Dissertations / Theses: 'Development economics'

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Rice, Derek. "Three Essays in Development Economics: First Nation Economic Development." Thesis, Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/37633.

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This dissertation contains three essays in the economics of development. The first essay investigates the effects of the decentralization of governance over education to communities in terms of individual education outcomes. The next essay relates to the first by exploring the factors that drive communities to adopt decentralized governance, including forms of decentralized governance over education. The last essay returns to the topic of education by examining a policy aimed at decreasing the costs of post-secondary education for a minority group. Each essay probes these topics within the context of First Nations in Canada. The first essay examines the substantial impacts of education decentralization on high school attendance and completion through the analysis of First Nation education self-government agreements in Canada. These agreements are important institutional arrangements that transfer the authority over education from the federal government to First Nations. I exploit confidential microdata and exogenous variation in the implementation of education self-government agreements to perform the analysis. My results indicate that self-government agreements focused exclusively on education increase high school attendance by 5 to 9 percentage points and high school completion by 3 to 5 percentage points. However, the effects on high school completion rates under multi-sectoral self-government agreements implemented together with comprehensive land claim agreements and for self-government agreements that focus on education alone differ dramatically for women and men. High school completion improves by 8 to 11 percentage points for women, but drops by a staggering 17 to 25 percentage points for men. These results have important policy implications for education decentralization in general, along with implications for the particular case of First Nation education self-governance in Canada. The second essay identifies the determinants of decentralized governance by exploring the First Nation self-government agreement claim and implementation processes. I use a novel dataset on self-government agreements and confidential microdata to perform the analysis. My results support the notion that we can treat self-government treatment variables as exogenous, when controlling for reserve fixed effects. This is not an onerous condition to impose. Specifically, I do not find any factors of economic or statistical significance for claims for my richest and most-preferred specification, which includes controlling for reserve fixed effects. Contrary to the results for claims, I find that education and income are important factors for implementation, but only conditional on a reserve having previously made a claim. However, this significance disappears, once I relax this condition and compare the determinants of implementation against reserves that may or may not have made a claim. The third essay examines the substantial impacts of a targeted policy that provides postsecondary tuition and living expense subsidies for Aboriginal Canadians. To identify the effects of the policy, I exploit a reform of the policy's eligibility requirements in 1985 that lead to a large increase in the number of individuals with access to the subsidies. My results indicate that the reform lead to economically and statistically significant increases in the likelihood of attaining any post-secondary education for a group of women whose eligibility was particularly targeted by the reform and for women generally. These increases range from about 4 to 7 percentage points. The effects for men are positive, but much smaller and not significant.

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Baiardi, Anna. "Essays in development economics and economic history." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2017. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/90133/.

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The first chapter provides an overview of the topics covered in this thesis. The second chapter explores the effect of historic gender division of labour during slavery on African American women’s performance in the labour market. Using census data from 1870 to 2010, I show that African American women living in areas with lower levels of gender division of labour were more likely to participate in the labour market and have higher occupation income scores after emancipation. The effects are persistent for at least 70 years after the end of slavery. I analyse the mechanisms driving the results, distinguishing between labour supply and demand channels, and I explore intergenerational transmission of gender roles. The third chapter empirically assesses the importance of ethnic networks in facilitating international trade. In particular, it investigates the impact of ethnic Cantonese networks in the United States on the export performance of firms based in Southern China. The results indicate that exposure to ethnic networks has a positive effect on exports, both at the extensive and the intensive margin. We explore the mechanisms underlying the results, distinguishing between information flows, contract enforcement, foreign investment and technology diffusion. The fourth chapter analyses the effect of ethnic Chinese networks in the United States on knowledge diffusion and innovation in China. I construct a proxy for the ethnic network based on historic Chinese settlements and current industry employment patterns, exploiting the migration restrictions imposed by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The results indicate that when innovation in the U.S. increases, industries that are more exposed to the ethnic network in the U.S. innovate more in China. This suggests that ethnic networks contribute to the diffusion of technology across countries.

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Wang, Shengzu 1978. "Economic policies in developing and emerging market economies : three essays in international and development economics." Thesis, McGill University, 2008. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=115647.

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This thesis consists of three essays, which focus on different aspects of economic policy issues faced by developing and emerging market economies. The first essay explores the effect of monetary policy credibility on exchange rate volatility in a small open economy, even if the exchange rate is not an explicit target set by the monetary authority. Using an open economy framework modified from Gall and Monacelli (2005) and Walsh (2006), it shows that monetary policy credibility helps to stabilize the exchange rate as supply and demand side shocks hit the domestic economy. The monetary policy credibility can be achieved by the monetary authority's commitment to certain rules aiming for output/price smoothing. In the empirical analysis inflation targeting is used as a proxy variable for monetary credibility. The GARCH model of selected South-East Asian countries indicates that countries with inflation targeting policies have exhibited reduced exchange rate volatility when other factors are controlled.
The second essay looks at FDI inflows into developing economies. Two distinctive differences of FDI inflows between developed and developing economies are entry modes and evidence of government regulations. This essay investigates the incentives of FDI flows in terms of cost-saving merger, fixed cost of entry and the role of government policies. In particular it shows that, if the cost-saving effect is large and the government intervenes, the foreign firm will consider the FDI through either Greenfield or Brownfield, which corresponds to the situation for FDI flows into developing economies. Otherwise, the foreign firm will only consider Brownfield or staying outside, which stands for the developed economy case. Since one remarkable feature of the FDI flows into developing countries is the benefit of cost-saving from low labour costs, this essay takes this effect into account and provides insights for economic "outsourcing". The multi-stage sequential game model presented in this chapter provides comparable results for the pattern of the FDI flows affected by regulation and institutional factors, which are not addressed by existing literature. Finally, it reveals some intuition and feature of a developing economy where the government regulations on FDI flows are more often observed.
The third essay deals with the resource/revenue reallocation within powerful groups in the economy and the impact of the rent-seeking behavior of these groups on the economic growth and the social welfare. In particular, it introduces a dynamic model of resource-grabbing by status-conscious agents, i.e., agents value not only their absolute consumption levels, but also the relative status within his/her reference group. The purpose of this paper is to explore the effect of the "positional externalities" on the urge to seek rent and to connect the "tragedy of the commons" problem with relative consumption. The model shows that the greater is agents' concern about their relative status, the more aggressively they tend to behave. Consequently, the social welfare is lower because the growth rate of the public asset is reduced due to higher extraction rate. After introducing heterogeneity, it shows that the social welfare decreases as the distribution of status-consciousness among agents widens. Finally, it provides some policy suggestions that the government might consider to achieve a second best social outcome.

