nigerian states, replicating the intervention—implemented by a single organization—on bureaucrats performing identical tasks in both states. Social recognition improved performance in one state but had no effect in the other, highlighting both the potential and the limitations of behavioral interventions. Differences in observables did not explain cross-state differences in impacts, however, illustrating the limitations of observable-based approaches to external validity.

JAMISON Julian (Georgetown University) Motivating Bureaucrats through Social Recognition: Evidence from Simultaneous Field Experiments

Varun Gauri, Nina Mazar, Owen Ozier, Shomikho Raha and Karima Saleh

Development Economics Seminar

Le 12/12/2018 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


In developing countries, the state often has limited capacity to effectively target transfers. We examine the effects of enhanced authentication technology on the performance of India's largest targeted transfer scheme, the Public Distribution System. We conduct an experiment at scale with the state government of Jharkhand, randomizing the rollout of "Aadhaar"-based biometric authentication. On its own, this reform had little effect on corruption or on average beneficiary access to transfers while slightly increasing transaction costs. When paired with new protocols for reconciling supply chain balances using data from authenticated transactions, however, it significantly reduced both corruption and beneficiary access (and was swiftly suspended). Contrasted with results from (our own) earlier work, these findings highlight the importance of “construct validity” and of political economy when extrapolating from past program evaluations to predict the effects of future reforms.

NIEHAUS Paul (Georgetown University) Authentication and targeted transfers: experimental evidence from India

Development Economics Seminar

Le 04/12/2018 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4

Khwaja Asim, Khwaja Asim (Georgetown University) TBA

Development Economics Seminar

Le 21/11/2018 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


host country in the world. We build and estimate a model using detailed micro data from Turkey to quantify the effects of this sudden and massive migration wave. Low and high skill workers self-select into different regions based on idiosyncratic preferences and mobility costs, while firms within each region can exploit two margins of informality: to register or not register their business, the extensive margin; and whether to hire their workers formally or informally, the intensive margin. We combine simulate method of moments and direct estimation from micro data to characterize the pre-shock, baseline Turkish economy and then use the estimated model to perform counterfactual exercises. The results show that although the inflow of Syrian refugees induces an increase in informality among low skill workers, it also generates both a reduction in informality among high skill workers and a rise in the skill premium. Furthermore, while the regions receiving larger numbers of refugees experience larger effects, the shock spreads to all regions due to regional migration of native workers.

Ulyssea Gabriel (University of Oxford) Informality and the Economic Effects of Mass Migration: Evidence from Syrian Refugees in Turkey

Development Economics Seminar

Le 07/11/2018 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


Microentrepreneurs in low-income countries have high marginal returns to capital yet face significant credit constraints. Because returns are highly heterogeneous, the cost of assessing credit worthiness often makes lending to this sector unprofitable. In this paper, we show that (1) community knowledge can help overcome information asymmetries prevalent in poorly developed financial markets and that (2) appropriately designed elicitation mechanisms can extract truthful community reports. We asked entrepreneurs in Maharashtra, India to rank their peers on metrics of business profitability and growth potential. To assess the validity of their reports, we then randomly distributed cash grants of USD 100 to a third of these entrepreneurs. We find that information provided by community members is highly predictive of the marginal return to capital: entrepreneurs ranked in the top tercile earn returns of 23% per month, which is three times the average return within the sample. We horserace community rankings against a machine learning prediction built using entrepreneur characteristics and find that peer reports are predictive over and above observable traits. Yet community information is only useful if it is feasible to collect truthful statements. We experimentally vary the elicitation environment and demonstrate agency problems when community members have incentive to lie: accuracy of community reports decreases by a third when cash grants are at stake. But we also show that tools from mechanism design can be used to address these agency problems. Paying for truthfulness using a peer prediction rule fully corrects for strategic misreporting induced by the high-stakes environment. Public reporting and cross-reporting techniques motivated by implementation theory also significantly improve the accuracy of peer reports.

RIGOL Natalia (MIT Economics) Targeting High Ability Entrepreneurs Using Community Information: Mechanism Design In The Field.

Reshmaan Hussam (HBS) and Benjamin Roth (HBS)

Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 17/10/2018 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


This project tests a novel theoretical mechanism for low take-up of collateralized credit. Using a field experiment with a lender in Kenya, we vary whether already-owned assets serve as collateral, or whether instead the new asset being financed by the loan itself serves as collateral, as in mortgages or car loans. The experimental design holds everything except existing ownership of the collateral constant. We find that borrowers display an endowment effect over their existing assets, and thus dislike loans that place existing assets at risk of loss by providing them as collateral. They are willing to pay 8% per month higher interest to instead collateralize using the new asset being financed by the loan itself. We next show that borrowers systematically under-predict their future attachment to new assets. After taking a loan collateralized with a new asset, borrowers become attached to the new asset, and exert similar repayment effort to loans collateralized with existing assets. We develop and estimate a structural model to provide behavioral parameters and to better understand the welfare consequences of such loans.

KREMER Michael (MIT Economics) The Endowment Effect and Collateralized Loans

Kevin Carney, Xinyue Lin, and Gautam Rao

Development Economics Seminar

Le 03/10/2018 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


This paper studies the impact of foreign direct investment (FDI) on empowerment of women. India experienced a sharp large-scale increase in FDI due to liberalization and reform of policies governing inflows of FDI. We exploit this variation and the spatial distribution of industries affected by the changes to demonstrate that FDI reduces reported rapes. Using nationally representative employment and expenditure data, we establish that greater empowerment due to a rise in women's relative income drives this finding. Analysis of household and voter survey data confirms an increased expenditure on goods that enhance safety and increased voting. We consider a series of alternative explanations and show evidence that disfavors them including “image concerns” that can lead to under-reporting to attract foreign investment.

SEKHRI Sheetal (MIT Economics) Reppeling Rapes: Role of FDI in Empowering Women

Development Economics Seminar

Le 24/09/2018 de 12:30:00 à 14:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


In 1973, the Indonesian government began one of the largest school construction programs ever. We use 2016 nationally representative data to examine the long-term and intergenerational effects of additional schooling as a child. We use a difference-in-differences identification strategy exploiting variation across birth cohorts and regions in the number of schools built. Men and women exposed to the program attain more education, although women’s effects are concentrated in primary school. As adults, men who received more education are more likely to be formal workers and work in a non-agricultural sector. Households in which either parent received more education have higher consumption, more assets, and pay more government taxes. These education benefits are transmitted to the next generation. Increased parental education has larger impacts for daughters, particularly if the mother was exposed to the school construction program. Migration and marriage are potential mechanisms linking additional education and improved long-term outcomes.

AKRESH Richard (MIT Economics) Long-term and Intergenerational Effects of Education: Evidence from School Construction in Indonesia

with Daniel Halim and Marieke Kleemans

Development Economics Seminar

Le 19/09/2018 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


Abstract The delivery of development programs is often delegated to local delivery agents (DAs). A common presumption is that, in the absence of financial rewards, social ties with potential beneficiaries might motivate the DA but also distort targeting. We provide evidence on the conditions underpinning the trade-off by means of a two-layered field experiment in the context of an extension program meant for the poorest farmers in Western Uganda. The first layer is a standard cross-village RCT that reveals significant gains in agricultural output and consumption in treated villages. The second layer randomizes the selection of the delivery agent between two elite farmers. This creates a counterfactual delivery agent (CA) for the agent and for her social ties. We find that social ties create bias but also improve coverage and that it is the rivalry between the agent and her counterfactual that creates this trade-off. The results have implications for the procedural rules used by governments or NGOs when recruiting DAs, and help explain why otherwise similar development often succeed in some communities and fail in others.

Deserranno Erika (Kellog School of Management at Northwestern University) Social ties and the delivery of development programs

Development Economics Seminar

Le 13/06/2018 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


Traditional gender norms can restrict female independent migration, thus limiting rural women in their ability to take advantage of economic opportunities in urban non-agricultural industries. Under such restrictions, marriage can potentially become a means of female long-distance migration and produce interlinkages between marriage and labour markets. To test this hypothesis, we use the event of the construction of a major bridge in Bangladesh – which dramatically reduced travel time between the economically deprived north-western region and the industrial belt located around the capital city Dhaka – as a source of plausibly exogenous variation in migration costs. We find effects of the bridge construction on rural women from north-western Bangladesh, but only for those coming from families above a poverty threshold: they are more likely to migrate towards Dhaka, work in the urban manufacturing sector, and pay a higher dowry. There is a statistically significant effect on marriage-related migration but not on economic migration. We find no effects on women from families below the poverty threshold.

WAHHAJ Zaki (Kellog School of Management at Northwestern University) Marriage, Work and Migration: The Role of Infrastructure Development and Gender Norms

Amrit Amirapu (University of Kent) and Niaz Asadullah (University of Malaya)

Development Economics Seminar

Le 06/06/2018 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


Using data from a two-year randomized pricing experiment in China, we study the impact and design of subsidy policies for weather insurance. Results show that subsidies are effective in boosting demand in the short-run but not in the longer term. Exploring the channels, we show that while subsidies increase the direct and social effects of payout experiences by enlarging coverage, they also dampen these effects by reducing attention to payouts. We estimate a demand model for policy simulations. Results suggest that the optimum subsidy scheme should be continuously adjusted based on the policy objective and on past subsidies and payouts.

SADOULET Elisabeth (Kellog School of Management at Northwestern University) Subsidy Policies and Insurance Demand

Jing Cai (University of Maryland), NBER and BREAD & Alain de Janvry (University of California at Berkeley)

Development Economics Seminar

Le 30/05/2018 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


How much of the distribution of economic activity today is determined by history rather than by geographic fundamentals? And if history matters, does it matter much? We develop an empirical framework that enables answers to these questions. Our model combines a workhorse model of trade subject to geographic frictions with an overlapping generations model of labor mobility also subject to spatial fractions. Both production and consumption potentially exhibit local agglomeration and congestion externalities. We derive parameter conditions, for arbitrary static and dynamic geographic scenarios, under which equilibrium transition paths are unique and yet steady states may nevertheless be non-unique — that is, where initial conditions (“history”) determine long-run steady-state outcomes (“path dependence”). We then estimate the model’s parameters (which govern the strength of agglomeration externalities and trade and migration frictions), by focusing on moment conditions that are robust to potential equilibrium multiplicity, using spatial variation across US counties from 1800 to the present. At these parameter estimates our simulations — based on randomly reassigning the geographical incidence of various shocks among members of similar regional clusters — imply the the long arm of history has only small consequences for the distortions caused by spatial path dependence.

ALLEN T. (Kellog School of Management at Northwestern University) The Geography of Path Dependence.

Dave Donaldson (MIT).

Development Economics Seminar

Le 16/05/2018 de 13:30:00 à 15:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4

HJORT Jonas (Kellog School of Management at Northwestern University) Ethnic Investing and the Value of Firms.

Development Economics Seminar

Le 02/05/2018 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4

LEON Gianmarco (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona GSE and IPEG) Teacher Wages, Student Achievement and the Recruitment of Talent in Rural Peru

Development Economics Seminar

Le 18/04/2018 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


One often hears concerns that the poorest are being “left behind” by social policies and economic development. Yet standard measures of poverty may reveal nothing about whether the poorest are being lifted-up or left-behind. The paper draws on a recent approach to measuring the time-mean floor of any observed distribution containing transient effects and measurement errors. Guided by a theoretical model of the determination of that floor, the paper assesses whether social spending has reached the poorest and what role economic development has played. Both cross-country data and time-series data for the US indicate that social spending lifted the floor. Food stamps in the US raised the floor more than one would expect from a uniform (untargeted) allocation of mean spending. The opposite holds for the developing counties, 87% which do not raise the floor through social spending more than mean spending. Across countries, we observe higher pre-transfer floors when mean income is higher. An inequitable growth process created a sinking floor in the US since the mid-1990s, though the higher public sending on food stamps helped stabilize the floor in the wake of the 2008 crisis. Both data sets suggest a complementarity between social spending and economic growth in determining the gains to the poorest from social spending.

RAVALLION Martin (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona GSE and IPEG) Social Protection and Economic Development: Are the Poorest Lifted-Up or Left-Behind?


Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 04/04/2018 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


The village of Palanpur in Uttar Pradesh, North India, has been the subject of close study by researchers since the late 1950s. Himanshu, Lanjouw and Stern (forthcoming) assemble detailed quantitative and qualitative data over the period 1957/8 to 2015 to document the village economy’s evolution over these six decades and to link this to developments occurring at the regional, as well as all-India level. The data reveal that Palanpur has transformed from a largely closed, small-holder, farming community into a highly diversified economy, where non-agricultural income now accounts for the bulk of village income. This process of structural transformation has followed clear stages, with agricultural intensification and productivity growth during the 1960s and 1970s preceding a subsequent shift into non-farm activities. The “Green Revolution” stage was associated, in Palanpur, with rising incomes, falling poverty and a decline in income inequality. This latter finding occurred as a result of land reforms that were introduced just prior to the first survey of Palanpur in 1957, and because of the progressive impact of the expansion of irrigation whereby previously rain-fed farming households were able to “catch up” to those initially able to achieve multiple crops per year on their irrigated land. The second, diversification, stage occurred as productivity gains in agriculture slowed while a growing population continued to exert pressure on per capita incomes. Villagers’ horizons expanded beyond the village as commuting to nearby towns and villages accelerated. Although most of the new jobs and economic activities were casual and only moderately remunerative, they were sufficient to maintain the trend of rising per capita incomes and falling poverty. However, income inequality in this second stage increased sharply. A further striking finding is that across the two stages of transformation, inter-generational income mobility appears to have fallen: fathers’ incomes during the diversification stage have become better predictors of their sons’ incomes than during the agricultural intensification stage. We enquire, on the basis of a stylized model of the Palanpur economy and its recent evolution, whether the distributional outcomes observed could plausibly also be occurring in other, similar, villages. If the Palanpur findings - of falling poverty and rising incomes being accompanied by sharply widening village-level inequality - were to be widely repeated, they could presage a deceleration and possibly even reversal of some of the encouraging trends of rising rural living standards in Uttar Pradesh and North India more generally.

LANJOUW Peter (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona GSE and IPEG) The Distributional Consequences of Structural Transformation: The Experience of a North Indian Village over Six Decades

Chris Elbers, VU Amsterdam

Development Economics Seminar

Le 21/03/2018 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


Farm yields in northern Ghana are 75-80% below agronomic potential. This yield gap is the motivation for the overall shape of agricultural policy in the region. We describe the preliminary results of a 4 year RCT of a set of five interventions designed to overcome barriers to productivity gains on smallholder farms. Farmers were provided with access to community-based, high frequency agricultural extension services, with access to lower transaction-cost access to improved inputs, to introductory grants of rainfall index insurance, to daily updates on remote market prices of output, and to short-term rainfall forecasts. Neither yield nor agricultural profits respond strongly to any, or all, of these interventions on average. Treatment effects vary strongly across rainfall outcomes, and by gender of the cultivator.

UDRY Chris (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona GSE and IPEG) Information, Market Access and Risk: Addressing Constraints to Agricultural Transformation in Northern Ghana

Development Economics Seminar

Le 15/03/2018 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


Abstract We seek to improve the targeting of agricultural extension training by inviting past trainees to select future trainees from a candidate pool. Some referees are rewarded or incentivized. Training increases the adoption of recommended practices and improves per- formance on average, but not all trainees adopt. Referred trainees are 3.7% more likely to adopt and randomly selected trainees, but rewarding or incentivizing referees does not improve referral quality. When referees receive ?nancial compensation, average adoption increases and referee and referred are more likely to coordinate their adoption behavior. Ad- dtional adopters induced by incentivizing referral adopt imperfectly and incur losses from adoption; they also tend to abandon the new practices in the following year.

FAFCHAMPS Marcel (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona GSE and IPEG) Can Referral Improve Targeting? Evidence from a Vocational Training Experiment

Development Economics Seminar

Le 07/03/2018 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4

MESNARD Alice, MESNARD Alice (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona GSE and IPEG) *

Development Economics Seminar

Le 14/02/2018 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


This paper tests whether uncertainty about future rainfall affects farmers’ decision-making through cognitive load. Behavioral theories predict that rainfall risk could impose a psychological tax on farmers, leading to material consequences at all times and across all states of nature, even within decisions unrelated to consumption smoothing, and even when negative rainfall shocks do not materialize down the line. Using a novel technology to run lab experiments in the field, we combine survey experiments with recent rainfall shocks to test the effects of rainfall risk on farmers’ cognition, and find that it decreases farmers’ attention, memory and impulse control, and increases their susceptibility to a variety of behavioral biases. Effects are quantitatively important, equivalent to losing 25% of one’s harvest at the end of the rainy season. Evidence that farmer’s cognitive performance is relatively less impaired in tasks involving scarce resources suggests that the effects operate through the mental bandwidth mechanism.

MANI Anandi (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona GSE and IPEG) COGNITIVE DROUGHTS‡

Guilherme Lichand (University of Zurich, Dept. of Economics)

Development Economics Seminar

Le 31/01/2018 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


We study how search frictions in the labour market affect firms' ability to recruit talented workers. In a field experiment in Ethiopia, we show that an employer can attract more talented applicants by offering a small monetary incentive for making a job application. The size of the effect is equivalent to doubling the wage offer for the same position. Estimates from a structural model suggest that application incentives are effective because (i) the cost of making a job application is large (on average 9-13 percent of the monthly wage), especially among talented low-income jobseekers; and (ii) 30 percent of individuals are unable to pay this cost due to credit constraints. In a second experiment, we show that local recruiters underestimate the positive impacts of application incentives. This can explain why the use of this intervention is limited in our context. Our findings highlight that financial incentives for job applications can improve the selection and allocation of talent.

CARIA Stefano (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona GSE and IPEG) The Selection of Talent: Experimental and Structural Evidence from Ethiopia

joint work with Girum Abebe and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina

Development Economics Seminar

Le 24/01/2018 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


In wealthy nations, novel sources of data from the internet and social media are enabling new approaches to social science research and creating new opportunities for public policy. In developing countries, by contrast, fewer sources of such data exist, and researchers and policymakers often rely on data that are unreliable or out of date. Here, we develop a new approach for measuring the dynamic welfare of individuals remotely by analyzing their patterns of mobile phone use. To benchmark these methods, we conducted high-frequency panel surveys with 1,200 Afghan citizens, and with the respondent's consent, matched each individual's responses to his or her entire history of mobile phone-based communication, which we obtained from Afghanistan's largest mobile operator. We show that mobile phone data can be used to accurately estimate the social and economic welfare of respondents, and that machine learning models can be used to infer the onset and magnitude of positive and negative shocks. These results have the potential to inform current practices of policy monitoring and impact evaluation.