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Yamasaki, Junichi. "Essays on development economics and Japanese economic history." Thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science (University of London), 2017. http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/3676/.

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This thesis consists of three independent chapters on development economics and Japanese economic history. The first chapter analyzes the effect of railroad construction in the Meiji period (1868–1912) on technology adoption and modern economic development. By digitizing a novel data set that measures the use of steam engines at the factory level and determining the cost-minimizing path between destinations as an identification strategy, I find that railroad access led to the increased adoption of steam power by factories, which in turn induced structural change and urbanization. My results support the view that railroad network construction was key to modern economic growth in pre-First World War Japan. The second chapter analyzes the effect of time horizon on local public investment in the Edo period (1615–1868). I use a unique event in Japanese history during this period to identify the effect. In 1651, the sudden death of the executive leader of the Tokyo government reduced the transfer risk of local lords, especially for insiders, who supported the Tokyo government during the war of 1600. Using a newly digitized data set and a difference-in-differences strategy, I find that after 1651, regions owned by insiders increased the number of public projects more than regions owned by the other lords. I discuss other possible channels to interpret the effect of tenure risk, but I find no strong support for these alternative channels and conclude that the results support a longer time horizon effect. The third chapter provides more general background and a complete description of the data availability in Japan in the 17th–20th centuries, to discuss future research directions. It would aid reexamination of the history of Japan and other East Asian countries, which have experienced different economic and political paths.

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Garcia, Hombrados Jorge. "Empirical essays on development economics." Thesis, University of Sussex, 2018. http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/73411/.

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This thesis investigates empirically three questions of key relevance for the life of disadvantaged people in developing countries. Using a sample of Ethiopian women and a regression discontinuity design exploiting age discontinuities in exposure to a law that raised the legal age of marriage for women, the first chapter documents for the first time (a) the effect of increasing the legal age of marriage for women on infant mortality and (b) the causal effect of early cohabitation on infant mortality. The analysis shows that, even though it was not perfectly enforced, the law that raised the legal age of marriage had a large effect on the infant mortality of the first born child. Furthermore, the estimates suggest that the effect of a one-year delay in women's age at cohabitation on the infant mortality of the ffrst born is comparable to the joint effect on child mortality of measles, BCG, DPT, Polio and Maternal Tetanus vaccinations. Using longitudinal data from northern Ghana, the second chapter shows that parents allocate more schooling to children that are more cognitively able. These results provide evidence for the main prediction of the model of intra-household allocation of resources developed in Becker (1981), which concludes that parents allocate human capital investments reinforcing cognitive differences between siblings. The third chapter uses the 8.8 Richter magnitude earthquake that struck Chile in February 2010 as a case study and employs a difference in difference strategy to investigate whether natural disasters have lasting effects on property crime. The results show that the earthquake reduced the prevalence of property crime the year of the earthquake and that this effect remained stable over the 4 post-earthquake years studied. The lasting drop in crime rates in affected areas seems to be linked to the earthquake strengthening community life in these municipalities.

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Rathke, Alexander [Verfasser]. "Essays in Monetary Economics and Economic Development / Alexander Rathke." Aachen : Shaker, 2011. http://d-nb.info/107408778X/34.

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NARCISO, GAIA. "Essays on political economics and development economics." Doctoral thesis, Università Bocconi, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/11565/4051033.

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Booysen, Frederik Le Roux. "The measurement of economic development : alternative composite indices." Thesis, Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2000. http://hdl.handle.net/10019.1/51995.

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Thesis (PhD)--Stellenbosch University, 2000.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The success of policies aimed at economic development cannot be monitored and evaluated without development indicators. These indicators are also crucial in comparing levels of development across time and space so as to come a greater understanding of the development process. Yet, economic development does not mean the same thing to everyone. As a result, there exists a variety of indicators of economic development. Five main classes of development indicators are distinguished on the basis of the shift over time in our understanding of economic development (Chapter 1). A distinction is drawn between indicators of national income and economic growth (Chapter 3), employment, unemployment and underemployment (Chapter 4), and poverty and inequality (Chapter 5). Social indicators (Chapter 6) and composite indices (Chapter 7) of economic development represent two futher classes of development indicators. These indicators differ in terms of their content, method and technique, comparative application, simplicity, clarity, focus, availability and flexibility. These main classes of development indicators are evaluated with reference to these dimensions of measurement which are described in detail in Chapter 2. There is no one indicator that can be described as an ideal, all encompassing measure of economic development, at least not in terms of its performance on these dimensions of measurement. Hence, the measurement of development remains imperfect, but nonetheless makes an invaluable contribution to the study of economic development. In fact, development studies will be impossible without access to such a variety of development indicators. Given the importance of development indicators in development studies, two new composite indices of development are presented here to address two specific gaps in indicator research. Indices of Human Security (HSIs) and Inefficiency ratios are developed to determine the extent to which countries have made progress on human security as defined by the UNDP (Chapter 8). Progress is assessed in terms of both effort and outcomes, as well as the extent to which efforts are actually translated into outcomes. Indices of Reconstruction and Development (RDIs) are employed to measure the extent to which the nine provinces of South Africa have made progress on the development objectives described in the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) (Chapter 9). The measurement results suggest that there remain substantial disparities in progress on both human security and reconstruction and development. These new composite indices are also employed to determine those development characteristics associated with progress on human security and reconstruction and development. So, for example, disparities in human security are associated with certain urban and population dynamics, as well as communications capacity and infrastructural development. Progress on reconstruction and development is associated with lower population pressure, higher matric pass rates, less poverty and inequality, and more political representativeness at the provincial level. The RDIs also underscore the extent to which progress on the RDP has not materialised in rural areas. Furthermore, current provincial disparities in progress on reconstruction and development appear still to be indicative of the racial dynamics of development so characteristic of the Apartheid era.
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Dit is onmoontlik om sonder ontwikkelingsindikatore die sukses van beleid wat gemik is op ekonomiese ontwikkeling te moniteer of te evalueer. Ontwikkelingsindikatore IS ook onontbeerlik III die vergelyking van ontwikkelingsvlakke oor tyd en ruimte om sodoende 'n beter begrip van die ontwikkelingsproses te verkry. Ekonomiese ontwikkeling het egter nie dieselfde betekenis vir almal nie. Gevolglik bestaan daar 'n verskeidenheid van ontwikkelingsindikatore. Vyf hoofklasse van ontwikkelingsindikatore word onderskei op grond van verskuiwings oor tyd in die interpretasie van ekonomiese ontwikkeling (Hoofstuk 1). 'n Onderskeid word getref tussen maatstawwe van nasionale inkome en ekonomiese groei (Hoofstuk 3), indiensname, werkloosheid en onderindiensname (Hoofstuk 4), en armoede en ongelykheid (Hoofstuk 5). Sosiale indikatore (Hoofstuk 6) en saamgestelde indekse (Hoofstuk 7) van ekonomiese ontwikkeling verteenwoordig twee verdere groepe indikatore. Hierdie indikatore verskil in terme van hul inhoud, metode en tegniek, vergelykende toepassing, eenvoud, duidelikheid, fokus, beskikbaarheid en buigsaamheid. Hierdie hoofklasse van ontwikkelingsindikatore word geëvalueer met verwysing na hierdie dimensies van meting, wat in groter besonderhede in Hoofstuk 2 bespreek word. Daar is nie een indikator wat beskryfkan word as 'n ideale, allesomvattende maatstafvan ekonomiese ontwikkeling nie, ten minste nie in terme van die prestasie daarvan op hierdie dimensies van meting nie. Gevolglik is die meting van ekonomiese ontwikkeling onvolmaak, alhoewel dit 'n onskatbare bydrae lewer tot die studie van ekonomiese ontwikkeling. Om die waarheid te sê, ontwikkelingstudies salonmoontlik wees sonder toegang tot so 'n verskeidenheid van ontwikkelingsindikatore. Gegewe die belangrikheid van ontwikkelingsmaatstawwe In ontwikkelingstudies, word twee nuwe saamgestelde indekse hier aangebied om twee spesifieke gapings in navorsing oor ontwikkelingsmaatstawwe aan te spreek. Indekse van Menslike Sekuriteit (MSls) en Ondoeltreffendheidsratio's word ontwikkelom te bepaal tot watter mate lande vordering gemaak het in menslike sekuriteit, soos definieer deur die UNDP (Hoofstuk 8). Vordering word gemeet in terme van sowel pogings en uitkomste as die mate waartoe pogings werklik in uitkomste omskep word. In Hoofstuk 9 word Indekse van Heropbou en Ontwikkeling (HOIs) gebruik om te meet tot watter mate die nege provinsies in Suid-Afrika vordering gemaak het in die bereiking van die ontwikkelingsdoelwitte wat uitgespel word in die Heropbou- en Ontwikkelingsprogram (HOP). Die metingsresultate dui daarop dat daar wesenlike ongelykhede bestaan in beide menslike sekuriteit en heropbou en ontwikkeling. Hierdie nuwe saamgestelde indekse word ook gebruik om te bepaal met watter ontwikkelingskenmerke ongelykhede in menslike sekuriteit en heropbou en ontwikkeling geassosieer word. So, byvoorbeeld, toon dispariteite in menslike sekuriteit 'n verband met sowel stedelike en bevolkingsdinamika as kapasiteit in kommunikasie en infrastruktuur. Vordering in heropbou en ontwikkeling word ook geassosieer met laer bevolkingsdruk, beter matrikulasieresultate, minder armoede en inkomste-ongelykheid, en wyer politieke verteenwoordiging op provinsiale vlak. Die indekse beklemtoon ook die mate waartoe vordering met die HOP nog nie in landelike gebiede gematerialiseer het nie. Verder wil dit voorkom asof huidige provinsiale ongelykhede in vordering met heropbou en ontwikkeling steeds kenmerkend is van die rasse-dinamika agter ontwikkeling wat so kenmerkend was van die Apartheidsera.

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Arvanitidis, Paschalis A. "Property market and urban economic development : an institutional economics approach." Thesis, University of Aberdeen, 2003. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.288280.

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This thesis examines the relationship between the property market and urban economic development. The impetus for the research lies in the rapid process of urban economic change and the failure of economic approaches to explore adequately the important role of the property market in that process. The study draws on institutional economics to advance the argument that the property market as an institution is a mediator through which economic potential can be realised and served. Due to major philosophical and theoretical deficiencies in the area, focus is placed on the establishment of an appropriate philosophical framework, the development of a new theory, and the specification of a research design for empirical investigation of the issues. The thesis's foremost contribution therefore lies in the formation of a holistic research programme to conceptualise the property market as an institution and to explore its role within the urban economy. Critical realist principles provide the basis for the development of the philosophical position of the study. These are combined with institutionalist insights to construct a three-layer ontological framework discussing the nature of urban socioeconomy. The thesis then lays down a rich theory of urban economic organisation, placing explicit emphasis on the institutional mechanisms, processes and dynamics through which the built environment is provided. The interrelation between property market process and the wider institutional environment is explored, particularly in terms of efficiency in providing appropriate market institutions and property outcomes that support urban economic potential. From this discussion the institutionalist concept of 'property market purpose efficiency' is developed. Building upon the conceptual framework, the thesis explicitly addresses the requirements for concrete analysis. It, first, lays down a generic analytical approach specifying appropriate research methods and techniques for investigation, and, second, sets up a research design providing an operational frame in which developed theory is translated into empirical practice. This research design provides a blueprint for empirical case studies. Finally, a case study of Madrid is employed to empirically explore the research design.