BLUMENSTOCK Joshua (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona GSE and IPEG) Towards Real-Time Measures of Poverty and Vulnerability

Development Economics Seminar

Le 17/01/2018 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4

POMERANZ Dina (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona GSE and IPEG) Can audits backfire? Evidence from public procurement in Chile

Development Economics Seminar

Le 13/12/2017 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


Different unemployment insurance schemes exist to support displaced formal workers across countries, and their disbursement policies differ substantially. State-contingent transfers, such unemployment insurance (UI) programs, are schemes that transfer benefits periodically to displaced workers who remain non-employed. In contrast, some schemes transfer a benefit amount in a lump-sum fashion at layoff, such as severance pay programs (SPP) and most unemployment insurance savings accounts (UISA) programs. Although most countries provide workers with some combination of periodic benefits and lump-sum schemes, little is known about how the different disbursement designs affect the insurance value they provide to displaced workers. Moreover, the relative importance of these schemes vary systematically across the development path: lump-sum transfers are more common than UI in developing countries, where the state has limited capacity to monitor workers and a large share of the workforce is informal. This paper contributes to fill this gap using evidence from Sao Paulo, Brazil. We analyse high frequency expenditure data matched to a longitudinal microdata of formal employment for over 400,000 workers. Using multiple sources of individual income variation from unemployment insurance schemes available to workers in Brazil, we document several empirical findings on how different unemployment insurance schemes affect consumption smoothing. Across our empirical analysis we find that consumption is highly sensitive to the timing of disbursement of benefits. First, we find a substantial increase in consumption at layoff, when a lump-sum becomes available, followed by a long-term loss in consumption if workers remain non-formally employed. This increase is larger for workers with higher lump-sum despite similar long-term losses. Second, we find that consumption drops after UI exhaustion, and we zoom in at daily data to find that the higher consumption levels workers experience before UI exhaustion is concentrated around the UI payday. These empirical patterns shed light on the relevance of disbursement policies for social insurance, and provide novel evidence on the insurance value of unemployment benefits in a developing country context.

GERARD François (Columbia University ) Unemployment Insurance Schemes and Consumption: Evidence from Brazil

with Joana Naritomi

Development Economics Seminar

Le 06/12/2017 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


A common assertion is that decentralized agents such as local government organizations have better information than their centralized counterparts. We test this assertion by measuring the beliefs of public officials regarding the characteristics of the citizens they serve at the federal, regional and local levels of government in Ethiopia. By benchmarking these claims against validated administrative and survey data we show that local government officials make significantly lower errors in their estimates of citizen characteristics than other public officials. We are also able to show that there is no statistically significant difference between the errors made by managers and non-managers, implying that principals are no less informed than their agents. We investigate the determinants of these more accurate beliefs both non-experimentally and experimentally and provide evidence that distinct management practices rather than proximity to citizens underlies the more accurate beliefs we measure at the decentralized tiers of government

ROGGER Daniel (Columbia University ) Decentralization and Information: Empirical Evidence from Ethiopia


Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 22/11/2017 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


Abstract This paper proposes a decision-theoretic framework for experiment design. We model experimenters as ambiguity-averse decision-makers, who make trade-os between subjective expected performance and robustness. This framework accounts for experimenters' preference for randomization, and claries the circumstances in which randomization is optimal: when the available sample size is large enough or robustness is an important concern. We illustrate the practical value of such a framework by studying the issue of rerandomization. Rerandomization creates a trade-o between subjective performance and robustness. However, robustness loss grows very slowly with the number of times one randomizes. This argues for rerandomizing in most environments. JEL Classications: C90, D78, D81 Keywords: experiment design, robustness, ambiguity aversion, randomization, rerandomization

BANERJEE Abhijit () A Theory of Experimenters

Sylvain Chassang (New York University), Sergio Montero (University of Rochester) and Erik Snowberg (University of British Columbia)

Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 08/11/2017 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


The partition of British India in 1947 resulted in one of the largest and most rapid migrations in human history. This paper examines how areas affected by the partition fare in the long run. Using migrant presence as a proxy for the intensity of the impact of the partition, and district level data on agricultural output between 1911-2009, we find that areas that received more migrants have higher average yields, are more likely to take up high yielding varieties (HYV) of seeds, and are more likely to use agricultural technologies. These correlations are more pronounced after the Green Revolution in India. Using pre-partition data, we show that migrant placement is uncorrelated with soil conditions, agricultural infrastructure, and agricultural yields prior to 1947; hence, the e?ects are not solely explained by selective migration into districts with a higher potential for agricultural development. Migrants moving to India were more educated than both the natives who stayed and the migrants who moved out. Given the positive association of education with the adoption of high yielding varieties of seeds we highlight the presence of educated migrants during the timing of the Green Revolution as a potential pathway for the observed effects.

BHARADWAJ Prashant () Displacement and Development: Long Term Impacts of the Partition of India.


Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 18/10/2017 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4

MORTEN Melanie () Migration and Consumption Insurance in Bangladesh.


Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 04/10/2017 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


Abstract. Is it possible to identify individuals who are highly central in a community without gathering any network information, simply by asking a few people? If we use people’s nominees as seeds for a diffusion process, will it be successful? We explore these questions theoretically, via surveys, and via field experiments. We show via a model of information flow how members of a community can, just by tracking gossip about others, identify highly central individuals in their network. Asking villagers in rural Indian villages to name good seeds for diffusion, we find that they accurately nominate those who are central according to a measure tailored for diffusion – not just those with many friends or in powerful positions. Finally, we run a randomized field experiment in 213 other villages that tests how effective it is to use such nominations as seeds for a diffusion process. Relative to random seeds or those with high social status, hitting at least one seed nominated by villagers leads to more than a 65% increase in the spread of information. JEL Classification Codes: D85, D13, L14, O12, Z13 Keywords: Centrality, Gossip, Networks, Diffusion, Influence, Social Learning

DUFLO Esther () USING GOSSIPS TO SPREAD INFORMATION: THEORY AND EVIDENCE FROM A RANDOMIZED CONTROLLED TRIAL

with Abhijit Banerjee, Arun G. Chandrasekhar and Matthew O. Jackson

Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 20/09/2017 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


Abstract Public employment programs play a large role in many developing countries' anti-poverty strategies, but their impact on poverty reduction will depend on both direct program effects as well as indirect effects through changes induced in market wages and employment. We estimate both eects, exploiting a large-scale experiment that improved the implementation of India's rural employment guarantee scheme. Despite constant scal outlays, the earnings of lowincome households rose 13.3%, driven overwhelmingly by market (90%) as opposed to program earnings (10%). Low-skilled wages increased by 6.1% and days without paid work fell 7.1%, while migration, land utilization and prices were unaected. The market effects on wages, employment, and income also spilled over into neighboring sub-districts, and estimates that adjust for these spillovers are substantially larger, typically double the unadjusted magnitudes. These results highlight the importance of general equilibrium eects in program evaluation, and the feasibility of studying them using large-scale experiments.

SUKHTANTAR Sandip (University of Virginia ) General Equilibrium Effects of (Improving) Public Employment Programs: Experimental Evidence from India

Karthik Muralidharany and Paul Niehausz

Development Economics Seminar

Le 13/09/2017 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


The gains from insurance arise from the transfer of income across states. Yet, by requiring that the premium be paid upfront, standard insurance products also transfer income across time. We show that this intertemporal transfer can help explain low insurance demand, especially among the poor, and in a randomized control trial in Kenya we test a crop insurance product which removes it. The product is interlinked with a contract farming scheme: as with other inputs, the buyer of the crop offers the insurance and deducts the premium from farmer revenues at harvest time. The take-up rate for pay-at-harvest insurance is 72%, compared to 5% for the standard pay-upfront contract, and take-up is highest among poorer farmers. Additional experiments and outcomes provide evidence on the role of liquidity constraints, present bias, and counterparty risk. Finally, evidence from a natural experiment in the United States, exploiting a change in the timing of the premium payment for Federal Crop Insurance, shows that the transfer across time also affects insurance adoption in developed countries.

WILLIS Jack (University of Virginia ) Time vs. State in Insurance: Experimental Evidence from Contract Farming in Kenya

Lorenzo Casaburi

Development Economics Seminar

Le 24/05/2017 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


Abstract We examine the channels through which a randomized early childhood intervention in Colombia led to significant gains in cognitive and socio-emotional skills among a sample of disadvantaged children aged 12 to 24 months at baseline. We estimate the determinants of material and time investments in these children and evaluate the im- pact of the treatment on such investments. We then estimate the production functions for cognitive and socio-emotional skills. The effects of the program can be explained by increases in parental investments, which have strong effects on outcomes and are complementary to both maternal skills and child's baseline skills.

Meghir Costas (University of Virginia ) Estimating the Production Function for Human Capital: Results from a Randomized Controlled Trial in Colombia

Orazio Attanasio, Sarah Cattan, Emla Fitzsimons and Marta Rubio-Codina

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Development Economics Seminar

Le 03/05/2017 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


Abstract Trust is an essential element of economic transactions, but trust in financial institutions is especially low among the poor. Debit cards provide not only easier access to savings, but also a mechanism to monitor bank account balances and thereby build trust. We study a natural experiment in which debit cards are rolled out to beneficiaries of a Mexican conditional cash transfer program whose benefits are directly deposited into a savings account. Using adminis- trative data on over 340,000 bank accounts over four years, we find that prior to receiving a debit card, beneficiaries do not save in these accounts. After receiving a debit card, beneficiaries do not increase their savings for the first 9_12 months, but after this their savings increase over time. During this initial period, however, they use the card to check their balances frequently; the number of checks decreases over time as their reported trust in the bank increases. Using household survey panel data, we find the observed effect represents an increase in overall savings. After 1_2 years, the debit card causes the savings rate to increase by 3_5 percent of income.

Bachas Pierre (University of Virginia ) Banking on Trust: How Debit Cards Enable the Poor to Save More

Paul Gertler, Sean Higgins & Enrique Seira

Development Economics Seminar

Le 05/04/2017 de 00:00:00 à 00:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


Abstract: Antipoverty policies in developing countries often assume that targeting poor households will be reasonably effective in reaching poor individuals. This paper questions this assumption, using nutritional status as a proxy for individual poverty. The comprehensive assessment for Sub-Saharan Africa reveals that undernourished women and children are spread widely across the distribution of household wealth and consumption. Roughly three-quarters of underweight women and undernourished children are not found in the poorest 20 percent of households, and around half are not found in the poorest 40 percent. The mean joint probability of being an underweight woman and living in the poorest wealth quintile is only 0.03. Countries with higher overall rates of undernutrition tend to have a higher share of undernourished individuals in nonpoor households. The results are consistent with evidence of substantial intrahousehold inequality

Van de Walle Dominique , Van de Walle Dominique (University of Virginia ) Are Poor Individuals Mainly Found in Poor Households ? Evidence from Nutrition Data for Africa

Caitlin Brown, Martin Ravallion and Dominique van de Walle

Development Economics Seminar

Le 15/03/2017 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


Abstract Climate policy pushes energy-eciency investments as a means to reduce energy consump- tion, and thus greenhouse gas emissions, in developing countries. I report the results of a large eld experiment among energy-intensive Indian manufacturing plants that oered information and skilled labor to encourage energy-eciency investments and practices. Treatment plants invest small amounts in recommended energy-eciency measures; in- crease physical eciency for some systems; increase capacity utilization across the board; hire more skilled labor; and invest more in other capital improvements. This suite of changes looks like modernization|a shift towards higher-skill, more capital-intensive plant production. The net eect of modernization on both energy consumption and productivity are roughly zero, within the precision of my estimates. Plants that become more ecient run more, which osets any savings in energy. Similarly, treatment plants are estimated to increase sales by a large (though statistically insignicant) twelve percent, an amount oset by the higher cost of their new input mix.

Ryan Nicolas (University of Virginia ) Is There An Energy-Eciency Gap? Experimental Evidence from Indian Manufacturing Plants


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Development Economics Seminar

Le 01/03/2017 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


When consumption generates negative externalities, raising the price to reflect the social cost of consumption is the preferred policy solution. In some cases – for example, household water and electricity use – consumption is susceptible to a second externality problem: each individual enjoys the private benefits of consumption but shares the costs with other household members, leading to overconsumption even from the household's viewpoint. We test the prediction that intrahousehold inefficiency dampens price sensitivity in the context of piped water use in urban Zambia, combining billing records, randomized price variation, and lab-experimental measures of intrahousehold efficiency. We find that households with above-median efficiency have a short-run price elasticity that is three times higher than that of households with below-median efficiency. These results suggest that when individual-level consumption is difficult to observe and usage is billed at the household level, the required Pigouvian price will need to be set to correct both the environmental and the intrahousehold externalities. Alternative policies such as price incentives targeted toward the primary water-using household members or access to real-time data on household water consumption (which would improve the enforceability of intrahousehold agreements) could also be useful.

Jayachandran Seema (University of Virginia ) Environmental externalities and intrahousehold inefficiencies


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Development Economics Seminar

Le 08/02/2017 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


Abstract: Improving the health and nutrition of young children is important not only for immediate well-being and human capital development, but also because it is believed to reduce poverty in the long-run in part through improved labor market outcomes. Many programs such as Head Start and Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programs rely on this postulated link. However, little is known about the long-term effects of programs targeted to improve health and nutrition in early childhood on outcomes in adulthood. In this paper, we take advantage of the quasi-randomly placed Matlab Maternal and Child Health and Family Planning program that started in 1977, the phasing out of the program over time, and recent survey data collected by the authors to evaluate the effect of the program on labor market, investment, and migration outcomes. We use a single-difference model with birth year fixed-effects and baseline controls to examine the effects on three main age groups: 35-65 year olds born prior to the program (1947-1976), 30-34 years olds born when the family planning interventions were introduced (1977-1981) and 24-29 year olds born when both the family planning and child health interventions were available in the treatment area (1982-1988). Previous research shows the program led to important improvement in human capital in early and late childhood for those born when the intervention was available in the treatment area. We find that when these same children are adults, approximately aged 24-29, they are 20 percent less likely to migrate out of the study area, are more likely to have semi-professional or professional jobs, but on average do not earn more income or work more hours. The lack of effect on income is in part due to the lower migration rates, and hence lower incomes, among those eligible for the program.

BARHAM Tania (University of Virginia ) Thirty-Five Years Later: Evidence of Child Health and Family Planning on Economic and Migration Outcomes

Development Economics Seminar

Le 25/01/2017 de 16:30:00 à 18:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4

Rasul Imran (University of Virginia ) The Returns to Training in Low Income Labor Markets: Evidence from a Field Experiment and Structural Model

Livia Alfonsi [BRAC], Oriana Bandiera [LSE], Vittorio Bassi [UCL], Robin Burgess [LSE], Munshi Sulaiman [BRAC] and Anna Vitali [BRAC].

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Development Economics Seminar

Le 11/01/2017 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4

LaFave Daniel (University of Virginia ) *Are Rural Markets Complete? Prices, Profits, and Recursion

Evan Peet (RAND), Duncan Thomas (Duke)

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Development Economics Seminar

Le 30/11/2016 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


We use administrative data from 48 large garment factories in Bangladesh to examine pay differentials between women and men. We focus on sewing machine operators for most of our analysis. Wages are highly regulated, with the government specifying, and our firms complying with, minimum wage rates for each operator grade level. Even in a context where the average wage of operators is only a few percentage points above minimum wage, we find that men are paid 3.4 percent more than women. Most of the gap is explained by the fact that men are more likely to be in higher operator grades. We have exceptionally detailed skills data from a subset of the factories. We show that the wage- and grade-gaps are not explained by differences in skill levels. Rather, men have higher grades even conditioning on skills. Next, we show that the higher grades are not he result of factories promoting males more often than females (they do, but the magnitude of the difference is tiny). Rather, most “promotions” appear to happen when workers leave one factory and enter another factory at a higher grade. Males are more mobile than females, with average firm tenure rates across their careers that are 7 months, or 25 percent, shorter. We explore two reasons why men may be more mobile: women face higher costs of changing factories because they are juggling household responsibilities as well as work, and men have stronger incentives to be promoted because they ultimately want to be promoted into management, a path that is all but foreclosed to women. We find somewhat more evidence for the latter channel.

Woodruf Chris (University of Virginia ) Gender Wage Gaps and Worker Mobility: Evidence from the Garment Sector in Bangladesh.

Andreas Menzel (CERGE-EI)

Development Economics Seminar

Le 16/11/2016 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4

Kaur Supreet (University of Virginia ) *Barriers to contracting in Village Economies: A Test for Enforcement Constraints

Ryan Bubb and Sendhil Mullainathan

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Development Economics Seminar

Le 02/11/2016 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

I study how social connections and patronage affect the allocation and performance of senior bureaucrats using newly digitized personnel and public finance data from the British colonial administration. Exploiting the ministerial turnover in London as a source of within-governor variation in social connections, I find that governors are more likely to be appointed to higher salaried colonies when connected to their superior. At the same time, they provide more tax exemptions, generate less revenue, invest less and are less likely to be recognized for their service. Both promotion and performance gaps disappear after the abolition of patronage. This coincides with an increased matching assortativeness of appointees. Colonies administered for longer periods by connected governors during the period of patronage exhibit lower fiscal capacity today. I provide evidence consistent with policy persistence.

Xu Guo (University of Virginia ) The Costs of Patronage: Evidence from the British Empire

Development Economics Seminar

Le 12/10/2016 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

Rubio-Codina Marta (University of Virginia ) Home visiting at scale: The evaluation of Peru’s Cuna Mas program

Caridad Araujo, Sally Grantham-McGregor, Fabiola Lazarte and Norbert Schady

Development Economics Seminar

Le 28/09/2016 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


Around the world, there is a growing interest to provide insurance policies to low-income households. The selection of high-risk individuals into the insurance pool is an often cited impediment for the sustainability of such schemes, though. We provide robust evidence on the presence of adverse selection from a large randomized control trial on health insurance in rural Pakistan. Our experimental setup allows us to separate adverse selection from moral hazard, to estimate how selection changes at different points of the demand curve and to test measures against adverse selection. The results suggest that there is substantial adverse selection if health insurance coverage can be individually assigned. In particular, adverse selection tends to become worse with higher premium prices, creating a trade-off between cost recovery and the quality of the insurance pool. In contrast, adverse selection is mitigated when bundling insurance policies at the household or higher levels. Further analyses suggest that adverse selection in individual products has non-negligible welfare consequences and that these are relatively less pronounced when bundling policies.

Landmann Andreas (University of Virginia ) Adverse Selection in Low-Income Health Insurance Markets: Evidence from a RCT in Pakistan

Development Economics Seminar

Le 14/09/2016 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


This paper studies how targeted cash transfers to women affect their empowerment. We use a novel identification strategy to measure empowerment, as the women's willingness to pay to receive cash transfers instead of their partner receiving it, which we apply to women living in poor households in urban Macedonia. We match experimental data with a unique policy intervention (CCT) in Macedonia offering poor households cash transfers conditional on having their children attending secondary school. The program randomized whether the transfer was offered to household heads (generally a male) or mothers at municipality level. We show that women who were offered the transfer have stronger measured empowerment, which is in line with theoretical predictions from a simple model of household decision making.

Armand Alex (University of Virginia ) Measuring and Changing Control: Women’s Empowerment and Targeted Transfers

Ingvild Almas (IIES), Orazio Attanasio (UCL) and Pedro Carneiro (UCL, IFS, CEMMAP)

Development Economics Seminar

Le 31/08/2016 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


A good understanding of the constraints on agricultural growth in Africa relies on the accurate measurement of smallholder labor. Yet, serious weaknesses in these statistics persist. The extent of bias in smallholder labor data is examined by conducting a randomized survey experiment among farming households in rural Tanzania. Agricultural labor estimates obtained through weekly surveys are compared with the results of reporting in a single end-of-season recall survey. The findings show strong evidence of recall bias: people in traditional recall-style modules report working up to four times as many hours per person-plot relative to those reporting labor on a weekly basis. If hours are aggregated to the household level, however, this discrepancy disappears, a factor driven by the underreporting by recall households of people and plots active in agricultural work. The evidence suggests that these competing forms of recall bias are driven not only by failures in memory, but also by the mental burdens of reporting on highly variable agricultural work patterns to provide a typical estimate. All things equal, studies suffering from this bias would understate agricultural labor productivity.

Beegle Kathleen (University of Virginia ) Not Your Average Job: Measuring Farm Labor in Tanzania

Vellore Arthi (University of Oxford), Joachim De Weerdt (Universities of Antwerp and Leuven) , Amparo Palacios-López (World Bank)

Development Economics Seminar

Le 15/06/2016 de 17:00:00 à 20:30:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


Partenariat avec G-monD Programme 5:30pm – 6:00pm Welcoming 6:00pm – 7:00pm Lecture Kaushik Basu 7:00pm – 7:30pm Questions and answers and public debate 7:30pm – 8:30pm Cocktail reception

LANJOUW Peter (The World Bank) SEANCE EXCEPTIONNELLE : The Social and Behavioral Roots of Development - INSCRIPTION OBLIGATOIRE (anaelle.six@psemail.eu)

Development Economics Seminar

Le 25/05/2016 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


We test the impact of information about institution- and major-specific labor market outcomes on college enrollment decisions using a randomized controlled trial administered within the online Chilean federal student loan application process. Using linked secondary and post-secondary education records and tax returns for fourteen cohorts of Chilean high school graduates, we created measures of past-cohort earnings for nearly all institution and major combinations in the Chilean higher education system. Applicants were asked a series of survey questions about their enrollment plans and their beliefs about earnings and cost outcomes. Following the survey questions, randomly selected applicants were given information on earnings and costs for past students at their planned enrollment choices, as well as access to a searchable database that allowed them to compare earnings and costs across degrees. Students have unbiased but highly variable beliefs about costs, and upward-biased beliefs about earnings outcomes. Poorer students have less accurate information and choose lower-earning degrees conditional on baseline ability and demographics. While treatment has no effect on whether students enroll in postsecondary education, it does cause low-SES students to enroll in degrees where earnings net of costs were higher for past enrollees. Though effect sizes are small, they substantially exceed the cost of implementing the disclosure policy.

NEILSON Christophe ( New York University Stern ) THE EFFECTS OF EARNINGS DISCLOSURE ON COLLEGE ENROLLMENT DECISIONS

Justine Hastings and Seth D. Zimmerman

Development Economics Seminar

Le 04/05/2016 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


Policies may change the returns to transmitting cultural norms to the next generation with the unintended consequence of changing cultural practices. I study cultural norms that determine whether boys or girls support their parents in their old age in Indonesia and Ghana. These norms play the dual role of increasing old age support while relieving incomplete contracting problems between parents and children. Therefore, parents invest more in the human capital of the child who is more likely to care for them in old age. In both Indonesia and Ghana, the entry and expansion of pension plans crowds out human capital investment in the children targeted by these norms. Moreover, consistent with a model where transmission of the norm is costly, the pension plan also crowds out the practice of the norm. Thus, policy crowds out culture.

ESTEVEZ BAULUZ Luis Natalie () Can Policy Crowd Out Culture ?


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Development Economics Seminar

Le 30/03/2016 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


Does knowledge about antipoverty programs spread quickly with in poor communities or are there significant frictions, such as due to social exclusion? We combine longitudinal and intra-household observations in estimating the direct knowledge gain from watching an information movie in rural India, while randomized village assignment identifies knowledge sharing with those in treatment villageswho did not watch the movie. Knowledge is found to be shared withinvillages, but lesssoamong illiterate and lower caste individuals, especially when also poor; these groups relied more on actually seeing the movie. Sizeable biases are evident in impact estimators that ignore knowledge spillovers

RAVALLION Martin () Social Frictions to Knowledge Diffusion : Evidence from an Information Intervention


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Development Economics Seminar

Le 09/03/2016 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


We develop and test a model of environmental regulation that integrates firm and regulator behavior to evaluate a voluntary certification program : the Mexican Clean Industry Program. Imposing structure on the costs of participation and compliance we first establish that plants with lower compliance costs are more likely to certify. Then, we show that because authorities seem to use certification as a screening device, the program leads to higher levels and more efficient targeting of inspections. Using remotely sensed estimates of local air quality we find evidence that is consistent with the model and suggests that the Clean Industry Program had little impact on emissions of firms that certified but reduced emissions overall as a result of the regulatory response that certification made possible.

FOSTER Andrew (Brown University) Direct and Indirect Effects of Voluntary Certification: Evidence from the Mexican Clean Industry Program Draft (February 2016)

Emilio Gutierrez (ITAM)

Development Economics Seminar

Le 18/02/2016 de 14:30:00 à 16:00:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


Piracy off the coast of Somalia took the world by surprise when, within a six-year span (2005-2011), around 1,100 ships were attacked, among which more than 200 were successfully hijacked. In 2012 however, attacks had plummeted with, no new hijacking reported between 2013 and mid-2015. We quantitatively investigate the roles of two crime deterrence measures widely believed to be responsible for the collapse of Somali piracy: the deployment of international navies in pirate-infested waters and the provision of armed security guards onboard vessels. Using unique data on attacks, hijacks, and ransoms to calibrate a structural model of Somali piracy, we estimate the elasticity of crime with respect to deterrence and highlight the positive and negative spillovers generated by the private adoption of onboard armed security. We discuss counterfactual scenarios obtained by varying the intensity and composition of deterrence measures.

DO Quy-Toan (Brown University) Pirates of Somalia: Crime and Deterrence on the High Seas

Development Economics Seminar

Le 03/02/2016 de 12:30:00 à 14:00:00

Campus jourdan, Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 10

BURCHARDI Konrad (IIES-Stockholms universitet) Moral Hazard: Experimental Evidence from Tenancy Contracts

with S. Gulesci, B. Lerva, and M. Sulaiman.

Development Economics Seminar

Le 13/01/2016 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


For many technologies, the rate of return depends on local conditions. Therefore, local experimentation is needed for individuals to make technology adoption decisions. Given this public good aspect, experimentation needs to be subsidized. The premise of our study is that people are heterogeneous in their suitability as experimenters, and that the effectiveness of programs to promote experimentation can be enhanced by targeting the most appropriate experimenters. The key question is how to identify who are the most appropriate experimenters: is this information known from individuals themselves? from their network? If known, can it be elicited? We develop theoretically, implement and compare (through a field experiment with Kenyan farmers) three elicitation/selection mechanisms, based on the selective trials approach developed in Chassang et al. (2012).

DUPAS Pascaline (Stanford University) Targeting Experimentation Subsidies in Credit Constrained Environments

Sylvain Chassang, Catlan Reardon and Erik Snowberg

Development Economics Seminar

Le 09/12/2015 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


Existing theories of coups against democracy emphasize that elite incentives to mount a coup depend on the threat that democracy represents to them and what they stand to gain from dictatorship. But holding interests constant, some potential plotters, by the nature of their social networks, have much more influence over whether or not a coup succeeds. We develop a model of elite social networks and show that coup participation of an elite is increasing in their network centrality and results in rents during a dictatorship. We empirically explore the model using an original dataset of Haitian elite social networks which we linked to firm-level data on importing firms. We show that highly central families are more likely to participate in the 1991 coup against the democratic Aristide government. We then find that the retail prices of the staple goods imported by coup participators differentially increase during subsequent periods of non-democracy. Finally, we find that urban children born during periods of non-democracy are more likely to experience adverse health outcomes.

NAIDU Sureh (Stanford University) Social Origins of Dictatorships: Elite Networks and Political Transitions in Haiti

James A. Robinson and Lauren E. Young

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Development Economics Seminar

Le 18/11/2015 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

KENISTON Daniel (Department of Economics Yale University ) How Positive Was the Positive Check? Investment and Fertility in the Aftermath of the 1918 Influenza in India

Development Economics Seminar

Le 14/10/2015 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


We estimate the impact of Kenya’s post-election violence on individual risk preferences. Because the crisis interrupted a longitudinal survey of more than five thousand Kenyan youth, this timing creates plausibly exogenous variation in exposure to civil conflict by the time of the survey. We measure individual risk preferences using hypothetical lottery choice questions which we validate by showing that they predict migration and entrepreneurship in the cross-section. Our results indicate that the post-election violence increased individual risk aversion significantly. Findings remain robust when we use an IV estimation strategy that exploits random assignment of respondents to waves of surveying.

JAKIELA Pamela (University of Maryland) The Impact of Violence on Individual Risk Preferences: Evidence from a Natural Experiment

Owen Ozier

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Development Economics Seminar

Le 23/09/2015 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

FOLTZ Jeremy (University of Wisconsin) Do Higher Salaries Lower Petty Corruption? A Policy Experiment on West Africa’s Highways.

Co-author : Kweku A. Opoku-Agyemang (University of California, Berkeley)

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Development Economics Seminar

Le 10/06/2015 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


Globalization can lead to either conservation or depletion of natural resources that are used in the production of traded goods. Rising prices may lead to better resource management. Alternatively, stronger incentives to extract these resources may exacerbate their decline- especially in open access institutional frameworks. We examine the impact of agricultural trade promotion on the groundwater extraction in India using nationally representative data from 1996-2005. We find evidence that trade promotion led to increased extraction of the reserves. In areas deemed over-exploited by the government, groundwater depleted by an additional 2.5 meter or 1 within district standard deviation. This large decline had economically signicant distributive consequences. While large and marginal farmers did not experience any real welfare changes, we detect a 1 standard deviation decline in real mean per capita expenditure for small farmers in such areas. We also quantify the social cost of groundwater depletion due to increased agricultural trade. Our findings indicate that the monetized value of depleted groundwater could be atleast as high as 1 billion US dollars in 1991 dollar terms.

SEKHRI Sheetal (University of Virginia) Agricultural Trade and Depletion of Groundwater

Co-author(s) : Paul Landefeld

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Development Economics Seminar

Le 20/05/2015 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


We are especially indebted to Jim Robinson who, in the initial stages of the project when we were wallowing in case studies drawn from disparate times and places, encouraged us to focus on the British Empire and the under-exploited Colonial Blue Book data. We are also indebted to Elhanan Helpman for his encouragement in exploring the relationship between international trade and domestic institutions. We benefited from discussions with Daron Acemoglu, Lee Alston, Magda Bisieda, Kyle Bagwell, Stanley Engerman, James Fenske, Murat Iyigun, Suresh Naidu, Diego Puga, Alan Taylor, and seminar participants at Boulder, CIFAR, LSE, Ryerson, Stanford, Toronto (Law Faculty), Western, the World Bank, UC Davis, and UC San Diego. Trefler gratefully acknowledges financial support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). All three co-authors gratefully acknowledge the support of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, CIFAR Program in Institutions, Organizations, and Growth, Toronto, ON M5G 1Z8. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

DIPPEL Christian (UCLA) THE RENTS FROM TRADE AND COERCIVE INSTITUTIONS: REMOVING THE SUGAR COATING

Co-author(s) : Avner Greif and Daniel Trefler

Development Economics Seminar

Le 22/04/2015 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


We provide an explanation for large spatial wage disparities and low male migration in India that is based on the trade-off between consumption-smoothing, provided by caste-based rural insurance networks, and the income-gains from migration. Our theory generates two key predictions, which we verify empirically: (i) relatively wealthy households within the caste who benefit less from the redistributive (surplus-maximizing) network will be more likely to have migrant members, and (ii) households facing greater rural income-risk (who benefit more from the insurance network) are less likely to have migrant members. Structural estimates of the model show that even small improvements in formal insurance decrease the spatial misallocation of labor by substantially increasing migration.

MUNSHI Kaivan (University of Cambridge) Networks and Misallocation: Insurance, Migration, and the Rural-Urban Wage Gap

Co-author(s) : Mark Rosenzweig

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Development Economics Seminar

Le 25/03/2015 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

ALSAN Marcella (University of Stanford) The Gendered Impact of Young Children's Health on Human Capital: Evidence from Turkey

Development Economics Seminar

Le 04/03/2015 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


'There can b e no Partnership with the King': Regulatory Commitment and the Tortured Rise of England's East Indian Merchant Empire  Dan Bogart y January 2015 Abstract The English East India Company help ed build Britain's colonial empire, but the Company struggled for much of its early history due to a violotile regulatory environ- ment. This pap er argues that the Company's p erformance was hindered by instability and incapacity of English institutions as late as the mid eighteenth century. It gives a brief history of the torturous renegotiations over its monop oly trading privileges and the scal demands by the monarchy. It also analyzes the eects of p olitical instabil- ity, warfare, and scal capacity on the Company's investment in shipping tonnage. Regressions show the growth of shipping tonnage declined signicantly when there were changes in government ministers, when Britain was at war in Europ e and North America, and when shipping capacity exceeded central government tax revenues. The ndings p oint to the signicance of regulatory institutions in Britain's development and its links with p olitics and war. They also provide a unique insight into how regulations and investment change as institutions evolve.

BOGART Dan (UC-Irvine) There can be no Partnership with the King’: Regulatory Uncertainty and Investment in Britain’s East India Monopoly


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Development Economics Seminar

Le 11/02/2015 de 12:30:00 à 13:45:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

VALSECCHI Michele (University of Gothenberg) Resource Windfalls and Public Goods: Evidence From a Policy Reform in Indonesia

Development Economics Seminar

Le 28/01/2015 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

BRYAN Gharad (LSE) The Costs of Spatial Labor Misallocation: Evidence from Indonesia

Development Economics Seminar

Le 14/01/2015 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


We play a series of incentivized laboratory games with risk-exposed coffee farmers in Guatemala to understand the demand for index-based excess rainfall insurance. By varying risk in systematic ways over a large number of games, we can use numerical techniques to estimate explicit flexible utility functions for each player, and with these to simulate demand under alternate scenarios. We introduce the presence of the types of novel drought risks likely to be driven by global warming and find that these lead to sharp decreases in flood insurance demand, even when the objective benefit of the flood insurance is held constant. The possibility of using group-based mechanisms to smooth idiosyncratic risk is introduced by playing games with group-based products, and by asking farmers to anticipate and deliberate on the extent to which their groups would effectively smooth risk. Our results indicate that elevated weather-driven variance has very different effects if it occurs inside of insured or uninsured states, and that groups provide a very imperfect way of protecting farmers from these risks.

SADOULET Elisabeth (UC-Berkeley) Utility, Risk, and Demand for Incomplete Insurance: Lab Experiments with Guatemalan Cooperatives

Co-author(s) : Craig McIntosh and Felix Povell

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Development Economics Seminar

Le 03/12/2014 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


In order to induce farmers to adopt agricultural technologies in Malawi, we apply diffusion models of simple and complex contagion on rich social network data from 200 villages in Malawi to identify optimal seed farmers to target and train on the new technologies. A randomized controlled trial compares these theory-driven network targeting approaches to simpler, scalable strategies that either rely on a government extension worker or an easily measurable proxy for the social network (geographic distance between households) to identify seed farmers. Adoption rates over three years are greater in villages that received the theory-based data intensive targeting treatments. The data, interpreted through the lens of the theory, yield insights on the nature of diffusion, and are most consistent with a learning environment where farmers need to know more than one person with knowledge of the technology before they adopt themselves.

MOBARAK Mushfik (University of Yale) Can Network Theory based Targeting Increase Technology Adoption?

Co-author(s) : L. Beaman, A. BenYishay and J. Magruder

Development Economics Seminar

Le 12/11/2014 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


In this paper, we investigate how reductions of barriers to migration a¤ect the decision of middle school graduates to attend high school in rural China. Change in the cost of migration is identified using exogenous variation across counties in the timing of national identity card distribution, which made it easier for rural migrants to register as temporary residents in urban destinations. After taking care to address potential strengths and weaknesses of our identification strategy, we find a robust negative relationship between migrant opportunity and high school enrollment. The mechanisms behind the negative relationship are suggested by observed increases in the subsequent employment rates of high school age young adults in both local and migrant non-agricultural activities with increases in the share of village residents working as migrants outside the village.

GILES John (World Bank) Migrant Opportunity and the Educational Attainment of Youth in Rural China

Co-author(s) : Alan de Brauw

Development Economics Seminar

Le 15/10/2014 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


We describe a model of targeted redistribution choices by a self-interested incumbent politician, and use it to derive predictions about public good provision levels and poverty outcomes following secession of a region from a political union. Secession of one of those other regions, by removing private rent-seeking incentives for the incumbent, reduces targeted redistribution in the seceded jurisdiction, raising public good provision and improving the distribution of welfare. The model's predictions are examined in light of evidence on inequality and poverty outcomes following the political break-up that resulted in the creation three new Indian states. We use satellite data on night-time lights to proxy for economic activity across new and old state borders. Employing a regression discontinuity design we find a significant decrease in inequality in new states post break-up. Our result indicate that this effect is driven entirely by a decrease in inequality amongst natural resource poor regions in the new states, post break-up.

PATNAM Manassa (ENSAE-CREST) Targeted transfers, inequality, and poverty outcomes from the break up of states : evidence from the réorganization of states in India

Co-author(s) : Amrita DHILLON, Pramila KRISHNAN, and Carlo PERRONI

Development Economics Seminar

Le 01/10/2014 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

SOMANATHAN Rohini (Delhi Shool of Economics) Community contracts: An experimental investigation of rule formation in Indian villages

Co-author(s) : Karla Hoff and Pontus Strimling

Development Economics Seminar

Le 18/06/2014 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


Economists have recently argued that time inconsistency may play a central role in explaining intertemporal behavior, particularly among poor households. However, time-preference parameters are typically not identified in standard dynamic choice models and little is known about the fraction of inconsistent agents in the population. We formulate a dynamic discrete choice model in an unobservedly heterogeneous population of possibly time-inconsistent agents motivated by specifically collected information combined with a field intervention in rural India. We identify and estimate all time-preference parameters as well as the population fractions of time-consistent and “naïve" and “sophisticated" time-inconsistent agents. We estimate that time-inconsistent agents account for more than half of the population and that “sophisticated" inconsistent agents are considerably more present-biased than their “naïve" counterparts. We also examine whether there are other differences across types (e.g. in risk and cost preferences) and find that these differences are small relative to the differences in time preferences.