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Osafo-Kwaako, Philip. "Essays in Economic History and Development." Thesis, Harvard University, 2012. http://dissertations.umi.com/gsas.harvard:10718.

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Chapter 1 provides a brief overview of the recent literature in economic history and long-run development, and summarizes the main findings of the three essays presented in this dissertation. In Chapter 2, I examine the subject of villagization in Tanzania, a major episode of development planning in post-independence Tanzania. I revisit this period of Tanzania’s economic history, focusing on the legacy of developmental villages (vijiji uya maendeleo) introduced in mainland Tanzania over the period 1974-1982. Combining historical data on Tanzania from the 1970s with data from population censuses and recent national household surveys, I investigate whether variation in the intensity of the governments villagization program explains within-region variation in social and economic outcomes today. I document that, in the short-run, developmental villages led to an increase in various educational outcomes, such as primary school completion rates, literacy rates, and total years of schooling. Today, districts which experienced a high share of developmental villages have greater availability of some public goods and citizens report higher rates of participation in community activities, but there is worse perception of corruption among government officials and greater rejection of one-party rule. Per capita household consumption is also significantly lower in districts with historically high levels of the treatment measure. To address potential endogeneity in village formation, I report instrumental variable results based on variation in ethnolinguistic fragmentation and the occurrence of droughts in the 1970s which facilitated the resettlement of peasants into villages. I conclude by providing some preliminary evidence on the lack of economic diversification as well as political alignment to the TANU/CCM party as possible channels which explain the legacy of the villagization experiment. In Chapter 3, I turn to the subject of disease eradication, and examine the impact of the successful control of a highly infectious tropical disease, yaws, in Ghana over the period 1956-1963. The availability of cheap, mass-produced penicillin following World War II resulted in a mass treatment campaign by WHO/UNICEF aimed at controlling the prevalence of yaws and other bacterial infections. I examine the effect of this penicillin campaign in which over 70 percent of the estimated Ghanaian population received a single dose of an intramuscular penicillin injection. Data collected by the WHO/UNICEF program before and after the campaign indicates that penicillin-based treatment resulted in an immediate reduction in the prevalence of infectious yaws among the Ghanaian population. Using a microsample from the 2000 Ghanaian census, I estimate a difference-in-difference model exploiting spatial variation in pre-treatment prevalence of yaws infections and variation in exposure due to the timing of the penicillin campaigns. My results indicate that, following the penicillin campaigns, cohorts born in districts with higher initial yaws prevalence achieved higher education outcomes than prior generations when compared with cohorts from districts with lower yaws prevalence. The results are particularly robust for the female subsample, where I observe increases in educational attainment for cohorts born just prior to the penicillin campaigns. In Chapter 4, I study the development of political partisanship, examining the plausibly random spread of the cocoa swollen shoot disease in the Gold Coast/Ghana in the 1940s. In 1948, the Watson Commission which investigated riots in colonial Ghana sparked by the cocoa swollen shoot pest noted the political motivations of the disturbances. In this chapter, I utilize novel data on cocoa farm acreages and the spatial variation in the spread of the swollen shoot virus to investigate the impact of the pest on the development of local political movements. Based on responses from the Afrobarometer surveys, I find that today, individuals in districts which historically experienced a high intensity of the disease pest report stronger anti-government opinions, and are more likely to attribute success in life to individual effort than government support. I trace the historical roots of these political views by examining electoral results from the 1956 Legislative Elections in colonial Ghana. Conditional on region fixed effects, and various pre-epidemic district controls, I observe that more adversely affected districts were more likely to vote against the new center-left (Nkrumahist) government. By 2000, with multiparty democracy, these areas still vote against the center-left (Nkrumahist) party. This partisan opposition has an impact on the allocation of resources today. Using an instrumental variable strategy, I examine the impact of government opposition on local government transfers received in various districts, with the historic intensity of the pest shock as an instrument. I examine possible violations to the exclusion restrictions of the 2SLS strategy by ruling out the impact of the cocoa swollen shoot disease on other economic and social outcomes. Based on the approach developed by Conley, Hansen and Rossi (2012), I also document that the 2SLS results remain robust to moderate forms of violations to the exclusion restriction assumptions.

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Maslyukivska, O. "Ecological economics as the economics of sustainable development." Thesis, Видавництво СумДУ, 2004. http://essuir.sumdu.edu.ua/handle/123456789/23063.

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Atallah, Samura. "Studies in Labor Economics, Organizational Economics, and Development." Thesis, Harvard University, 2015. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:26718720.

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The first chapter in this dissertation discusses the results of a field experiment that lasted three weeks at a firm in Saudi Arabia where we randomized an attention to variability or mindfulness training program. We conducted a baseline and end-line survey 3 months post training, collecting measures on non-cognitive skills, beliefs, affect, and employee performance and productivity. The training program was incentivized as managers’ reports on employees’ performance get reflected in future raises and bonus pay. We converted the measures to z-scores (unit standard deviation, mean zero) to standardize the scaling across measures. We found that mindfulness improved by 0.485 standard deviations in the treatment group. This effect is mediated by an increase in employees’ engagement. The extent to which locus of control is internal improved by 0.344 standard deviations, meaning that employees who took the training gave a greater weight to effort verses luck in determining their life outcomes. On the other hand, we found that work locus of control became more external by 0.646 standard deviations, and that employees perceived a greater degree of ethnic discrimination. On average, employees’ performance improved by about 0.5 standard deviations as measured by managers’ direct reports and punctuality. We explain the improvement in general locus of control but decrease in work locus of control with the gains in productivity and performance through a compensating story. Being more aware of variability has arguably led employees to perceive more discrimination in the environment, resulting in employees perceiving their work locus of control as more external. But employees improved their performance as a compensatory measure for perceived discrimination. The second chapter discusses the results of two lab experiments where we measure the effects of a negative shock on wage under uncertainty on subsequent efforts decisions under certainty. We found that students in the negative shock treatment do not optimize their effort, decreasing their total payout. This is explained through a tax in beliefs on the relationship between effort and reward in life, and trust in life. Even though the lab experiment was local, the students generalize what they learnt to their life beliefs. Furthermore, we conduct a second experiment to test that it is the uncontrollability of the negative shock rather than the negative shock per se that caused this. While this is a lab experiment and it is likely that these effects do not last in the long term, these results can be put in perspective when one thinks about the uncontrollability of the shocks that the poor are exposed to in the long-term, and their effect on life beliefs and effort decisions. The final chapter provides support to how the poor are more likely to experience learned helplessness and larger magnitude of learned helplessness. The effects of initial levels of capital, institutions, and differences in expected utility on learned helplessness is explored. We also provide evidence that once learned helplessness occurs, it is more likely that it will occur in the future providing evidence for poverty traps. We discuss the effects of noncognitive skills in decreasing the probability that learned helplessness will materialize, and in breaking the cycle.
Public Policy

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Pecha, Garzón Camilo José. "Essays on development economics." Doctoral thesis, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/10803/405342.