TAROZZI Alessandro (Pompeo Fabra) Time Inconsistency, Expectations and Technology Adoption: The case of Insecticide Treated Nets

Co-author(s) : Aprajit Mahajan

Development Economics Seminar

Le 28/05/2014 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


This study exploits within-state variation in drought severity to identify how insurgency during the Mexican Revolution, a major early 20th century armed conflict, impacted subsequent government policies and long-run economic development. Using a novel municipal-level dataset on revolutionary insurgency, the study documents that municipalities experiencing severe drought just prior to the Revolution were substantially more likely to have insurgent activity than municipalities where drought was less severe. Many insurgents demanded land reform, and following the Revolution, Mexico redistributed over half of its surface area in the form of ejidos : farms comprised of individual and communal plots that were granted to a group of petitioners. Rights to ejido plots were nontransferable, renting plots was prohibited, and many decisions about the use of ejido lands had to be countersigned by politicians. Instrumental variables estimates show that municipalities with revolutionary insurgency had 22 percentage points more of their surface area redistributed as ejidos. Today, insurgent municipalities are 20 percentage points more agricultural and 6 percentage points less industrial. Incomes in insurgent municipalities are lower and alternations between political parties for the mayorship have been substantially less common. Overall, the results support a view of history in which relatively modest events can have highly nonlinear and persistent influences, depending on the broader societal circumstances.

DELL Melissa (Harvard University) Path dependence in development: Evidence from the Mexican Revolution

Development Economics Seminar

Le 07/05/2014 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


We analyze the tradeoff between child quantity and quality in developing countries by estimating the effect of family size on child education in urban Philippines. To isolate exogenous changes in family size, we exploit a policy shock: in the late 1990s, the mayor of Manila enacted a municipal ban on modern contraceptives. Since other comparable cities in the Manila metropolitan area were not affected by the ban, this allows us to implement a difference-in-difference estimation of the effect of family size. We also exploit the fact that older mothers were less likely to become pregnant during the ban. Our results indicate that the contraceptive ban led to a significant increase in family size. They also provide evidence of a quality-quantity tradeoff: increased family size led to a sizable decrease in school performance.

DUMAS Christelle (Université de Lorraine, BETA and THEMA) Sex in Marriage is a Divine Gift : For Whom? Evidence from the Manila Contraceptive Ban

Co-author(s) : Arnaud Lefranc

Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 02/04/2014 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


Circular labor migration is a core feature of low-income labor markets. Yet, evidence on how this migration affects education investments in sending communities is limited due to lack of high quality data and challenging identification issues. This is especially true in Africa, where children can substitute for migrant adult labor. In this paper, we estimate the net effect of international migration on human capital accumulation of children by exploiting two large migrant labor shocks in sending communities in Malawi. An international mine labor treaty signed in 1967 initiated a 300% increase in the flow of Malawians to South Africa. Seven years later, a mining plane crash prompted the Malawian government to halt and reverse this expansion until 1977. Our strategy compares differences in long run human capital accumulation across high and low shock areas, among cohorts eligible and ineligible for primary school during the shock years. We construct measures of district-level exposure to this rapid expansion and contraction of foreign employment and earnings using historical locations of mining recruiting stations. We match this spatial variation in migration costs to cohort-specific education outcomes from newly digitized 1977 and 1998 Census data. Both shocks to migration had large, positive impacts on education. Age eligible cohorts exposed to the shocks attained 10 to 15% more schooling and the share with any primary schooling rose by 5 to 8%. Neither school supply-side interventions nor internal migration dynamics account for our results. However, these long run effects are only apparent in districts without agricultural estates, where child labor is less substitutable for missing male labor.

DINKELMAN Taryn (Dartmouth College) What are the long run effects of labor migration on human capital? Evidence from Malawi

Co-author(s) : Martine Mariotti

Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 12/03/2014 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


The development of modern sectors has long been linked to the displacement of traditional agriculture. The economic literature has focused on explanations associated with input reallocation, but has neglected other mechanisms, such as pollution externalities. To explore this issue, we examine the case of gold mining in Ghana. We find that mining has reduced agricultural total factor productivity, and increased rural poverty. Consistent with a pollution spillover, we document higher concentrations of air pollutants near mines. The results highlight an important channel --i.e., reduction in productivity-- through which polluting industries can affect living conditions in rural areas.

RUD Juan Pablo (University of London) Modern Industries, Pollution and Agricultural Productivity: Evidence from Ghana

Co-author(s) : Fernando M. Aragon

Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 05/02/2014 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


The paper studies the effects of a financing mechanism for the health sector in which payment to health facilities is based on the volume of health service provision, as opposed to a fixed payment. Even though performance-based financing (PBF) models have been implemented in developed and developing countries in various settings and forms, the scientic evidence on the impact of these mechanisms on health outcomes remains thin. Using a field experiment in the Democratic Republic of Congo, we give evidence that financial incentives led to more effort from health workers to increase targeted service provision. Equally important, health workers did not substitute service quality or non-targeted services for targeted ones. However, demand for health services was not responsive to the increased supply-side effort. Finally, the increase in overall staff motivation happened at the expense of its intrinsic component.

HUILLERY Elise (Sciences Po) Performance-Based Financing for Health: Experimental Evidence from the Democratic Republic of Congo

Co-auteur : Juliette Seban

Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 15/01/2014 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

LAMBERT Sylvie, Sylvie.Lambert@ens.fr (Sciences Po) ANNULE

Development Economics Seminar

Le 04/12/2013 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


Recent developments in the political economy literature suggest that a central role of good political institutions is to select more competent leaders. Competence of politicians is typically measured by years of education. However, we have limited empirical evidence on the causal effect of education of political leaders on economic outcomes. This paper exploits a large construction program of schools in Indonesia and variation in the electoral cycle of villages to estimate the effect of education of village leaders on public good provision. I construct a panel of 10,000 villages in the island of Java. The results suggest that the education of village heads leads to an increase in the provision of a wide range of public goods.

MARTINEZ BRAVO Monica (Cemfi, Madrid) The Effect of the Education of Politicians on Public Good Provision: Evidence from Indonesia

Development Economics Seminar

Le 20/11/2013 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


Firms can choose how they export : directly or through intermediaries. What are the costs and benefits of such choices? Firms may choose to trade directly, even if this is more costly in the short run, if doing so results in better future outcomes. A policy pursued by China gives us a unique chance to look at such trade-offs in the real world. Before China's accession to the WTO, a large share of domestic Chinese firms were not allowed to export directly, only through intermediaries. The policy could have been a double-edged sword : while firms may have been spared the costs of direct exporting, they may also have been barred from obtaining any benefits of doing so. In this paper we develop and estimate a dynamic discrete choice model where firms choose their export mode. We recover not only the sunk and fixed costs of exporting according to mode, but also the evolution of productivity and demand under different export modes. We find that the evolution of both demand and productivity is more favorable under direct exporting. On average, starting direct exporting requires signicantly higher start-up costs than starting indirect exporting. It is also more costly to remain a direct exporter than to remain an indirect one. Moreover, climbing the export ladder by starting off as an indirect exporter and then transitioning into direct exporting is cheaper than exporting directly to begin with. Our counterfactual experiment suggests that this policy reduced Chinese export growth considerably. Exports would have been 30 percent lower and the export participation rate would have been 37 percent lower had there been no liberalization of trading rights. In addition, we compare the effects of different trade policies, namely export subsidies and subsidies on export costs. For export subsidies, it is better to target direct exporters over indirect ones, both for increasing the number of exporters and in terms of exports per dollar expended. However for cost subsidies, the opposite is true. The contribution of this paper is the use of frontier techniques to estimate a structural dynamic model with a view to evaluating the consequences of a major policy reform in China.

KRISHNA Kala (Penn State University) How You Export Matters: Export Mode, Learning and Productivity in China

Co-author(s) : Xue Bai (The Pennsylvania State University) and Hong Ma (Tsinghua University)

Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 16/10/2013 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


Using detailed data on labor supply and daily shocks among 257 bicycle taxi drivers in Western Kenya, we show that labor supply responds to both unexpected and expected demands on income on the day money is needed, but does not adjust in days prior to expected needs. We find that the quitting hazard within a given work day increases discontinuously once earned income reaches the day’s cash need. We conjecture that workers set a personal rule of “earning enough for the day’s need” as an internal commitment device to provide effort. Since demands on income are empirically uncorrelated with the wage rate, this rule generates a negative wage elasticity. The inability to better arbitrage intertemporally has substantial welfare costs: greater variance in hours worked is associated with worse health, and we estimate a lower bound on lost income of 5%.

DUPAS Pascaline (Stanford University) The Daily Grind: Cash Needs, Labor Supply and Self-Control

Co-author(s) : Jonathan Robinson

Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 25/09/2013 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

ASHRAF Nava (Harvard Business School) Do-gooders and Doctors: Evidence on Selection and Performance of Health Workers

Co-auteur(s) : Oriana Bandiera (LSE) and Scott Lee (Harvard)

Development Economics Seminar

Le 12/06/2013 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

UDRY Christopher (Yale University) Agricultural decisions after relaxing credit and risk constraints

Co-author(s) : Dean Karlan, Issac Osei-Akoto and Robert Osei

Development Economics Seminar

Le 29/05/2013 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


In most developing countries, firms are on average very small, often do not grow as they age and have low productivity. We argue that one contributing factor to these outcomes is limited "effective" market size: due to information, search and transactions costs, many manufacturers serve only local consumers, making many industries a collection of small, independent and autarkic markets. We explore this hypothesis in the context of the artisanal boat building industry in Kerala, India, using a panel data set of builders and buyers (commercial fishermen). The spread of mobile phones in the late 1990s led some fishermen for the first time to buy boats built outside of their local area. Those firms that were the most productive ex-ante grew rapidly, gaining market share at the expense of less productive firms, with many of the latter exiting the market. On net, the industry shifts from a large number of very small firms, to a smaller number of larger firms. We also show that aggregate productivity of the sector increases, due to both the loss of market share (or exit) by less productive firms and increases in productivity for surviving incumbents.

JENSEN Robert (UCLA) Market size and the growth of firms : evidence from a natural experiment in India

Co-author(s) : Nolan Miller (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

Development Economics Seminar

Le 15/05/2013 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

GLEWWE Paul (University of Minnesota) Heterogeneity in Impacts of School Characteristics on Student Learning in Developing Countries: Evidence from Vietnamese and Peruvian Panel Data

Development Economics Seminar

Le 24/04/2013 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


In this paper we develop a new methodology for estimating intranational trade costs, apply our methodology to newly collected CPI micro-data from Ethiopia and Nigeria, and explore how our estimates affect the geographic incidence of globalization within these countries. Our approach confronts three well-known but unresolved challenges that arise when using price gaps to estimate trade costs. First, we work exclusively with a sample of goods that are identi?ed at the barcode-level, to mitigate concerns about unobserved quality differences over space. Second, because price gaps only identify trade costs between pairs of locations that are actually trading the product in question, we collect novel data on the location of production/importation of each product in our sample in order to focus exclusively on trading pairs. Conditioning on this new information raises our estimate of trade costs by a factor of two. Third, we demonstrate how estimates of cost pass-through can be used to correct for potentially varying mark-ups over space. Applying this correction raises our trade cost estimate by a factor of two (again). All said, we estimate that intranational trade costs in our sample are 7-15 times larger than similar estimates for the US. In a ?nal exercise we estimate that intermediaries capture the majority of the surplus created when the world price for an imported product falls, and that intermediaries’ share is even higher in remote locations. This sheds new light on the incidence of globalization

DONALDSON Dave (MIT) Who’s Getting Globalized? The Size and Nature of Intranational Trade Costs

Co auteur : David Atkin

Development Economics Seminar

Le 17/04/2013 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


Enforcement problems, insurance considerations and uncertainty over trading parties are salient features of real-life relationships between ?firms. We develop tests to empirically distinguish between different models of relationships and, using data on Kenyan rose exports, show that 1) the value of the relationship for the seller increases with the relationship?'s age; 2) during a negative supply shock sellers prioritize the most valuable relationships; and 3) compliance at the time of the shock positively correlates with future survival, orders, prices and relationship value. The evidence is consistent with sellers valuing a reputation for reliability and rejects models exclusively focussing on enforcement or insurance considerations.

MACCHIAVELLO Rocco (Warwick, BREAD and CEPR) "The Value of Relationships: Evidence from a Supply Shock to Kenyan Flower Exports"

Co-auteur : Ameet Morjaria (Harvard University)

Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 13/03/2013 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


Private primary care providers routinely account for more than 50 percent of first-contacts in low-income settings, rising to 80 percent in countries like India. The majority of these providers operate in single provider clinics with little regulatory oversight or government subsidies. No patients have health insurance beyond the free care that they can access in the public sector. These key features offer a unique opportunity to evaluate the relative benefits (or lack thereof) of a market model of primary care provision, relative to provision through the public sector. We report results from audit studies, where standardized patients presented to primary care providers in a representative sample of rural public and private providers in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. Across all audit studies, public providers spent less time with patients, completed fewer items on a checklist of essential history and examination items, and were either no different or worse in their treatment and diagnostic accuracy. In one dramatic example, public providers in their private practice were 32 percentage points more likely to provide the correct treatment for unstable angina relative to in their public practice. Our results, that customer accountability in an unregulated, unsubsidized and uninsured private market results in better primary care relative to the administrative accountability in the public sector, is further supported by a strong positive correlation between the prices charged to the standardized patients and the quality of care received. These results suggest a trade-off between poor administrative accountability in the public sector and market failures arising from (potentially) misplaced quality judgments on the part of patients in the private sector. However, hedonic pricing in the private market also suggests that financial constraints may prevent the poor from accessing higher quality care

DAS Jishnu (World Bank & Centre for Policy Research) Quality and Accountability in Health: Audit Evidence From Primary Care Providers

Co-auteurs : Alaka Holla (World Bank), Michael Kremer (Harvard University) and Karthik Muralidharan (UCSD)

Development Economics Seminar

Le 20/02/2013 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


We assess the religious and social impacts of female schooling in Turkey using a change in compulsory schooling law. A new law, implemented in 1998, bound individuals born after a specific date to 8 years of schooling while those born earlier could drop out after 5 years. This allows the implemen- tation of a Regression Discontinuity (RD) Design and the estimation of meaningful causal estimates of schooling. Using a dataset of ever married Turkish women in 2008, we find large reducing effects of a year of schooling on expressions of religiosity, such as the habit of wearing a headscarf, attending Qur'anic courses, and regular prayer. Parallel to these, we also document a partial empowerment effect, whereby women are more likely to make marriage and family planning decisions themselves, less likely to marry under the legal age, and to experience better household and husband characteristics. A noteworthy non-result is the lack of clear effects on female labor force participation. On one hand, we show that returns to schooling in terms of women's status and living conditions may be substantial even when labor-related returns are not. In particular, our results are consistent with education allowing social mobility out of religiously conservative environments for the poor and pious; with women more independently choosing richer, and more educated husbands outside the family circle. On the other hand, however, we also document the absence of commensurate impacts for the country's large ethnolinguistic minorities. An evaluation of the education reform thus needs to weigh its average empowering effects against increased inequality across ethnolinguistic groups.

GULESCI Selim (University Bocconi) `For the Love of the Republic' Education, Religion, and Empowerment

Co-auteur : Erik Meyersson

Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 09/01/2013 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


Since 2001 Indonesia has transformed from a centralised government into a highly decentralised one. Local municipal and regency governments are now responsible for local public investment and service provision, for which they receive sizable annual transfers from the central government. We seek to better understand fiscal policy by regency (kabupaten) governments, focusing on the role of political accountability through political competition at the regency level. Our empirical strategy is based on the idea that if ethnic and religious diversity shapes the competitiveness of local politics (elections), then ethnic and religious diversity could provide a plausible instrument for political accountability (the composition of local parliaments). We particularly focus on 2006, when the total amount of unused local government budgetary resources reached a record-high level of Rp 97 trillion (approximately, AUD 14 billion; equivalent to 3 per cent of the national GDP) due an unexpected national budget surplus from oil price shocks. The paper contributes to the literature by testing a specific mechanism through which diversity can shape economic outcomes, showing that political accountability reduces underutilized fiscal space. Our results suggest that accountability measures, on the one hand, can help to prevent malfeasance by local politicians, but on the other hand may induce inappropriate risk-minimisation behaviour. Our results on the relationship between ethnic and religious diversity and election outcomes are also a novel finding in the Indonesian context.

TOTH Russell (University of Sydney, School of Economics) Fractionalization, Political Competition and Local Budgeting in Indonesia

Co auteurs : Sherry Tao Kong (Peking University), Thomas Pepinsky (Cornell University)

Development Economics Seminar

Le 19/12/2012 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


We report results from a randomized experiment designed and implemented by the Brazilian central government audit agency to test whether increased audit risk deters corruption and waste in local public procurement and improves provision of public services. We measure waste and corruption as irregularities in local public procurement and service delivery uncovered by central government auditors. Our estimates suggest that increasing audit risk by about 20 percentage points reduced the proportion of non-competitive procurement modalities adopted by local managers by about 17 percent. Higher audit risk also reduced the proportion of local procurement processes involving waste or corruption by about 20 percent. In contrast, we find no evidence that increased audit risk affected the quality of publicly provided preventive and primary health care services, measured using client satisfaction surveys. We also find no evidence that higher audit risk had an effect on local compliance with national guidelines of the conditional cash transfer program Bolsa Família, measured in terms of appropriate inclusion of beneficiaries into the program or their compliance with health and education conditionalities.

Litschig Stefan (Universidad Pompeu Fabra) Audit Risk and Rent Extraction: Evidence from a Randomized Evaluation in Brazil

Co auteur : Yves Zamboni

Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 05/12/2012 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

Cardenas Juan Camillo (Universidad de Los Andes, Bogota, Colombia) Vertical Collective Action and the Distributive Challenges of Cooperation: Experiments in the Developing World

Development Economics Seminar

Le 21/11/2012 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


We examine the political economy mechanisms that link resource abundance and economic development by analyzing the recent increase in Brazil's oil production and the distribution of oil royalties to municipalities. We explore a xed geographic rule which determines who receive oil royalties and investigate how incumbents spend oil windfall and the impact of these rents on local elections. We show that oil windfall creates a large incumbency advantage in the election that follows oil windfall boom, but this eect disappears in the medium-run. Royalty payments are associated with a large increase in the number of municipal employees, but we don't nd any signicant impact on household infrastructure, education and health supply. The pattern of the increase in public jobs indicates that voters reward increases in public sector and audit data suggest that institutions limit this increase. Taken together, our results indicate that oil does not make leaders unaccountable, and provide suggestive evidence that constraints on the executive branch restrained the the irresponsible use of oil revenues. These results point out that a democratic system is crucial to avoid the negative eects of resource abundance but also indicate that the institutions in place are not sucient to transform natural resource wealth into economic development.