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Esta disertación es presentada como un compendio de tres ensayos que estudian los efectos de choques medioambientales y de política en el desarrollo físico de la infancia temprana y en algunas variables de resultado de la oferta laboral. En el primer ensayo, es analizado el efecto de sufrir el embate de tormentas tropicales en periodo de gestación sobre las medidas antropométricas de los niños tomadas en los primeros 5 años de vida. Se combinan índices de destrucción a nivel de distrito con 13 rondas anuales de la encuesta de hogares de Jamaica. La estrategia empírica explota la variación que surge de la temporalidad y la intensidad de las tormentas a través de diferentes cohortes en el mismo distrito. Los resultados sugieren que cuando las madres gestantes que habitan la región rural-costera son afectadas por al menos dos huracanes, sus hijos tienen una probabilidad 56 puntos porcentuales más alta de sufrir de bajo peso al nacer. Además, esos niños/as también experimentan impactos negativos en las medidas antropométricas tomadas en los primeros cinco años de vida equivalentes a 1.88 desviaciones estándar en peso-por-edad y 1.4 desviaciones estándar en peso-por-talla. En el segundo ensayo, se estudia la probabilidad de que la fuerza laboral masculina caiga en la informalidad ante la exposición a huracanes y tormentas tropicales. Se combinan variables de destrucción calculadas a partir de las características físicas de las tormentas a nivel de distrito con 36 rondas trimestrales de la encuesta de fuerza de trabajo de Jamaica. La estrategia empírica explota la variación proveniente de la intensidad y la temporalidad de las tormentas tropicales, así como la localización geográfica en conjunto con un modelo de panel con efectos aleatorios de selección endógena. Controlando por las potenciales fuentes de sesgo debido a condiciones iniciales, falta de seguimiento en el panel y selección de empleo, los resultados sugieren que los huracanes afectan positivamente la probabilidad de transición a la informalidad laboral sin importar la situación de formalidad inicial. Al examinar los efectos marginales de las tormentas se encuentra que la probabilidad de pasar a la informalidad se encuentra entre el 0.7 y el 12 porciento dependiendo de la condición de formalidad y el momento en el cual es afectado por las tormentas. Finalmente, en el tercer ensayo se examina si la política de universalización del sistema de salud de Jamaica afectó el estado de salud y la oferta laboral de los adultos. Se comparan resultados de adultos sin cubrimiento de seguridad sanitaria con sus contrapartes aseguradas, antes y después de la implementación de la política. El estudio encuentra que la política redujo tanto la probabilidad de sufrir enfermedades asociadas a la pérdida de días laborales como el número de días perdidos por enfermedad en 28.6 porciento y 34 porciento, respectivamente. Consistente con la ausencia de “encadenamiento al empleo”, no se encontraron efectos en el margen extensivo de empleabilidad. Sin embargo, consistente con una reducción en el número de días laborales perdidos por enfermedad, se encontró un efecto positivo de 2.15 horas adicionales de trabajo por semana. Este es principalmente un efecto de la oferta de trabajo dado que el estudio muestra que tanto el salario por hora reportado e imputado cae entre 0.15 y 0.06 puntos logarítmicos, respectivamente. Con esto, el monto monetario calculado como retorno asociado a la política asciende un promedio anual de US$26 millones en producto real a la economía durante el periodo 2008 a 2012.
This dissertation is presented as a compendium of three essays that study the effects of environmental and policy shocks on early childhood physical development and labor supply outcomes. In the first essay, it is analyzed the effects of exposure to hurricanes and tropical storms during pregnancy on children's anthropometric measures taken within the first five years of life. It combines destruction indexes at the district level with 13 yearly rounds of household level surveys from Jamaica. The empirical strategy exploits variation arising from the storms' timing and intensity across different cohorts within the same district. The findings suggest that when expectant mothers living in coastal-rural areas are affected by at least two hurricanes, their children are 56 percentage points more likely to show low birth weight. Furthermore, these children also experience negative impacts on anthropometric measures taken within the first five years of life equivalent to 1.88 standard deviations in weight-for-age and 1.4 standard deviations in weight-for-height. In the second essay, it is studied the probability of formally employed men falling into informality because of exposure to hurricanes and tropical storms. It combines destruction variables calculated from physical storms' characteristics at the district level with 36 quarterly rounds of Jamaica's labour force surveys. The empirical strategy exploits variation arising from the storm's timing, intensity, and geographic location within a panel-random effects endogenous choice model framework. Controlling for potential biases due to initial conditions, panel attrition and employment selection, findings suggest that hurricanes positively affect the transition probability regardless of whether the individually was initially employed in a formal or an informal job. When the marginal effects of the storm were studied, the probability of become informally employed ranges between 0.7 and 12 percent depending on the employee's initial state and the moment when the storms were suffered. These results suggest that the public and private policy agenda on adaptation to climate change should incorporate a discussion on how to offset the negative effects of hurricanes, since these events could become worse in the near future. Finally, in the third essay, it is examined whether Jamaica's free public healthcare policy affected health status and labor supply of adult individuals. It compares outcomes of adults without health insurance versus their insured counterparts, before and after policy implementation. The study finds that the policy reduced both the likelihood of suffering illnesses with associated lost work days and the number of lost days due to illnesses by 28.6 percent and 34 percent, respectively. Consistent with the absence of ``employment lock'', no effects are found on employment at the extensive margin. However, consistent with a reduced number of days lost due to illnesses, there is a positive effect of 2.15 additional weekly labor hours. This is primarily a labor supply effect as the study shows that both reported and imputed hourly wages decreased by 0.15 and 0.06 log-points respectively. Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that the policy added a yearly average of US$PPP 26.6 million worth of net real production to the economy during the period 2008-12.