Ferraz Claudio (Pontifica Universidade Catolica) Does Oil Make Leaders Unaccountable? Evidence from Brazil's offshore oil boom

Co-auteur : Joana Monteiro

Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 07/11/2012 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

Monge-Naranjo Alexander (Pennsylvania State University) Knowledge Spillovers and the Optimal Taxation of Multinational Firms

Development Economics Seminar

Le 17/10/2012 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


This paper measures the economic impacts of social pressures to share income with kin and neighbors in rural Kenyan villages. We conduct a lab experiment in which we randomly vary the observability of investment returns to test whether subjects reduce their income in order to keep it hidden. We find that women adopt an investment strategy that conceals the size of their initial endowment in the experiment, though that strategy reduces their expected earnings. This effect is largest among women with relatives attending the experiment. Parameter estimates suggest that women anticipate that observable income will be taxed" at a rate above four percent; this effective tax rate nearly doubles when kin can observe income directly. Though this paper provides experimental evidence from a single African country | Kenya | observational studies suggest that similar kin pressures may be prevalent in many rural areas throughout Sub-Saharan Africa.

Jakiela Pamela (University of Maryland) “Does Africa Need a Rotten Kin Theorem? Experimental Evidence from Village Economies.”

Co-auteur : Owen Ozier

Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 03/10/2012 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


We use new data to examine the effects of giant oilfield discoveries around the world since 1946. On average, these discoveries increase per capita oil production and oil exports by up to 50 percent. But these giant oilfield discoveries also have a dark side: they increase the incidence of internal armed conflict by about 5-8 percentage points. This increased incidence of conflict due to giant oilfield discoveries is especially high for countries that had already experienced armed conflicts or coups in the decade prior to discovery.

MICHAELS Guy (London School of Economics) "Do Giant Oilfield Discoveries Fuel Internal Armed Conflicts?"

Co-author(s): Yu-Hsiang Lei

Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 19/09/2012 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

I MIQUEL Gerard Padro (London School of Economics) Voter Heterogeneity and Public Goods : Evidence from Religious Fragmentation and Elections in China (Preliminary

Co-auteur : Nancy Qianz, Yang Yaox

Development Economics Seminar

Le 27/06/2012 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

McKENZIE David (World Bank) Soft skills or hard cash? The impact of training and wage subsidy programs on female youth employment in Jordan.

Development Economics Seminar

Le 13/06/2012 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

CHEMIN Matthieu (Université McGill) Do Workers Feel Entitled to High Wages? Evidence from a Long-Term Field Experiment


Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 23/05/2012 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

LA FERRARA Eliana (Bocconi - Milano) Customary Norms, Inheritance and Human Capital. Evidence from a Reform of the Matrilineal System in Ghana

Co-auteur : Annamaria Milazzo

Development Economics Seminar

Le 09/05/2012 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


Abstract Using a measure of tunneling out of Russian

ZHURAVSKAYA Ekaterina (PSE) Corruption in Procurement and Shadow Campaign Financing: Evidence from Russia

Co-author : Maxim Mironov

Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 02/05/2012 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

BROLLO Fernanda (University of Alicante) *

Development Economics Seminar

Le 11/04/2012 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

PRINA Silvia (Case Western Reserve University) Access to savings accounts and poor households' behavior: Evidence from a eld experiment in Nepal


Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 04/04/2012 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

FISCHER Greg (LSE) Eliciting and Utilizing Willingness to Pay: Evidence from Field Trials in Northern Ghana.

Development Economics Seminar

Le 21/03/2012 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


This paper investigates access to the semi-formal credit market - in the context of an almost inexistent formal credit sector- and the impacts of being credit constrained in this sector on crop productivity and off-farm income diversification of rural households. Data was collected in early 2011 from 3,600 households in land scarce Rwanda, a landlocked country where agriculture accounts for about 36 percent of GDP and 80 percent of employment. An endogenous switching regression model, together with detailed information on households’ credit constrained status, first highlights that access to information and political connections significantly reduce the likelihood that a household will face binding credit constraints in the semi-formal sector. The analysis further suggests distinct results on the returns of factor endowments in crop productivity for the constrained and unconstrained households, at the exception of the size of land. As the theory predicts, labour endowments (number of males in the household) and liquidity do increase observed yield for constrained households, but do not significantly impact productivity when households are unconstrained in the semi-formal credit market. On the contrary, being unconstrained does not offset the negative returns to the size of land, suggesting that larger land holder might face other constraints than credit – such as input supply. The results also indicate different returns in the likelihood to participate in non-farm enterprise for constrained and unconstrained households. The model predictions indicate that the elimination of constraints on credit in the semi-formal sector could potentially double current yield and would also significantly increase the likelihood of household’s decision to diversify income.

DUPONCHEL Marguerite (World Bank) Credit constraints, agricultural productivity and income diversification: evidence from rural Rwanda

Co-autheur(s) : Daniel Ayalew Ali, Klaus Deininger

Development Economics Seminar

Le 14/03/2012 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

Does India’s Employment Guarantee Scheme Guarantee Employment? Martin Ravallion and Dominique van de Walle Co-authors: Puja Dutta and Rinku Murgai India’s Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) promises up to 100 days of employment on public works for any rural household who wants it. It aims to dramatically reduce poverty by providing extra earnings for poor families, as well as empowerment and insurance. This paper examines how well the scheme is working in practice, focusing on whether it is meeting the demand for work. We begin with some theoretical arguments for why we might observe rationing of MGNREGS work, showing that both administrative costs and the costs of corruption facing local officials can generate endogenous rationing of the available work. We then examine the evidence for India as a whole using the micro data from the National Sample Survey for 2009-10, and specifically in Bihar, India’s poorest state, drawing on a panel survey of 3,000 households between 2008 and 2010. These data help us understand who gets rationed and how this affects the scheme’s ability to reach India’s rural poor and other identify-based groups, notably backward castes and women. Despite high overall rationing, we find that the scheme is working far better in meeting the demand for work in some states of India. As a rule, it tends to work less well in poorer states—ironically where it is needed the most. The results reveal a large unmet demand for work on the scheme in Bihar, very low awareness of what needs to be done to obtain work or scheme entitlements, and low participation by poor people in decisions about the scheme. A randomized awareness intervention using a specially designed movie on program features is shown to impact awareness, and more so for certain key sub-groups. We conclude that with a stronger, more capable, local administration, plus more effective participation by civil society, the aims of the scheme could be attained even in poor areas.

RAVAILLON Martin (World Bank) Does India’s Employment Guarantee Scheme Guarantee Employment?

Co-authors: Puja Dutta & Rinku Murgai

Development Economics Seminar

Le 22/02/2012 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


This paper relies on an original dataset on a new rural electrification program in Ethiopia, to assess the importance of bandwagon effects in determining individual connection choice. Combining GPS information and the random allocation of discount vouchers for connection, we show that both price and neighbors’ connection behavior have large effects on a household’s connection decision. For each additional connected household within a 10 meters radius, an individual’s probability of connection is increased by 11 percentage points. The effect is also shown to decrease by distance; no peer effect is found for neighbors 70 meters away or further. Our data further show that these effects are driven neither by social learning about the benefits of electricity nor by the effect of voucher distribution per se. With many development interventions constrained by low take-up rates and consecutive limited sustainability, these results carry important implications for the design of development interventions.

BERNARD Tanguy (IFPRI) Bandwagon effects in poor communities: experimental evidence from rural electrification program in Ethiopia

Co-author(s): Maximo Torero.

Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 25/01/2012 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

BOURGUIGNON François (PSE) Aid Effectiveness Revisited: The Trade-Off between Needs and Governance.

Co-author(s): Jean-Philippe Platteau

Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 11/01/2012 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


Big Push models suggest that local product demand can create multiple labor market equilibria: one featuring high wages, formalization, and high demand and one with low wages, informality, and low demand. I demonstrate that minimum wages may coordinate development at the high wage equilibrium. Using data from 1990s Indonesia, where minimum wages increased in a varied way, I develop a difference in spatial differences estimator which weakens the common trend assumption of difference in differences. Estimation reveals strong trends in support of a big push: formal employment increases and informal employment decreases in response to the minimum wage. Local product demand also increases, and this formalization occurs only in the non-tradable, industrializable industries suggested by the model (while employment in tradable and non-industrializable industries also conforms to model predictions).

MAGRUDER Jeremy (UC Berkeley) Can Minimum Wages Cause a Big Push? Evidence from Indonesia

Development Economics Seminar

Le 14/12/2011 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

KAUFMANN Katja Maria (Bocconi) Learning about the Enforcement of Conditional Welfare Programs and Behavioral Responses : Evidence from Bolsa Familia in Brazil


Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 07/12/2011 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


This paper develops the technique of experiments designed specifically to study the nature of spillover effects between subjects. By first randomizing the intensity of treatment within each cluster and then randomizing individual treatment conditional on this cluster-level intensity, a novel set of research questions can be addressed. Not only do we gain direct evidence as the impact of the treatment on untreated units, but the experimental variation in the treatment intensity allows the researcher a straightforward way to observe saturation and threshold effects among treated and untreated units alike. We present a framework in which to back out a very rich set of parameters in the analysis of such an experiment, and examine the power implications of the randomized saturation design relative to more standard designs. We demonstrate that the randomization of saturations at the village level brings empirical benefits even when we are interested in spillovers in dimensions other than the one in the saturations were directly randomized. The technique is implemented using a Cash Transfer program in Malawi; we find evidence of beneficial spillovers that improve cognitive performance among untreated girls, and expenditures on girls prove very sensitive to the saturation of treatment at the village level. Social and household networks appear to be particularly strong conduits for beneficial spillover effects that improve school enrollment and decrease the risk of HIV/AIDS.

BAIRD Sarah (George Washington University) Designing Experiments to Measure Spillover and Threshold Effects

Development Economics Seminar

Le 30/11/2011 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


This paper estimates the causal effect of attending an elite (or high performing) secondary school on student achievement using data from Kenyan secondary schools. The admission of students into government secondary schools in Kenya is centralized and is based solely on student scores on the national primary school exit exam, district quotas, and students' stated preferences. The assignment rules cause students of similar ability and preferences near the implied assignment score cutoffs to be assigned to secondary schools of different quality. We use a regression discontinuity design to obtain causal estimates of the effects of elite school attendance on student progression through secondary school and achievement in the secondary school exit examination. As the assignment rule generates different score thresholds for each district, we can examine whether the effects of attending an elite secondary school differ by the student's initial (primary school) test score. For stude nts whose primary school test scores are near the threshold of an elite school, we find that elite school attendance does not affect timely progression through secondary

MBITI Isaac (MIT) Elite Secondary Schools and Student Achievement: Regression Discontinuity Evidence from Kenya

Adrienne M. Lucas and Isaac M. Mbiti

Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 16/11/2011 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


This paper contrasts the behaviour of lenders with market power with competi- tive lenders in an environment where borrowers are collateral-poor but lenders can use implicit or explicit joint liability, leveraging the social capital that borrowers might have among themselves. We show that joint liability is preferred by borrow- ers compared to standard loan contracts, and also by the monopolist when he can earn sufficiently high rents from the borrowers' social capital. We consider policy implications and several extensions, including investments in social capital by the borrowers and the lender and how they are affected by the lending arrangements, and allowing lenders to use coercive methods.

GHATAK Maitreesh (LSE) Microfinance with a Monopoly Lender

de Jon de Quidt, Thiemo Fetzer and Maitreesh Ghataky

Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 20/10/2011 de 15:30:00 à 17:00:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


Abstract: Street children are common in developing countries, notably in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America. However, their mobility and mistrust has made them a difficult population to study. We are working with a unique dataset that tracks the interaction between 3859 street children and an NGO on the street and in their rehabilitation center over seven years in Dakar, Senegal. The children in this dataset represents 0.4% of the current Dakar population. Preliminary results on the effect of the street on children’s health and behaviors, the impact of the NGO on the rehabilitation of the children and peer effects are presented.

ARMENDARIZ Beatriz (UCL) An Economic Analysis of Street Children

Co auteur: Mauricio Fernández (Harvard University)

Development Economics Seminar

Le 19/10/2011 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

ARMENDARIZ Beatriz (UCL) *

CE SEMINAIRE EST REPORTE AU 20/10/2011 A 15H30

Development Economics Seminar

Le 05/10/2011 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

Abstract: This paper examines the effects of the U.S.-Vietnam Bilateral Trade Agreement (BTA) on the allocation of employment across firms within an industry in Vietnam. Unlike existing literature, we study this question in a setting that includes employment in small, informal firms and larger, more formal firms. Vietnam experienced a large decline in informal employment during this period. We show that a large portion of this decline in informality is driven by reallocation of labor from less to more formal firms within industries. This within-industry component is particularly pronounced in a sample that excludes agriculture and aquaculture and in urban areas. When we relate these within-industry changes in informal employment to industry tariff cuts, we find that the probability of working informally declined most in industries that faced the largest U.S. tariff cuts induced by the BTA. This evidence suggests that the BTA contributed toward the within-industry reallocation of employment from jobs in smaller, more informal establishments toward larger, more formal firms. This latter finding confirms the predictions of Melitz-style models, which suggest that new export opportunities should lead to expansion of larger, usually more "formal" firms.

McCAIG Brian (Australian National University) Export markets, employment, and formal jobs : Evidence from the U.S.-Vietnam Bilateral Trade Agreement


Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 21/09/2011 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

AUGSBURG Britta (Institute for Fiscal Studies) Microfinance at the Margin: Experimental Evidence from Bosnia and Herzegovina

Papier co-écrit avec Costas Meghir, Ralohde Haas et Heike Harmgart

Development Economics Seminar

Le 22/06/2011 de 17:00:00 à 19:00:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

GHATAK Matreesh (Institute for Fiscal Studies) To be announced ; () ;

La séance est annulée

Development Economics Seminar

Le 08/06/2011 de 17:00:00 à 19:00:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

BAIRD Sarah (The Georges Washington University) *; () ;

La séance est annulée

Development Economics Seminar

Le 01/06/2011 de 17:00:00 à 19:00:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


We report the results of a field experiment that randomly assigned smallholder cash crop farmers formal savings accounts. In collaboration with a microfinance institution in Malawi, we tested two primary treatments, offering either: 1) “ordinary” accounts, or 2) both ordinary and “commitment” accounts. Commitment accounts allowed customers to restrict access to their own funds until a future date of their choosing. A control group was not offered any account but was tracked alongside the treatment groups. Only the commitment treatment had statistically significant effects on subsequent outcomes. The commitment treatment had large positive effects on deposits and withdrawals immediately prior to the next planting season, agricultural input use in that planting, crop sales from the subsequent harvest, and household expenditures in the period after harvest. Across the set of key outcomes, the commitment savings treatment had larger effects than the ordinary savings treatment. Additional evidence suggests that the positive impacts of commitment derive from keeping funds from being shared with one’s social network. Keywords: savings, commitment, hyperbolic preferences, self-control, sharing norms JEL codes: D03, D91, O16, Q14

YANG Dean (University of Michigan) Commitments to Save: A Field Experiment in Rural Malawi

Co-auteur(s) : Lasse Brune, Xavier Giné & Jessica Goldberg

Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 25/05/2011 de 17:00:00 à 19:00:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


Changes in heat and precipitation as a result of climate change are expected to have adverse effects on health, particularly among the most vulnerable populations. These changes can affect health both directly, through extreme events and changes in the disease environment, as well as indirectly through its impact on the economic livelihood of the population. In this paper we utilize an extensive dataset of over 400,000 births combined with detailed historical geo-spatial weather data on temperature and rainfall to investigate the impact of extreme weather events on infant survival in Africa. Our results suggest that both extreme heat and extreme rainfall affect the likelihood of infant survival. In particular, we find that excessive heat around the month of birth is predictive of an increased likelihood of death, particularly for neonates but also for older infants. Rainfall during the third trimester of pregnancy increases the likelihood of death for neonates. We also find evidence that excess rainfall can be protective under certain scenarios, most likely as a result of positive income shocks. Utilizing our empirical estimates, we explore four different climate change scenarios that suggest an additional 400 to 900 thousand infant deaths in Africa over the period 2010-2030, due to the impact of increased heat and precipitation change, in the absence of effective adaptation or mitigation efforts.

FRIEDMAN Jed (The World Bank) Climate Variability and Infant Mortality in Africa

Co-auteur(s) : Sarah Baird & Marc Smitz

Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 11/05/2011 de 17:00:00 à 19:00:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


This paper investigates the impact of propaganda on participation in violent conflict. I examine the effects of the infamous "hate radio" station Radio RTLM that called for the extermination of the Tutsi ethnic minority population before and during the 1994 Rwanda Genocide. I develop a model of participation in ethnic violence where radio broadcasts a noisy public signal about the value of violence. I then test the model's predictions using a nation-wide village-level dataset on radio coverage and prosecutions for genocide violence. To identify causal effects, I exploit arguably exoge- nous variation in radio coverage generated by hills in the line-of-sight between radio transmitters and villages. Consistent with the model under strategic complements in violence, I find that Radio RTLM increased participation in violence, that the effects were decreasing in the size of the Tutsi minority group, highly non-linear in radio coverage, and decreasing in literacy rates. Finally, the estimated effects are substantial. Complete village radio coverage increased violence by 65 to 77 percent, and a simple counter-factual calculation suggests that approximately 9 percent of the genocide, corresponding to at least 45 000 Tutsi deaths, can be explained by the radio station.

YANAGIZAWA-DROTT David (Harvard University) Propaganda and Conflict: The Impact of Hate Radio on Participation in the Rwandan Genocide

Development Economics Seminar

Le 27/04/2011 de 17:00:00 à 19:00:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

NAIDITCH Claire (Université de Lille 1) Remittances and incentives to migrate: An epidemic approach of migration

Co-auteur(s) : Christian Ben Lakhdar

Development Economics Seminar

Le 06/04/2011 de 17:00:00 à 19:00:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

Social constraints are an unexplored dimension of schooling decisions in developing countries. We focus on two such constraints in the context of rural South Asia: seclusion practices limiting female mobility and stigma based on caste affiliation. Using a novel data-set from Pakistan that explicitly recognizes the geographic structure of villages and the social structure of their constituent settlements, we uncover two main findings: First, controlling for distance to school, the odds of ever enrolling in school are substantially lower for girls who would need to cross settlement boundaries to attend, an e¤ect not present for boys. Second, low-caste children, both boys and girls, are deterred from enrolling when the most convenient school is in a settlement dominated by high-caste households. Low-caste girls, the most educationally disadvantaged group, would achieve substantially higher enrollment rates if given access to caste-concordant schools, whether these schools are placed inside or outside their own settlement. Indeed, we find that a policy of providing schools in low-caste dominant communities would increase overall enrollment far more cost-e¤ectively than a policy of placing a school in every unserved settlement. Our analysis also suggests that stigma, not low aspirations or meager perceived returns to education, explains the comparatively poor enrollment rates of low-caste girls in rural Pakistan.

MANSURI Ghazala (World Bank) Crossing Boundaries: Gender, Caste and Schooling in Rural Pakistan

co-écrit avec Hanan Jacoby.

Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 23/03/2011 de 17:00:00 à 19:00:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


Previous studies report that schooling and adult height have significant associations with wages. But schooling and height are imperfect measures of adult cognitive skills (“brains”) and strength (“brawn”); further they are not exogenous. Analysis of rich Guatemalan longitudinal data over 35 years finds that proximate determinants—adult reading comprehension skills and fat-free mass—have significantly positive associations with wages, but only brains, and not brawn, is significant when both human capital measures are treated as endogenous. Even in a poor developing economy in which strength plausibly has rewards, labor market returns are increased by brains, not brawn.

MALUCCIO John (Middlebury College) Brains versus Brawn: Labor Market Returns to Intellectual and Physical Health Human Capital in a Developing Country

Co-auteur(s) : Jere R. Behrman, John Hoddinott, & Reynaldo Martorell

Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 16/03/2011 de 17:00:00 à 19:00:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

The plight of Africa‘s many widows has largely been ignored in the work of economists and in policy discussions and actions. In particular, the situation of ever-widowed women who have remarried or been in some way absorbed into male headed households along with, or sometimes without, their dependent children has received scant attention. A review of evidence on the situation of women in Mali suggests that they are more vulnerable and less able to mitigate and cope with downside risk than men. Women in Malian society appear to be exceptionally vulnerable to the loss of husbands especially in rural areas. An analysis of available household consumption data indicates that households headed by widows have significantly lower living standards than all other male or female headed households in both rural and urban areas. This holds both unconditionally and conditional on observable household and individual characteristics including age. An examination of individual measures of well-being further reveals that, relative to other women, worse outcomes for ever-widowed women persist through remarriage. Furthermore, these detrimental effects are passed onto children, suggesting an intergenerational transmission of poverty stemming from widowhood.

VAN DE WALLE Dominique (World Bank) Welfare Effects of Widowhood in a Poor Country


Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 09/03/2011 de 17:00:00 à 19:00:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

RAVALLION Martin (World Bank) Why Don’t We See Poverty Convergence?


Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 09/02/2011 de 17:00:00 à 19:00:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

SADOULET Elisabeth (University of California) Fair Trade and Free Entry: The Dissipation of Producer Benefits in a Disequilibrium Market

Co-auteur(s) : Alain de Janvry & Craig McIntosh

Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 12/01/2011 de 17:00:00 à 19:00:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

Informal labour markets are a standard characteristic of labour markets in developing countries. It is often argued indeed that they are the engine of growth because their existence allows rms to operate in an environment where wage and regulatory costs are lower. On the other hand informality means that the amount of insurance oered to workers is lower. Thus the key question is how should one design policy on informality; what is the impact of a tighter regulatory framework on employment in the formal and the informal sector and on the distribution of wages. To answer this question we extend the framework of Burdett and Mortensen (1998) to allow for two sectors of employment. In our model rms are heterogeneous and decide endogenously in which sector to locate. Workers engage in both o the job and on the job search and decide which oers to accept. This introduces direct transitions across sectors which matches the evidence in the data about job mobility. Our paper relates to Van den Berg (2003) and Bontemps, Robin and Van den Berg (2000) and also to other papers which consider two sectors such as Albrecht (2008) and Bosch (2006). Our empirical analysis uses Brazilian data and exploits information on compliance costs, which vary both over time and region. Finally, we use the model to discuss the relative merits of alternative policies towards informality.

MEGHIR Costas (University College London) Wages and Informality in Developing Countries

Co-auteurs : Costas Meghir, Renata Narita and Jean-Marc Robin

Development Economics Seminar

Le 15/12/2010 de 17:00:00 à 19:00:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

Recent evidence on the impact of information provision on service delivery has been mixed, with overall outcomes even worsening in certain cases. We examine the market-wide impact of an intervention that provides school and child-level learning report cards in a randomly selected half of 112 educational markets (villages) in Pakistan. We track all 823 public and private primary schools, 12,000 Grade 3 children, 5,000 teachers and a sample of 1,800 households in these villages. Report card provision improves learning by 0.10 standard deviations and decreases private school fees by 21 percent, with very small changes in school switching and moderate increases in overall enrollment. We argue that providing report cards generates credible competitive pressures on schools to increase price-adjusted quality, with the specific tool used - decreasing prices or raising quality - determined by the nature of production costs and market demand. Consistent with this, we find substantial heterogeneity in the impact across schools. Initially "bad" (below median baseline test scores) private schools respond by increasing quality - showing learning gains of 0.34 standard deviations - or shutting down, but show limited fee changes. In contrast, initially "good" (above median) private schools show no learning gains, but drop fees substantially. Government schools see a tenth of a standard deviation increase in learning. Moreover, we find schools increase investments, while there is little evidence of greater (direct) parental investments. The results show the cost of providing information is similar to the school fee drop, and the intervention likely raised child welfare by increasing learning and lowering educational costs.

KHWAJA Asim Ijaz (Harvard University) Report Cards: The Impact of Providing School and Child Test-scores on Educational Markets at the seminars.


Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 01/12/2010 de 17:00:00 à 19:00:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

PRAKASH Nishith (Cornell University) To be announced


Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 17/11/2010 de 17:00:00 à 19:00:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


It is well known that sex selection in favor of boys is taking place on a large scale in China. Less well studied is abandonment and adoptions of girls in China. The 1980s saw a surge in internal adoptions, reaching four percent of girls in the late 1980s, a development that was hailed as evidence that sex ratio imbalance in the 1980s overstated excess mortality of girls (pre or post natal), since abandoned girls are often omitted in self reported fertility histories. In this paper we seek to address two questions: first, why are girls adopted in a society marked by son preference; and second, did abandonments continue in the 1990s at the levels observed in the late eighties despite greater use of prenatal selection (120 boys per 100 girls were born between 2000 and 2005)? We investigate three hypotheses as to the motives for girl adoptions. One, parents may simply want a child, and girls make up 80 to 90 percent of abandoned children. Two, parents may want a girl, either because they have a preference for a girl, or they have a preference for children of both sexes and they already have a boy. Third, parents may prefer a girl for her services, notably domestic chores or securing a future daughter-in-law for a son, bride shortage looming large in China's future, with more than 25 million more males than females under the age of 20. It can be noted that the adoption of a little-daughter-in law was a common practise in the Pearl River delta and Taiwan well into the 20th century. To distinguish these hypotheses, we study adoption patterns using the 1992 National Sample Survey of the Situation of Children. We find that daughters are predominantly adopted by families with two older own-birth sons, evidence against the first motive of adoption of girls resulting from a gender neutral desire for a child. To separate the second and the third hypotheses, we study the educational outcomes of adopted girls and find that for children 8-13 years old -- an age when school enrolment and attendance reflect parental priorities more than child aptitude -- adopted girls were substantially less likely to attend school than own-birth children or adopted boys. Furthermore, we find adoption of girls to be particularly common in the two provinces where the adoption of little-daughters-in-law used to be a particularly prevalent form of marriage: Fujian and Jiangxi. These two findings we take as evidence for the third hypothesized motive: girls are adopted to serve, possibly including serving as a future-daughter-in law, or at least hedge against future bride shortages. Arguably, poor child outcomes could be attributed to adopted children being negatively selected. However, for primary education, the case can be made that this is a parent controlled outcomes. Moreover, the Chinese preference for sons suggests that adopted girls are likely no more negatively selected than adopted boys. Anecdotal evidence suggest that girl abandonments are triggered by the existence of an older sister, a circumstance largely exogenous to unobservable individual characteristics. Further to this argument, we show that adoptions (and presumably abandonments) of girls, but not boys, increased more in the 1980s in provinces that practised more strict birth-planning policies. To address the question of continued prevalence, we use the 1990 and 2000 censuses and note that sex ratios were unnaturally female in both the 1990 and 2000 censuses following sons. For instance, in the 2000 census, following two boys there were 0.66 boys/girls at third parity. Since there is no evidence that boys are aborted based on sex, these girl biased sex ratios may provide a lower-bound estimate of girl adoptions, and consequently, of girl abandonments. Employing this proxy, we estimate that adoptions continued through the 1990s at the level recorded for the late 1980s -- that is, three to four percent of girls were abandoned and raised by strangers. How these girls fared is an open question.

EDLUND Lena (Columbia University) The Kindness of Strangers: Adopted Girls in China

Co-auteur(s) : YuYu Chen, Avraham Ebenstein & Hongbin Li

Development Economics Seminar

Le 20/10/2010 de 17:00:00 à 19:00:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

PADRO I MIQUEL Gerard (LSE) Accountability in an Authoritarian Regime: The Impact of Local Electoral Reforms in Rural China; () ;
Co-auteur(s) : Monica Martinez-Bravo, Nancy Qian & Yang Yao

La séance est annulée

Development Economics Seminar

Le 06/10/2010 de 17:00:00 à 19:00:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

BLATTMAN Christopher (Yale University) The Industrial Organization of Rebellion: The Logic of Forced Labor and Child Soldiering


Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 22/09/2010 de 17:00:00 à 19:00:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

JENSEN Robert (UCLA) Economic opportunities and gender differences inman capital:Experimental evidence for India

Development Economics Seminar

Le 16/06/2010 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

RAPOPORT Hillel (Bar Ilan University) Tradable Immigration Quotas

Development Economics Seminar

Le 26/05/2010 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

SCHECHTER Laura (University of Wisconsin-Madison) Reciprocated Versus Unreciprocated Sharing in Social Networks.


Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 19/05/2010 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

FIELDS Gary (Cornell University) Does Income Mobility Equalize Longer-Term Incomes ? New Measures of an Old Concept


Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 12/05/2010 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

LAMBERT Sylvie, Sylvie.Lambert@ens.fr (Cornell University) *

Development Economics Seminar

Le 05/05/2010 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

BENJAMIN Dwayne (University of Toronto) Evaluating the impact of a targeted land distribution program: Evidence from Vietnam


Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 07/04/2010 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

THORNTORN Rebecca (University of Michigan) Financial Incentives, Testing, and HIV Prevention


Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 24/03/2010 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

CARNEIRO Pedro (university College London) Mandated Benefits, Employment, and Inequality in a Dual Economy

Co-auteur : Rita Almeida

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Development Economics Seminar

Le 10/03/2010 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


This paper uses a unique data set and the exogenous nature of the conflict and resulting displacement in Northern Uganda to examine their impacts on labour market participation. I find that the longer the existence of the Internally Displaced People's camp to which individuals moved, the less men work. In contrast, women's labour market decisions are not influenced by the age of the camp in which they live. I argue that these responses stem from the development of gender-specific social norms. A decline in the percentage of men working in a camp significantly reduces the probability that a given man works.

LEHRER Kim (Oxford University) Gender Differences in Labour Market Participation: Evidence From Displaced People's Camps in Northern Uganda


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Development Economics Seminar

Le 10/02/2010 de 00:00:00 à 00:00:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

LAMBERT Sylvie, Sylvie.Lambert@ens.fr (Oxford University) *

LE SEMINAIRE EST ANNULE

Development Economics Seminar

Le 03/02/2010 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


Many governments throughout history have tried to stabilize commodity prices based on the widespread belief that households – especially the poor – value price stability. We extend the existing microeconomic literature to derive an estimable matrix of the coefficients of price risk aversion and associated willingness to pay measures over multiple commodities. Using longitudinal household-level data from Ethiopia, we estimate that the average household would be willing to pay about 20 percent of its income to stabilize at their means the prices of the seven most important staples in the data. We further show that the welfare gains from price stabilization would be concentrated in the upper half of the income distribution , making price stabilization a regressive policy in this context

BELLEMARE Marc (Duke University) The Welfare Impacts of Price Fluctuations and Stabilization


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Development Economics Seminar

Le 16/12/2009 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

This paper introduces habit formation into an otherwise standard model of international trade. Household tastes evolve over time to favor foods consumed as a child. In autarky, households prefer foodstuffs that are locally abundant and thus relatively inexpensive. The opening of trade causes a rise in the price of these preferred goods. Neglecting the correlation between tastes and agro-climatic endowments systematically overstates the short-run nutritional gains from agricultural trade liberalization, as consumers are less willing to substitute into cheaper imports than they would be without habit formation. I examine the predictions of this model of trade with habit formation using household survey data from India, where internal agricultural trade remains highly restricted. I identify tastes with the unexplained regional variation in household demand for agricultural products and find that regional tastes favor food crops that are well-suited to local agro-climatic conditions. I predict that the liberalization of internal agriculture trade in India will generate short-run caloric losses unless income gains from trade are relatively large, and that there would be no such losses if tastes were identical across the country. I also examine the consumption patterns of inter-state migrants, and find that they consume fewer calories for a given level of food spending than otherwise similar consumers. This effect only disappears two generations after migration, as tastes adjust to local prices. These findings, which reflect the higher prices of preferred origin-state goods in the migrant's destination state, further corroborate the assumptions of my model.

ATKIN David (Yale University) Trade, Tastes and Nutrition in India.


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Development Economics Seminar

Le 02/12/2009 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

Endogenous Institutional Change and Economic Development: A micro-level Analysis of Transmission Channels* *Abstract *There is a well-known debate about the role of institutions in explaining the long-term development of countries. We believe there is value-added to consider the institutions hypothesis at the micro level within a country to analyze the exact transmission channels linking endogenous institutional change to development outcomes. Given the central importance of agricultural productivity improvements for initiating the process of economic development, we focus on the transmission mechanisms that lead to the emergence of institutions relevant for agricultural development, thereby incorporating insights from the literatures on demographic influences of institutional change, induced innovations, as well as the central role of land rights in our analysis. Our main argument is that in conditions of relative land abundance, geographic factors influence rural-rural migration flows to geographically well-endowed regions which in turn give rise to migration-induced land scarcity. Land scarcity in turn, provides incentives to formalize landownership. Eventually, formalized land rights increase investment in land and enhance the adoption of new and better technologies promoting agricultural growth and economic development. We provide empirical evidence for this hypothesis using longitudinal village and household survey data from Indonesia.

GRIMM Michael (Institute of Social Studies) Endogenous Institutional Change and Economic Development: A micro-level Analysis of Transmission Channels


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Development Economics Seminar

Le 18/11/2009 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


Using panel data on Chinese provinces over 27 years, we show that local public policy to a large extent is determined by the background of provincial leader, i.e., provincial party secretary. Provinces under the leadership of party secretaries who built their careers within the province have higher public goods provision and are less predatory towards business. The magnitude of these differences is large even after controlling for fiscal incentives and career concerns of provincial leaders, province and time fixed effects; as well as after taking in to account the possibility of endogeneity of appointments using instrumental variables. We show that the results are not driven by the differences in local knowledge or innate preferences of provincial leaders. We interpret our findings as the effect of ``elite capture'' in the absence of local democracy. Party secretaries who made their careers within the province, in contrast to the ``outsiders,'' have implicit contracts with local elites, who helped them to power, to deliver benefits to them, some of which come in the form of public goods. Formally provincial leaders in China are accountable only to the center and are given strong incentives to deliver economic growth, possibly, at the expense of local public goods provision. ``Elite capture,'' i.e., the implicit contracts of provincial leader and local elite, serve as an imperfect substitute to otherwise absent local accountability mechanism.

ZHURAVSKAYA Ekaterina (New Economic School, Moscou) Elite Capture in the Absence of Democracy: Evidence from Backgrounds of Chinese Provincial Leaders. _

Development Economics Seminar

Le 04/11/2009 de 17:00:00 à 19:00:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

MACOURS Karen (Johns Hopkins University) Cash Transfers, Behavioral Changes, and Cognitive Development in Early Childhood: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment

Norbert Schady, and Renos Vakis

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Development Economics Seminar

Le 23/09/2009 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

BAIRD Sarah (Georges Washington University) Re-examining the Role of Conditionality in CCT programs


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Development Economics Seminar

Le 09/09/2009 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


We estimate the role of benefits and peer effects in technology adoption using data from randomized distribution of menstrual cups in Nepal. Using individual randomization, we estimate causal effects of peer exposure on adoption; using differences in potential returns we estimate effects of benefits. We find both peers and value influence adoption. Using the fact that we observe both trial and usage of the product, we examine the mechanisms driving peer effects. We find that peers matters because individuals learn how to use the technology from their friends, but that they do not affect individual desire to use the cup.

OSTER Emily (University of Chicago) Determinants of Technology Adoption: Private Value and Peer Effects in Menstrual Cup Take-Up

co-écrit avec Rebecca Thornton

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Development Economics Seminar

Le 24/06/2009 de 00:00:00 à 00:00:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

EDMONDS Eric (Dartmouth College, IZA, and NBER) Poverty Alleviation and Child Labor


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Development Economics Seminar

Le 10/06/2009 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

KRISHNAN Pramila (Cambridge Univ.) Raising Self-Esteem and other Psychosocial skills: Evidence from Bombay’s slums

Development Economics Seminar

Le 27/05/2009 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


This paper investigates the extent to which the government can strategically distort a free media market by examining the effect of the U.S. State Department?s bias in human rights reporting on coverage in the New York Times. To establish causality, we exploit a novel source of variation in the strategic value of a country to the U.S. government. We show that the State Department favorably under-reports abuses in countries that it values strategically. This reduces news coverage by approximately 28% from what it should be. Our findings suggest that these distortions are not likely to be consumer driven. (P16 Political Economy, L82 Media)

QIAN Nancy (Brown Univ.) The Power of Propaganda: The Effect of U.S. Government Bias on Cold War News Coverage of Human Rights Abuses

Co-auteur: David Yanagizawa

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Development Economics Seminar

Le 13/05/2009 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


In this paper, we argue that the same force that drives the individualisation of land tenure in rural areas also drives the individualisation of the family unit possessing and managing the land. This force is the growing scarcity of land that results from population growth and/or market integration. Individualisation at the farm-cum-family level occurs when either of the two following circumstances arise: (i) the head of a collective farm decides to grant individual plots to members of the household who are entitled to keep for themselves the entire proceeds therefrom while being simultaneously required to work on the collective, family fields; (ii) the head agrees to split the stem family farm, implying that some members leave with some portion of its land in order to form separate, autonomous branch households based on the nuclear family. Using a principal-agent framework to describe a patriarchal family, we show that as land scarcity increases, or as exit options available to members improve, the pure collective regime becomes inferior to alternative farm structures. We then explore, with the help of numerical simulations, the sequence in which optimal regimes succeed each other. The main result there is that as land scarcity increases, or exit options improve, splitting the main household appears to be the first alternative farm organization superseding the strictly collective farm. It is only at higher level of scarcity that the mixed farm structure becomes the optimal organization, from the patriarch?s standpoint.

GUIRKINGER Catherine (Univ. de Namur) Transformation of the family under rising land pressure: a theoretical essay

Co-auteur: Jean-Philippe Platteau

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Development Economics Seminar

Le 29/04/2009 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

REYNAL Marta (Pompeu Fabra) Do democracies select better leaders?