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Nimoh, Florence. "Essays in development economics." Doctoral thesis, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/10803/664670.

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En esta tesis doctoral, utilizo estrategias empíricas en economía aplicada para proporcionar evidencias cuantitativas que pueden ayudar a mejorar las políticas de bienestar en los países en desarrollo. Mi principal objetivo es comprender la efectividad de las políticas y cómo los factores económicos pueden alterar las decisiones de las personas. En el capítulo 1, Evaluación de las políticas educativas sobre las tasas de matriculación en Ghana, analizo el impacto de las políticas educativas implementadas en Ghana en 2004 y 2005 sobre las tasas de matriculación en el nivel escolar básico. Estas políticas; La Subvención de Capitación, el Programa de Alimentación Escolar y el Kindergarten Obligatorio se implementaron con el objetivo principal de aumentar el acceso a la educación en el nivel básico. Usando el nivel del distrito datos del Ministerio de Educación, Ghana, y datos de encuestas de las Encuestas demográficas y de salud de Ghana, utilizo una estimación de diferencia en diferencias para estudiar cómo estas políticas han aumentado las tasas de matriculación a lo largo del tiempo. Los datos del nivel del distrito muestran que, en comparación con 2004, el NER aumentó en un 25% en 2006 y desde entonces ha fluctuado alrededor de este número, mientras que el GER aumentó en un 10% en 2006 y aumentó en un 20% en 2014. El nivel individual los datos también muestran un incremento en NER en un 10% en 2008 y un 8% en 2014, en comparación con 2003. Al examinar cómo las políticas afectaron a diferentes distritos y personas, ambos conjuntos de datos muestran disparidades en las tasas de matrícula por riqueza y lugar de residencia, pero no hay evidencia de disparidad de género. Además, la brecha que existe entre las regiones del norte y del sur se ha reducido. Desde la perspectiva de las políticas, estos hallazgos requieren atención sobre la equidad y los efectos sostenidos de estas políticas. En el capítulo 2, “Matrimonio precoz y conflicto, Evidence of Biafran War en Nigeria”, exploro las variaciones proporcionadas por la guerra civil nigeriana, conocida como la Guerra de Biafra, para estudiar el efecto del conflicto en el matrimonio precoz de las mujeres expuestas. Específicamente, realizo un análisis de diferencia en la diferencia mediante la explotación de la variación entre etnias y cohortes, que determinan si una mujer estuvo expuesta a la guerra o no. Encuentro que las mujeres expuestas a edades de 10 a 15 años tenían, en promedio, 6% más de probabilidades de casarse antes de cumplir 16 años que aquellas que no estuvieron expuestas. Este hallazgo llama la atención sobre el hecho de que el conflicto podría exacerbar el matrimonio precoz ya que los individuos pueden recurrir a esta dañina tradición solo para hacer frente a las crisis económicas que enfrentan. En el capítulo 3, “El impacto del conflicto sobre la edad al contraer matrimonio en el África subsahariana”, analizo el impacto de la variación en la intensidad del conflicto experimentado durante los años de matrimonio de las mujeres en el África subsahariana con respecto a su edad en el primer matrimonio. Usando datos de la Encuesta Demográfica y de Salud y estimando un modelo de riesgo discreto, encuentro que la exposición al conflicto tiene un impacto diferencial en el espectro de edad: el conflicto aumenta el riesgo de contraer matrimonio entre los 18 y los 21 años, sin efectos en el otra subpoblación de edad.
In this doctoral thesis, I use empirical strategies in Applied economics to provide quantitative evidences that can help improve welfare policies in developing countries. My main aim is to understand the effectiveness of policies, and how economic factors can alter the decisions of individuals. Specifically, I concentrate on the domain of gender and education. In the domain of gender, I study how the marital decisions of women can be altered when they are exposed to economic shocks such as conflict. And in the domain of education, I look at impact evaluations of educational programs aimed at improving access to education. In chapter 1, Evaluation of Educational Policies on Enrollment Rates in Ghana, I analyze the impact of educational policies implemented in Ghana in 2004 and 2005 on enrollment rates at the basic school level. These policies; the Capitation Grant, School Feeding Program, and Compulsory Kindergarten, were implemented with the main aim of increasing access to education at the basic level. Using district level data from the Ministry of Education, Ghana, and survey data from Ghana Demographic and Health Surveys, I employ a difference-in-difference estimation to study how these policies have increased enrollment rates over time. I measure enrollment rates as Net Enrollment Rate (NER) and Gross Enrollment Rates (GER): the NER measures the percentage of the official age population of a particular grade that are enrolled in that grade while the GER measures the total enrollment irrespective of age, expressed as a percentage of the official age population. The district level data shows that, compared to 2004, NER increased by 25% in 2006 and has since fluctuated around this number, while GER increased by 10% in 2006 and has increased over time, to about 20% in 2014. The individual level data also shows an increment in NER by 10% in 2008 and 8% in 2014, as compared to 2003. Examining how the policies affected different districts and individuals, both data sets show disparities in enrollment rates by wealth and place of residence, but no evidence of gender disparity. In addition, the gap that exists between the northern and the southern regions has reduced. From policy perspective, these findings call for attention on the equity and sustained effects of these policies. In chapter 2, Early Marriage and Conflict, Evidence from Biafran War in Nigeria, I explore variation provided by the Nigerian civil war, known as the Biafran War, to study the effect of conflict on early marriage of exposed women. Specifically, I perform a difference-in-difference analysis by exploiting variation across ethnicities and cohorts, which determine whether a woman was exposed to the war or not. I find that women exposed at ages of 10 to 15 years were, on average, 6% more likely to get married before they turn 16 than those who were not exposed. This finding draws attention to the fact that conflict could exacerbate early marriage as individuals may turn to this harmful tradition just to cope with the economic crises they face. In chapter 3, The impact of Conflict on the age at marriage in Sub-Saharan Africa, I analyze the impact of the variation in the intensity of conflict experienced during the marriageable years of women in Sub-Saharan Africa on their age at first marriage. Using data from Demographic and Health Survey and estimating a discrete-time hazard model, I find that exposure to conflict has differential impact across the age spectrum: conflict increases the hazard into marriage at the ages of 18 to 21 years, with no effect on the other age sub-population.