Co-auteur: Tim Besley

Development Economics Seminar

Le 01/04/2009 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


Recent studies have emphasized the importance of the quality of politicians for good government and consequently economic performance. But if the quality of leadership matters, then understanding what motivates individuals to become politicians and perform competently in office becomes a central question. In this paper, we examine whether higher wages attract better quality politicians and improve political performance using exogenous variation in the salaries’ of local legislators across Brazil’s municipal governments. The analysis exploits discontinuities in wages across municipalities induced by a constitutional amendment defining caps on the salary of local legislatures according to municipal population. Our main findings show that increases in salaries not only attracts more candidates, but more educated ones. Elected officials are more experienced and have more years of schooling. Higher salaries also increase legislative productivity as measured by the number of bills submitted and approved, and the provision of public goods.

FINAN Frederico (UCLA) Motivating Politicians: The Impacts of Monetary Incentives on Quality and Performance

co-auteur: Claudio Ferraz (PUC-Rio)

Development Economics Seminar

Le 25/03/2009 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


Prevailing measures of relative poverty put an implausibly high weight on relative deprivation, such that measured poverty does not fall when all incomes grow at the same rate. This stems from the (implicit) assumption in past measures that very poor people incur a negligible cost of social inclusion. That assumption is inconsistent with evidence on the social roles of certain private expenditures in poor settings and with data on national poverty lines. The authors propose a new schedule of 'weakly relative' lines that relax this assumption and estimate the implied poverty measures for 116 developing countries. The authors find that there is more relative poverty than past estimates have suggested. In 2005, one half of the population of the developing world lived in relative poverty, half of whom were absolutely poor. The total number of relatively poor rose over 1981–2005, despite falling numbers of absolutely poor. With sustained economic growth, the incidence of relative poverty becomes less responsive to further growth. Slower progress against relative poverty can thus be seen as the “other side of the coin” to success against absolute poverty.

RAVAILLON Martin (World Bank) Weakly Relative Poverty


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Development Economics Seminar

Le 18/03/2009 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


This paper presents a randomized field experiment on community-based monitoring of public primary health care providers in Uganda. Through two rounds of village meetings, localized NGOs encouraged communities to be more involved with the state of health service provision and strengthened their capacity to hold their local health providers to account for performance. A year after the intervention, treatment communities are more involved in monitoring the provider and the health workers appear to exert higher e¤ort to serve the community. We document large increases in utilization and improved health outcomes ?reduced child mortality and increased child weight ? that compare favorably to some of the more successful community-based intervention trials reported in the medical literature.

BJORKMAN Martina (Bocconi univ.) Power To The People: Evidence From A Randomized Field Experiment Of Community-Based Monitoring In Uganda.

Co-auteur: Jakob Svensson

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Development Economics Seminar

Le 11/03/2009 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


We assess impacts of rural road rehabilitation on market development at the commune level in rural Vietnam and examine the variance of those impacts and the geographic, community, and household factors that explains it. Double difference and matching methods are used to address sources of election bias in identifying impacts. The results point to significant average impacts on the development of local markets. They also uncover evidence of considerable impact heterogeneity, with a tendency for poorer communes to have higher impacts due to lower levels of initial market development. Yet, poor areas are also saddled with other attributes that reduce those impacts. These findings have important policy implications.

VAN DE WALLE Dominique (World Bank) Rural Roads and Local Market Development in Vietnam

Co-auteur: Ren Mu (Texas A & M University)

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Development Economics Seminar

Le 14/01/2009 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


This paper explores the optimal redistribution properties of a 3-class economy controlled by an Elite. The analysis allows for institutional changes through an exogenous or endogenous probability that the Elite will lose political control and includes ‘state capacity’ building as a control variable. The analytical framework is specified in a way that is general enough to synthetize the recent theoretical literature on development and institutional changes. Results show the particular importance of the structure of the economy – i.e. the complementarity or substitutability of the Elite and other groups in production – and the nature of political threats on the power of the Elite. The latter may explain why the Elite may not invest in improving the overall efficiency of the economy through state capacity building.

BOURGUIGNON François (Paris School of Economics) The political economy of redistribution and institution building in elite-dominated economies

Development Economics Seminar

Le 07/01/2009 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


Recent literature suggest that observed racial differentials in labor markets are result of lower investment in the accumulation of skills or of pre-market factors by individuals of African decent. If parents and children update investment decisions after extracting from school reports signals regarding scholastic abilities, differential errors in perceived ability could reinforce racial gaps in the accumulation of human capital. Evidence drawn from a unique data set from Brazilian elementary, middle and high-schools, suggests that teachers' grading (when compared to blindly scored tests of proficiency) suffers from cardinal and ordinal biases associated to a child's race.

RANGEL Marcos (University of Chicago) Discrimination goes to School? Understanding Racial Differences in Pre-Market Factors' Accumulation

Development Economics Seminar

Le 17/12/2008 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


This paper uses a new dataset to study the effects of public educational expenditures on literacy rates across districts of British India in the early 20th century. Using an instrumental variables strategy, I find that 1911 colonial investments on primary education had positive and statistically significant effects on 1921 literacy rates in the population aged 15 to 20 controlling for province fixed effects and other observable differences across districts. A 10 percent increase in per-capita spending or 44 additional primary schools in 1911 would have translated into a 2.6 percentage point increase in the 1921 literacy rate among the population aged 15 to 20. However, there are substantial differences by gender with males being more responsive to public investments as compared to females. India’s historical experience thus suggests that building more schools would not have solved the problem of female illiteracy that continues to persist even today.

CHAUDHARI Latika (Standford University) Taxation and Educational Development: Evidence from British India


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Development Economics Seminar

Le 03/12/2008 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


We illustrate the microeconomic cost of rent seeking, by showing how entrepreneurs’ economic incentives are distorted toward unproductive activities as the result of favoritism in the allocation of public contracts in Paraguay. After building a model of entrepreneurial choices, we use a large scale microeconomic database including all public procurement operations over a 4 year period to show that state providers are more profitable than other firms, even when controlling for their unobserved characteristics. Moreover, we present micro-evidence on the actual channels of rent provision through public procurement. A firm has a greater probability of obtaining a contract directly through an exceptional purchase from an institution with which it has a regular contractual relation, both in terms of the total value and of the frequency of transactions with that institution.

STRAUB Stéphane (Univ. de Toulouse 1) Public procurement and Rent Seeking - The Case of Paraguay

Co-auteurs : Emmanuelle Auriol, Thomas Flochel

Development Economics Seminar

Le 19/11/2008 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


Brain drain has long been one of the most common concerns developing countries have about migration. This concern has been amplified in recent years by the rapid increase in skilled emigration, driven in large part by developed countries shifting to more skill-intensive immigration systems. There is a long, mostly theoretical, literature on the consequences of brain drain for developing countries, but much less research on the determinants of the brain drain. Portes (1976) asked the central research question which has so far not been addressed. He wrote (p. 490) “given the…attractions of emigration, the real question is often not why some professionals migrate but why so few in fact leave”. This paper presents evidence from new surveys in the Pacific designed by the authors to study the individual level microeconomic determinants of the brain drain, and the determinants of return migration among the highly skilled.In each country we have collected the names of individuals who were the highest achieving students in their country at the end of high school, for students graduating high school between 1976 and 2004. We then tracked down these former top students, wherever in the world they currently live, and surveyed them. We use this to test theories of migrant selection among the highly skilled, and to answer the central question posed by Portes.

MCKENZIE David (World Bank) The Microeconomic Determinants of Emigration and Return Migration of the Best and Brightest: Evidence from the Pacific

Development Economics Seminar

Le 05/11/2008 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


Do marital institutions respond to the potential for inefficiency within marriage? We study the pervasive custom of watta satta in rural Pakistan, a bride exchange between families coupled with a mutual threat of retaliation. Watta satta can be seen as a mechanism for coordinating the actions of two sets of in-laws, each of whom wish to restrain their son-in-laws but who only have the ability to restrain their sons. Our empirical results corroborate this view. Marital discord, as measured by estrangement, domestic abuse, and wife's mental health, is significantly lower in watta sattas versus `conventional' marriages, but only after accounting for selection bias. This beneficial effect cannot be explained away by endogamy, a marriage pattern associated with watta satta.

JACOBY Hanan (World Bank) Watta Satta: Bride Exchange and Women's Welfare in Rural Pakistan

Co-auteur : Ghazala Mansuri

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Development Economics Seminar

Le 22/10/2008 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


This paper analyzes the role of social interactions in determining households’ responses to a transfer program. It analyzes whether investments and accumulation patterns are affected by the proximity to female leaders who themselves were also beneficiaries of the program. We identify the role of female leaders through the randomized assignment of leaders and other beneficiaries to three different interventions within each community. This allows identifying the role of social interactions for the heterogeneity of program outcomes. We find large social spillover effects on human and physical capital accumulation and aspirations. We then explore various mechanisms through which the social dynamics might play a role and investigate the relationship with the change in aspirations.

MACOURS Karen (Johns Hopkins University) Changing households’ investments and aspirations through social interactions

Co-auteur : Renos Vakis

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Development Economics Seminar

Le 08/10/2008 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

URQUIOLA Miguel (Columbia University) The consequences of going to a better school

Co-auteur: Cristian Pop-Eleches

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Development Economics Seminar

Le 24/09/2008 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


The institution of consanguineous marriage - a marriage contracted between close biological relatives - has been a basic building block of many societies in different parts of the world. We argue that consanguinity is closely related to the practice of dowry, and both emerge from incomplete marriage contracts in developing countries. We present a theoretical model where the families of the bride and groom both invest continually in a marriage, but patrilocal residence creates an incentive for the bride’s family to free-ride on the investments of their in-laws after the marriage is contracted. We show that dowry can alleviate this by transfering control rights over assets to the family with the highest incentives to invest at the time of marriage. Where dowries are unaffordable, consanguinity emerges as an alternative. A bride’s family relies on trust among kin, rather than on upfront payments, in order to make credible commitments to future transfers to their daughter’s household. Our model predicts that dowries are less likely to be observed in consanguineous unions, while bequests are more frequently expected. We also emphasize the effect of credit constraints on the relative prevalence of consanguinity and the timing of marital transfers. An empirical analysis using data from Bangladesh delivers results consistent with the predictions of the model.

DO Quy-Toan (World Bank) The Economics of Consanguineous Marriages

Co-auteurs : Sriya Iyer, & Shareen Joshi

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Development Economics Seminar

Le 18/06/2008 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


Few things reveal the salience of ethnic diversity as much as the level of inequality between ethnic groups. Standard methods of measuring between-group inequality rarely show significant between-group inequality. These measures are also a function of the number of groups in the population and are thus they are not very useful for central concerns in the analysis of ethnicity: comparisons of populations with different numbers of groups, and comparisons of the same population with different group definitions. A recent paper by Elbers, et al (2007) proposes a simple adaptation to the standard inequality decomposition calculation to remedy these problems. When this index is calculated for the north Indian village of Palanpur it indicates that one scheduled caste group of village households ? the Jatabs ? has failed to share in the overall steady, albeit slow, rise in prosperity experienced by the bulk of the population. This evidence matches well findings from in-depth analysis of economic and social development in Palanpur. On the other hand, when the analysis is repeated in the western Indian village of Sugao, Maharashtra which has been a steady source of migrant labor for Mumbai across castes, the Elbers et al statistic does not point to any clear association between caste affiliation and the level and evolution of income inequality in this village. Standard between-group inequality decompositions do not capture the durability of inequality in Palanpur but give similar measures as the Elbers et al statistic in Sugao. Whether the Elbers et al statistic helps to improve understandings of the role of group differences in overall inequality thus depends on the empirical setting and context. This paper demonstrates the importance and the ready feasibility of implementing the Elbers et al decomposition to study ethnic-group inequality, and points to the value of undertaking this analysis at the micro-level.

LANJOUW P. (World Bank) Revisiting Between-Group Inequality Measurement: An Application to the Dynamics of Caste Inequality in Two Indian Villages

Co-auteur : Vijayendra Rao (World Bank)

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Development Economics Seminar

Le 11/06/2008 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4


Studies have shown that differences in wage-determinant skills between blacks and whites emerge during a child’s infancy, highlighting the roles of parental characteristics and investment decisions. Exploring the genetics of skin- color and models of intrahousehold allocations, I present evidence that, controlling for observed and unobserved parental characteristics, light-skinned children are more likely to receive investments in formal education than their dark-skinned siblings. Even though not denying the importance of borrowing constraints (or other ancestry effects), this suggests that parental expectations regarding differences in the return to human capital investments may play an independent role on the persistence of earnings differentials.

RANGEL M. (Univ. of Chicago) Is Parental Love Colorblind? Allocation of Resources within Mixed Families ; () ;

La séance est annulée

Development Economics Seminar

Le 28/05/2008 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


We combine survey and experimental data with random assignment of gender quotas across Indian village councils to investigate whether being required to have a female chief councillor affects public opinion towards female leaders. Villagers who have not been exposed to a female leader state a taste preference for male leaders and perceive female leaders as less effective. While mandated exposure to female leaders does not alter voters' taste, it eliminates biased perceptions of their effectiveness, at least among male voters. Female voters exhibit less prior bias, but are also less likely to know about or participate in local politics; as a result their leader evaluation is largely unaffected. Consistently, villagers rate their first-time women leaders as less effective than, but second-time women leaders as effective as, male leaders.

PANDE H. (Harvard univ.) Powerful Women: Does Exposure Reduce Bias?

Co-auteurs : Lori Beaman, Raghab Chattopadhyay, Esther Duflo and Petia Topalova

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Development Economics Seminar

Le 14/05/2008 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

BALAND J.M. (Univ. de Namur) Land and Power: Theory and Evidence from Chile

Co-auteur : J.A. Robinson

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Development Economics Seminar

Le 26/03/2008 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

BOURGUIGNON F. (Ecole d'économie de Paris) *; () ;

La séance est annulée

Development Economics Seminar

Le 12/03/2008 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


Do individuals who join the political opposition pay an economic price? We study this question using unique information on individual political activity from Hugo Chvez's Venezuela, the Maisanta database. The names of millions of pro-opposition supporters who signed recall petitions (seeking to remove Chvez from office) during 2002-2004, and the names of pro-government supporters who signed counter-petitions, were made public. Media accounts detail how the information was utilized by the Government to punish opposition supporters and firms, and by the overwhelmingly pro-opposition private sector to discriminate against government supporters in hiring. After linking this political database to both national manufacturing firm and household survey data, we find evidence of lower earnings for opposition supporters, and extensive churning in the labor market: pro-opposition individuals disproportionately leave public sector employment and pro-government individuals leave private sector employment. Pro-opposition firms have falling profits, less access to foreign exchange, and rising tax burdens (possibly due to selective audits). The misallocation of resources associated with political polarization after 2002 contributed to a decline of 5% in TFP in our sample of firms. To the extent other regimes can identify and punish the political opposition, these findings may help explain why dislodging authoritarian regimes often proves difficult in less developed countries.

MIGUEL E. (Univ. of California) The Price of Political Opposition: Evidence from Venezuela's Maisanta

Co-auteurs : C.T. Hsieh, D. Ortega, F. Rodriguez

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Development Economics Seminar

Le 20/02/2008 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

RAVALLION M. (World bank) Are There Lasting Impacts of Aid to Poor Areas ?

Co-auteurs : S. Chen, R. Mu

Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 06/02/2008 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

BANDIERA O. (LSE) The Diminishing Effect of Democracy in Diverse Societies

Co-auteur: Gilat Levy

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Development Economics Seminar

Le 23/01/2008 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

CHEN D. (Univ. of Chicago) Islamic resurgence during the Indonesian financial crisis


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Development Economics Seminar

Le 16/01/2008 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


The paper examines the problem of signaling the quality of goods and services when quality is never observable to consumers. The solution to this problem is certification, which acts to transform unobservable credence attributes into observable search attributes. We study the impact of certification systems on market structure and performance. It turns out that the costs of certification, sunk in order to achieve credibility, play a key role in producing an oligopolistic market. We next show that since it involves increasing return to scale, certification is better achieved by an independent body which can either be a private firm or a public agency. We examine the two ways in which quality provision through certification may be financed (i.e. public and private), and identify the conditions under which each is most efficient. Finally we examine the relevance of the model by studying the role of certification in quality seed provision for agriculture. Overall, model predictions are compatible with the conclusions of the empirical study on LDCs.

AURIOL E. (TSE) Quality signaling through certification: Theory and an application to agricultural seed markets

Development Economics Seminar

Le 09/01/2008 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

LAMBERT Sylvie, Sylvie.Lambert@ens.fr () Pas de séance

Development Economics Seminar

Le 19/12/2007 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

BASU A. (College of William and Mary) Poverty Aversion, Relative Deprivation and the Willingness to Pay for Fair Trade Products


Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 12/12/2007 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

NUNN N. (Harvard Univ.) Ruggedness: The Blessing of Bad Geography in Africa


Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 28/11/2007 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

KARLAN D. (Yale univ.) Expanding Credit Access: Using Randomized Supply Decisions to Estimate the Impacts

Co-auteur : J. Zinman

Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 14/11/2007 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

PAVCNIK N. (Dartmouth College) Trade Adjustment and Human Capital Investment: Evidence from Indian Tariff Reform

Co-auteurs : E. Edmonds and P. Topalova

Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 07/11/2007 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

GLEWWE P. (Univ. of Minnesota) The Impact of Eyeglasses on the Academic Performance of Primary School Students: Evidence from a Randomized Trial in Rural China


Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 17/10/2007 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

BASU A. (College of William and Mary, Williamsburg) *; () ;

La séance est annulée

Development Economics Seminar

Le 26/09/2007 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


Much has been written on the determinants of input and technology adoption in agriculture in poor settings, with issues such as input availability, knowledge and education, risk preferences, profitability, and credit constraints receiving much attention. This paper focuses on a factor that has been less well documented: whether the presence of risk itself causes inefficiency in production choices? In particular, we focus on the differential ability of households to take on risky production technologies for fear of the welfare consequences if shocks result in poor harvests. Building on an explicit model, this is explored in panel data for Ethiopia. Historical rainfall distributions are used to identify the counterfactual consumption risk. Controlling for unobserved household and time-varying village characteristics, it emerges that not just ex-ante credit constraints, but also the possibly low consumption outcomes when harvests fail, discourage the application of fertiliser. The lack of insurance causes inefficiency in production choices.

DERCON S. (Oxford univ.) Consumption risk, technology adoption and poverty traps: evidence from Ethiopia

Co-auteur : Luc Christiaensen

Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 20/06/2007 de 16:00:00 à 17:30:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4

UDRY C. (Yale univ.) The Profits of Power: Land Rights and Investment in Rural Ghana


Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 13/06/2007 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

LA FERRARA E. (Bocconi univ.) Detecting illegal arms trade

Co-auteur (s) : S. DellaVigna

Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 16/05/2007 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


Using data from labour force surveys conducted simultaneously in the capital cities of seven WAEMU countries, we estimate a model of residential location choice, in which expected earnings play a role. The model is first estimated in a reduced form. Estimates are then used to correct for the endogeneity of locational choice in earnings equations estimated for each country. We find that migration behaviour has a significant effect in shaping earnings differentials between education levels and between the seven capital cities. A minimum distance estimator is then used to recover the value of log-earnings in the structural model of residential location choice. Results show that individuals tend to reside in countries in which their expected earnings are higher than elsewhere.

GUBERT F. (DIAL) Migration, Self-selection and Returns to Education in the WAEMU ?

Co-auteur (s) : P. De Vreyer et F. Roubaud

Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 09/05/2007 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


This paper examines how schools choose class size and how households sort in response to those choices. Focusing on the highly liberalized Chilean education market, we develop a model in which schools are heterogeneous in an underlying productivity parameter, class size is a component of school quality, a class-size cap applies to some schools, and households are heterogeneous in income and hence willingness to pay for quality. The model offers an explanation for two distinct empirical patterns: (i) There is an inverted-U relation between class size and household income in equilibrium, which will tend to bias cross-sectional estimates of the effect of class size on student performance. (ii) Some schools at the class size cap adjust prices and/or enrollments to avoid adding another classroom, which produces stacking at enrollments that are multiples of the class size cap. This results in discontinuities in the relationship between enrollment and students’ income at those points, violating the assumptions underlying regression-discontinuity (RD) research designs. An implication is that RD approaches should not be applied in settings in which parents have substantial school choice and schools are free to set prices and influence their enrollments.

VERHOOGEN E. (Columbia univ.) Class Size and Sorting in Market Equilibrium: Theory and Evidence

Co-auteur (s) : M. Urquiola

Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 25/04/2007 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


This paper aims at assessing the role of national institutions in observed development differences between countries with heterogeneous geographical and anthropological backgrounds. Comparative economics most often rely on national averages as collected by international databases. We explore another promising path where the location of national borders is viewed as a historical “natural” experiment. Drawing from large sample household surveys undertaken around 1990, we compare the development outcomes of neighbouring localities on both sides of the Côte d’Ivoire borders with Burkina-Faso, Ghana, Guinea and Mali. We examine a large span of variables including polygamy, education, utilities connexion, and monetary welfare, compute mean differences between localities that are not further than 100 km to the border, and also control for observable geographic and anthropologic correlates. This identification strategy of the impact of national idiosyncrasies seems well suited to most African borders which have been drawn rather arbitrarily during the colonial period, between two colonial powers or inside the same colonial empire. Results first show that borders matter. They reveal most striking national idiosyncrasies, some which date from the colonial era and some others which appeared later. In the end-1980s and mid-1990s, it was never detrimental to live in Côte d’Ivoire for a wide range of development indicators, especially for the quality of schooling received and connection to electricity. Côte d’Ivoire stood out as the most powerful and modern State, one exception being law enforcement about polygamy when compared with Ghana. The border effect on polygamy rates even allows to econometrically identifying a social interaction effect in that dimension. Keywords: Development differences, institutions, geography, social interaction, Africa JEL Codes: D32, D63, J62, O15

COGNEAU D. (DIAL) Development at the border - A study of national idiosyncrasies in post-colonial West-Africa

Co-auteur (s) : C. Guénard, S. Mesplé-Somps, G. Spielvogel et C. Torelli

Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 21/03/2007 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


In this paper we provide a model and data structure to identify the determinants of health care use by low income children, and the channels through which they operate. The most distinguishing feature of our approach is that we decompose the decision to use health care into three stages. The first stage determines whether a child is ill or requires preventive care. Conditional on the first stage, the second stage determines whether the mother perceives that professional health care will provide positive gross benefits. Conditional on the second stage, the third stage determines the use of health care by comparing the perceived benefits and costs. The advantage of our approach is that variables can influence each stage differently. The data comes from the survey to evaluate the Colombian Conditional Cash Transfer Program (Familias en Accion). We find that children living in towns with higher prevalence of violence are in higher need of health care but violence decreases the probability that the child will use health care conditional of the mother perceiving that health care will provide positive gross benefits. We also find that knowledge about self-care (measured by the percentage of women in the village that knows how to treat diarrhoea and by mother’s education) decreases the probability that the mother perceives positive gross profits of obtaining health care. These relations are unmasked if we use a standard Probit model.

VERA-HERNANDEZ M. (Institute for fiscal studies) Decomposing the determinants of the non-use of health care

Co-auteur (s) : B. Álvarez

Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 14/03/2007 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

BANDYOPADHYAY S. (Oxford univ.) Rich States, Poor States: Convergence and Polarisation across India


Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 07/02/2007 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


This paper exploits a unique long-horizon longitudinal data set from Tanzania to examine the long-run consequences of child labor on education, employment choices, and marital status. Using crop shocks as instruments, our 2SLS estimates indicate that child labor is causally associated with reduced educational attainment (both as measured by the number of school years as well as by an indicator capturing completion of primary school). Interestingly, this result appears to be entirely driven by the sample of boys, for whom doubling labor hours from a mean prevalence (16 hours) would imply losing 80% of a school year. Boys who worked when young are more likely to be farming (as opposed to earning a wage), although we could not find evidence that child labor is associated with discernible differences in the choices of crop (cash versus subsistence) or with subsequent migration. For girls, the main discernable effect is on marriage: a higher level of child labor hours is associated with a substantially greater chance of being married 10 to 13 years later.

BEEGLE K. (World bank) The Consequences of Child Labor in Rural Tanzania: Evidence from Longitudinal Data

Co-auteur(s) : R. H. Dehejia et R. Gatti

Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 31/01/2007 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


This paper aims at a better understanding of the conditions under which unequal rank or power positions may get permanently established through asymmetric gift exchange when a gift brings pride to the donor and shame to the recipient. The central result obtained is that an asymmetric gift exchange equilibrium can occur only if the importance attached to social shame by a recipient is smaller than that attached to social esteem by a donor. Moreover, an income transfer is more likely to be traded against social esteem, status, or power when the weight put on these attributes by the donor or patron is higher. We also show that the recipient’s productivity may take on a rather wide range of values in the domain of feasibility of asymmetric gift exchange, and that, contrary to a commonly prevailing view, it is even possible that his productivity would be identical to that of the donor. Finally, the conditions are spelt out under which the recipient’s effort is more likely to be reduced upon entering into asymmetric gift exchange relationships. Keywords: Social esteem, status, power, patronage, gift exchange. JEL classification: 012 ; O17 ; Z13

PLATTEAU J.P. (Univ. of Namur) On the feasibility of power and status ranking in traditional setups

Co-auteurs : P. G. Sekeris

Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 17/01/2007 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


This paper reports on randomized field experiments set up to investigate various reasons for the low usage of fertilizer in Western Kenya. Demonstration plots set up on farmer’s farm show that the rate of return to fertilizer is very high on average (up to 165%), but that in our sample, the combination of fertilizer plus hybrid seed is not profitable on average or for the median farmer. Farmers who participated in the demonstration plots project are on average 11% more likely to use fertilizer in the next season than a control group. The effect fades over time, but fertilizer use remains permanently higher in this group. In contrast, we observe no evidence of social learning, either between neighbors or between farmers who report sharing experience about agriculture. Finally, a program that offered farmers the option to buy fertilizer at harvest time led to a 17% increase in the adoption of fertilizer, an effect larger than that of a 50% subsidy offered later in the season. This suggests that the ability to save over the course of the agricultural cycle is a barrier to the adoption of fertilizer.

DUFLO E. (MIT) Why don't farmer use fertilizer: Evidence from field experiments in Western Kenya

Co-auteur(s) : M. Kremer et J. Robinson

Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 13/12/2006 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


We present evidence on whether and how a household's behavior is influenced by the characteristics of its extended family. Using household panel data from the Progresa social assistance program, we first exploit information on the paternal and maternal surnames of heads and spouses in conjunction with the patronymic naming convention to identify the inter and intra generational family links of each household to others in the same village. We then exploit the randomized research design of the Progresa evaluation data to identify whether the treatment effects of Progresa transfers on school enrolment are heterogeneous according to the presence and characteristics of extended family members. We find that Progresa only raises enrolment among households that are embedded in extended family networks. Eligible but isolated households do not respond. A key channel through which the extended family influences household schooling choices relates to resource transfers, both among parent-child and sibling family links.

RASUL I. (Univ. college London) Family Networks and Schooling Outcomes: Evidence from a Randomized Social Experiment

Co-auteurs : M. Angelucci, G. de Giorgi, M. A. Rangel

Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 06/12/2006 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


Building on anthropological evidence, we develop a model of intra-household de- cision making on fertility and child survival within the framework of the collective household model. We carry out a test of the implications of this framework with data from Demo- graphic and Health Surveys in rural Mali, where polygyny rates among married women are close to 50 per cent. The econometric tests reject the implications of efficient intra- household allocations for junior wives in bigynous households and fail to reject for senior wives in bigynous households as well as for wives in monogamous households. These findings are consistent with existent narrative evidence according to which co-wife rivalry is responsible for resource-consuming struggle and junior wives are the adults with the weakest bargaining position in the household.

KAZIANGA H. (World bank) The Intra-household Economics of Polygyny: Fertility and Child Mortality in Rural Mali

Co-auteur (s) : S. Klonner

Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 22/11/2006 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


This paper takes a first step towards empirically examining the balance of power between politicians and bureaucrats using a unique data set on the career histories of officers in the Indian Administrative Service. We find that despite strong constitutional safeguards to the contrary, the bureaucracy is not insulated from political pressures. Political turnover, represented by a change in the Chief Minister of a state, increases bureaucratic turnover by as much as 8%. Bureaucratic turnover is unaffected by changes in the federal government or by state party characteristics. This politically-induced turnover is higher for bureaucrats with more experience and those who serve in their home state.

IYER L. (Harvard business school) Direct versus indirect colonial rule in India : long-term consequences


Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 15/11/2006 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


The pricing of health products in the developing world has become the center of a controversy among policymakers, with important implications for the efficient targeting of social programs more generally. A central issue in this debate is whether higher prices lead to more intensive product use and, therefore, greater health benefits. We present results from an experiment in Lusaka, Zambia, designed to test whether charging more for a home water purification solution results in more intensive use of the product. Our methodology separates the screening effect of prices (charging more changes the mix of buyers) from the causal effect of prices (charging more stimulates greater use). We find that higher prices screen out less intensive users of the product, but that high prices do not cause greater product use than low prices. However, charging a positive price results in greater use than giving away the product for free, especially for households who display the sunk cost fallacy in hypothetical choice scenarios. Our findings have implications for the role of prices in a wide range of public and private enterprises where purchasers have substantial control over their intensity of use.

ASHRAF N. (Harvard business school) Can Higher Prices Stimulate Product Use? Evidence From a Field Experiment in Zambia

Co-auteur(s) : J. Berry, J. Shapiro

Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 27/09/2006 de 17:00:00 à 18:30:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


This paper uses administrative longitudinal micro data on about 100,000 Uruguayan students in public non-vocational Junior High school (grades 7-9) to identify the causal effect of grade failure on students' subsequent school outcomes. Exploiting the discontinuity in promotion rates induced by a rule that establishes that a pupil missing more than 25 days during the school year will automatically fail that grade I show that grade failure leads to substantial drop out and lower educational attainment after 4 to 5 years since the time when failure first occurred. Complementary evidence based on a change in the regime of grade promotion provides additional support for this conclusion.

MANACORDA M. (LSE) Grade Failure, Drop out and Subsequent School Outcomes: Quasi-Experimental Evidence from Uruguayan Administrative Data


Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 01/06/2006 de 00:00:00 à 00:00:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

FERREIRA F. (World bank) Local inequality and project choice in a social investment fund

Co-auteurs : M. Caridad Araujo, P. Lanjouw et B. Özler

Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 10/05/2006 de 00:00:00 à 00:00:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

BRANDT L. (Univ. of Toronto) Inequality and Growth in Rural China: Does Higher Inequality Impede Growth?

Co-auteurs : D. Benjamin et J. Giles

Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 03/05/2006 de 00:00:00 à 00:00:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

ROZELLE S. D. (Univ. of California) Growth, Population and Industrialization and Urban Land Expansion of China

Co-auteur : X. Deng, J. Huang & E. Uchida

Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 12/04/2006 de 00:00:00 à 00:00:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

GINE X. (World bank) Group versus Individual Liability: A Field Experiment in the Philippine

Co-auteur : D. Karlan

Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 22/03/2006 de 00:00:00 à 00:00:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

RAI A. S. (Williams college) Borrower runs

Co-auteur : P. Bond

Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 08/03/2006 de 00:00:00 à 00:00:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

ASHRAF N. (Harvard business school) *; () ;

La séance est annulée

Development Economics Seminar

Le 01/03/2006 de 00:00:00 à 00:00:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

TERRA C. (Fundação Getulio Vargas) Political Business Cycles Through Lobbying

Co-auteur(s) : M. BONOMO

Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 01/02/2006 de 00:00:00 à 00:00:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8


We provide a theoretical framework for understanding when an official angles for a bribe, when a client pays, and the payoffs to the client’s decision. We test this framework using a new data set on bribery of Peruvian public officials by households. The theory predicts that bribery is more attractive to both parties when the client is richer, and we find empirically that both bribery incidence and value are increasing in household income. However, 65% of the relation between bribery incidence and income is explained by greater use of officials by high–income households, and by their use of more corrupt types of official. Compared to a client dealing with an honest official, a client who pays a bribe has a similar probability of concluding her business, while a client who refuses to bribe has a probability 16 percentage points lower. This indicates that service improvements in response to a bribe merely offset service reductions associated with angling for a bribe, and that clients refusing to bribe are punished. We use these and other results to argue that bribery is not a regressive tax.

HUNT J. (Mc Gill univ.) Bribery: Who Pays, Who Refuses, What Are The Payoffs?

Co-auteur : S. Lazlo

Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 07/12/2005 de 00:00:00 à 00:00:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

DE JANVRY A. (Univ. of California) Can conditional cash transfer programs serve as safety nets to keep children at school and out of the labor market when exposed to schocks ?

Co-auteur(s) : F. Finan et R. Vakis

Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 23/11/2005 de 00:00:00 à 00:00:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

AKRESH R. (Univ. of Illinois) School enrollment impacts of non-traditional household structure


Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 16/11/2005 de 00:00:00 à 00:00:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

MUNSHI K. (Brown univ.) Why is mobility in India so low ? Social insurance, inequality, and growth

Co-auteur(s) : M. Rosenzweig

Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 19/10/2005 de 00:00:00 à 00:00:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

KOCHAR A. (Stanford center for international development) Social banking and poverty : a micro-empirical analysis of the Indian experience


Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 12/10/2005 de 00:00:00 à 00:00:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

DUFLO E. (MIT) Dams

Co-auteur(s) : R. Pande

Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 11/05/2005 de 00:00:00 à 00:00:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

GHATAK M. (London school of economics and political science) *; () ;

La séance est annulée

Development Economics Seminar

Le 20/04/2005 de 00:00:00 à 00:00:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

OLARREAGA M. (World bank) Subsistence farming, adjustment costs and agricultural prices : evidence from Madagascar

Co-auteur(s) : O. Cadot et L. Dutoit

Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 06/04/2005 de 00:00:00 à 00:00:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

WOODRUFF C. (Univ. of California) Do Entry Costs Provide an Empirical Basis for Poverty Traps ? Evidence from Mexican Microenterprises

Co-auteur(s) : D. Mc Kenzie

Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 23/03/2005 de 00:00:00 à 00:00:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

CHARLTON A. (Oxford univ.) Why is there so little foreign investment in most developing countries ? Vertical FDI in a multi-country world


Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 09/03/2005 de 00:00:00 à 00:00:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

MAYDA A. M. (Univ. de Georgetown) Who Is Against Immigration? A Cross-Country Investigation of Individual Attitudes Towards Immigrants


Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 16/02/2005 de 00:00:00 à 00:00:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

PONCET S. (Univ. de Paris 1) Are Chinese provinces forming an Optimal Currency Area? Magnitude and determinants of Business Cycles with China


Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 02/02/2005 de 00:00:00 à 00:00:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

STROZZI C. (Univ. di Modena e reggio Emilia) Citizenship laws and international migration in historical perspective

Co-auteur(s) : G. Bertocchi

Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 19/01/2005 de 00:00:00 à 00:00:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

STRAUB S. (Univ. of Edinburg) Concessions of Infrastructure in Latin America : governement-led renegotiation

Co-auteur(s) : L. Guasch et J.J. Laffont

Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 05/01/2005 de 00:00:00 à 00:00:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

FIELD E. (Harvard univ.) Entitled to work property rights and labor supply in Peru


Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 15/12/2004 de 00:00:00 à 00:00:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

DESSY S. (Univ. de Laval) The economics of child trafficking

Co-auteur(s) : F. Mbiekop et S. Pallage

Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 08/12/2004 de 00:00:00 à 00:00:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

FANI R. (Univ. Tor Vergata) Trade liberalization in a globalizing world


Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 10/11/2004 de 00:00:00 à 00:00:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

JUTTING J. (OCDE) The impact of social institutions on the economic role of women in Developping countries

Co-auteur(s) : C. Morisson

Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 20/10/2004 de 00:00:00 à 00:00:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

BANERJEE A. (MIT) Productivity and the Misallocation of Capital

Co-auteur(s) : E. Duflo

Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 06/10/2004 de 00:00:00 à 00:00:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

GLEWWE P. (Univ. of Minnesota) Teacher Incentives

Co-auteur(s) : I. Nauman et M. Kremer

Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 02/06/2004 de 00:00:00 à 00:00:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

GARCIA M. (PUC) A risk management approach to emerging market's sovereign debt sustainability with an application to brazilian data

Co-auteur(s) : R. Rogobon

Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 26/05/2004 de 00:00:00 à 00:00:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

KLONNER S. (Cornell univ.) Does credit rationing reduce default ?


Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 05/05/2004 de 00:00:00 à 00:00:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

ATTANASIO O. (Univ. college London) Is the food ? Nutrition intervention in Columbia

Co-auteur(s) : M.V. Hernandez

Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 28/04/2004 de 00:00:00 à 00:00:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

MURGAI R. (World bank) The impact of farmer-fields-schools on knowledge and productivity

Co-auteur(s) : E. Gotland, E. Sadoulet, A. de Janvry et O. Ortiz

Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 31/03/2004 de 00:00:00 à 00:00:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

GOLDSTEIN M. (LSE) Gender, power and agricultural investment in Ghana


Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 17/03/2004 de 00:00:00 à 00:00:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

ANDERSON S. (Univ. of British Columbia) Should dowries be banned ?


Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 03/03/2004 de 00:00:00 à 00:00:00

Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8

SVENSSON J. (IIES) The power of information : evidence from a newspaper campaign to reduce capture

Co-auteur(s) : R. Reinikka

Texte intégral

Development Economics Seminar

Le 00/00/0000 de 00:00:00 à 00:00:00

Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 4

DUFLO Esther (IIES) *

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agenda