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Heusch, Niklas. "Essays in development economics." Doctoral thesis, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/10803/663490.

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This thesis combines three independent articles. In the first chapter, I examine the health care that drug sellers, common medical providers in many developing coun-tries, provide for childhood illness in Ghana, and study its determinants. Overall, I find the quality of treatment to be poor and provide evidence that this is caused by low knowledge of drug sellers, rather than low effort or adverse financial in-centives; a simulation exercise suggests that adequate treatment would not reduce drug sellers’ profits or increase clients’ expenditures. In the second chapter, I examine rural-urban migration in Tanzania and pro-vide evidence of substantial selection into urban migration among residents of agricultural households: movers to urban areas are substantially better educated and more commonly participate in formal labour markets prior to moving. Ho-wever, changes to the economic situation of agricultural households have large impacts on this sorting to urban areas, suggesting that households’ ability to fi-nance migration might be an important bottleneck. In the third chapter, I study the (recently debated) performance of proxy me-ans testing (PMT), an econometric approach deducing households’ poverty status from easily collectable information on household characteristics. Brown et al.(2016) criticise the performance of PMT; I find these results to be driven by mis-calibration: when calibrated to match the poverty rate of the population, PMT performs substantially better and, although far from perfect, might still provide useful information to its users.
Esta tesis está compuesta por tres artículos independientes. El primer capítulo examina la atención sanitaria que los farmacéuticos, proveedores médicos muy comunes en algunos países en vías de desarrollo, proveen para enfermedades infantiles en Ghana y estudia los factores determinantes. Encuentro que la calidad de los tratamientos es baja y muestro evidencia de que esta´áausada por el bajo conocimiento de los farmacéuticos, y no por el bajo esfuerzo de éstos o la presencia de incentivos económicos perversos. Un ejercicio de simulación sugiere que el tratamiento adecuado no reduciría los beneficios de los farmacéuticos ni incrementaría los gastos de los clientes. En el segundo capítulo, examino la migración rural-urbana en Tanzania y proveo evidencia de la existencia de una selección sustancial en la migracióon urbana dentro de los residentes de los hogares agrícolas: aquellos que deciden mudarse aáreas urbanas son más educados y tienden a participar más en el mercado laboral antes de mudarse. Sin embargo, cambios en la situación económica de los hogares agrícolas tienen grandes impactos sobre la selección, sugiriendo que la habilidad para financiar la migración que tienen los hogares puede ser un obstáculo importante. En el tercer capitulo estudio el desempeño (debatido recientemente) del “proxy means testing” (PMT), un método econométrico que establece el estatus de pobreza de los hogares según un conjunto de información sobre las características de los hogares que se obtienen fácilmente. Brown et al. (2016) critican el desempeño del PMT; yo encuentro que estos resultados se deben a una calibración errónea: cuando la calibración se realiza para igualar la tasa de pobreza de la población, el PMT funciona mucho mejor y, aunque no es perfecto, puede seguir proveyendo con información útil a sus usuarios.

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Arshad, Junaid. "Essays in development economics." Thesis, University of Leicester, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/2381/38497.

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This dissertation consists of three essays in development economics. The first essay is concerned with competition between two processing mills in the sugarcane market of Pakistan. I develop a two-stage duopsony game where, in the first period, mills fragmentize the market by investing in the procurement logistics and infrastructure to create captive segments in the market. In the second stage, mills take the segmentation given and compete in prices. The model endogenously determines the market fragmentation. In equilibrium, complete segmentation of the market emerges, mills buy cane from mutually exclusive segments of the market. Finally, I show that a binding price floor has no effect on the market segmentation. The second essay is concerned with coordination amongst processing mills. I analyse why sugar mills in Pakistan pay cane farmers by weight instead of sucrose content? I develop a two-stage pricing game. In the first stage, mills choose the price regime: pay by weight or sucrose content. In the second stage, for a given price regime, mills compete in prices. The model suggests that evaporation of moisture increases the effective transportation cost for farmers and hence reduces the competition between mills. Numerical solution to the game generates a coordination game. The fact that mills pay by weight, payoff dominant equilibrium, indicates a collusive behaviour among mills. However, I could not rule out the possibility of historical inertia when parameter values represent the historical conditions of the market. Finally, I suggest a price floor as an equilibrium switching policy. The final essay of this dissertation is concerned with cooperation between rural households. I study informal risk sharing contracts when players’ behaviour is motivated not only by their material payoff but also by intrinsic motivations. My results suggest that emotions such as envy, altruism, and intentions work in different directions. Envy and altruism not only reduce the critical discount factor that can self-sustain risk sharing but also make the sharing mechanism more equitable by reducing the number of equilibria in the repeated game. Finally, I study intention based preferences in an infinity repeated psychological game. The main result of the final chapter shows that intrinsic reciprocity based on expectations and intentions can reduce the level of informal insurance by increasing the critical discount factor.

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Bjorkegren, Daniel Ingvar. "Essays in Development Economics." Thesis, Harvard University, 2014. http://dissertations.umi.com/gsas.harvard:11358.

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Economic development is often associated with the adoption of new technologies. The three chapters in this dissertation ask how societies can achieve efficient adoption of these technologies. The first two chapters analyze the dramatic spread of a new communication technology---the mobile phone---in the East African country of Rwanda, using transaction data. Many technologies important for the modern economy are network goods; these goods tend to diffuse inefficiently in the absence of careful policy design. The first chapter introduces a new method to estimate the value of a network good, and to simulate the effects of policies. Economic actors also must decide whether a given technology is worth adopting. The second chapter analyzes how individuals learn about a new technology, by tracing the adoption of a new, cheaper mobile phone plan. The third chapter considers the side effects of new technologies, specifically, how innovation affects dimensions of quality that are not observed by consumers.
Economics

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Reed, Tristan. "Essays in Development Economics." Thesis, Harvard University, 2014. http://dissertations.umi.com/gsas.harvard:11390.

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Lopez, Pena Paula. "Essays in development economics." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2018. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/109831/.

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This thesis consists of three chapters, which address different but related research questions, using original data collected during extensive field work in Bangladesh. Chapter one studies the impact of training in stress management on firm outcomes in Bangladesh. 310 female owners were recruited and one-half was randomly offered a 10-week training based on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, the current best practice treatment for chronic stress. The other half was assigned to an active control group and received empathetic listening. Initially, CBT reduces stress levels but does not affect profits and sales. For owners in sectors with a high concentration of women, predominantly clothing and handicrafts shops, the effect of CBT on stress dissipates within six months and it has no effect on profits and sales. For owners in sectors with a lower concentration of women, such as electronics or interior design, the effect of CBT on stress persists six months after the treatment, and profits and sales grow over time. Chapter two uses a reverse Becker-DeGroot-Marschak (BDM) mechanism to elicit the willingness to accept a one-time subsidy to try formal childcare in 17 low-income communities in Bangladesh. We visited 635 households with preschool-age children and invited the 415 that were not using childcare to participate in the BDM. The median and modal amounts demanded to try the service are 500 Bangladeshi Taka, approximately 6 US dollars. Households where the head owns a business or does not work demand significantly lower subsidies, compared to those where the head is in wage employment. Respondents living in low-quality dwellings, or in communities where daycare use is low, also demand smaller subsidies. One month after receiving the subsidy, only 17 parents had visited the centre and 9 enrolled their child. These results suggest that a single cash transfer might not be an effective policy for increasing preschool enrollment and regular attendance in low-income urban areas. Chapter three studies correlations between physical and mental health outcomes, employment and household infrastructure in a sample of 1,778 low-income households in Greater Dhaka, Bangladesh. Women and urban dwellers have lower well-being levels than men and residents of peri-urban areas, even after controlling for occupation, consumption and household infrastructure. Participation in paid employment is associated with higher levels of stress for women, but the effects are concentrated on women who own a business or work as domestic helpers. Female garment workers, the largest occupational group among women, fare no worse than women who do not work. Proximity to central Dhaka is associated with higher access to improved sanitation but worse health. Peri-urban dwellers spend less days sick and with fever than those living in the city.

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Ammon, Kerstin Christina. "Essays in development economics." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2015. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/92086/.

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This thesis is a collection of three essays studying firms in low income countries. The first chapter explores how relational contracts that substitute for formal contracts in the presence of weak institutions, are affected by changes to the outside option of one of the parties. I investigate this question by assessing how a change in the pay-off of cultivating an alternative crop by farmers affects the relationship with downstream buyers in the sugar industry in colonial Taiwan (1895-1945). Using novel historic sugar mill level data, I analyse effects on interlinked lending and the provision of inputs by mills to farmers following a reversal of the downward price trend of the main alternative crop, rice. In the second chapter, which is co-authored with Anna Baiardi, we empirically assess the importance of ethnic networks in facilitating international trade. In particular, we investigate the impact of ethnic Cantonese networks in the United States on the export performance of firms based in Southern China. In the third chapter, I investigate whether the dominance of small firms in developing countries can be explained by the production of customised goods, which allows smaller and less efficient firms to compete with larger and more efficient modern firms. I incorporate this hypothesis in a model, in which the key variables impacting the profitability of the customised technology and thus firm size are transport costs and income.

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Chen, Daniel. "Essays in development economics." Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2004. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/28818.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 2004.
Includes bibliographical references.
(cont.) social activities. These results are unlikely to be driven by omitted environmental variables: social violence increases fastest where participation in Koran study also increases the fastest, and this is not true for state or industrial violence. Religious intensity is more strongly linked with social violence in regions that are more economically distressed. Credit availability mitigates this effect. These results support the ex-post social insurance model of religious intensity. High marginal utilities during economic distress increase incentives to enact sanctions. With volatility, religions with harsher punishment or violence are more stable and successful. As volatility declines, benign groups and religions become relatively successful. Chapter 3 During the early 20th century, France initiated an unusual tax policy to promote marriage and fertility, regressive in that fertility incentives were so large and greatest among the rich. Eugenic interest in family allowances was substantial during this time due to fear of depopulation and changing ratios of uneducated to educated. Family incomes were divided by family size to determine a final tax bracket. A number of countries have begun promoting similar tax incentives. Economic theory is ambiguous as to what such incentives do. This paper uses variation in tax policy with differential impact for different population groups to disentangle economic incentives from propaganda that often accompany such country-wide initiatives. Evidence using synthetic cohorts constructed from aggregate tax return data suggests ...
Chapter 1 exploits relative price shocks induced by the Indonesian financial crisis to demonstrate a causal relationship between economic distress and religious intensity and investigate why it exists. Rapid inflation favored growers of staple crops and disfavored sticky wage-earners. I use pre-crisis wetland hectares and government occupation as instruments and dryland hectares and service occupation as "placebo instruments" to estimate the impact of economic distress on religious intensity. Economic distress stimulates Koran study and Islamic school attendance but does not stimulate other social activities or secular school attendance. The results seem attributable to the role of religion as ex-post social insurance: credit availability reduces the effect of economic distress on religious intensity by roughly 80%, religious intensity alleviates needing alms or credit to meet basic needs at the peak of the crisis, and religious institutions facilitate consumption smoothing among villagers. I explain these findings in a model where religious intensity represents the degree of social insurance. in which people participate and social sanctions facilitate religion's function as ex-post insurance. Together, these results provide evidence that religious intensity responds to economic forces and suggest alleviating risk may mitigate fundamentalist tendencies. Chapter 2 exploits differences in religious intensity across Indonesia before and during the Indonesian financial crisis to identify the effect of religious intensity on social violence. In high religious intensity areas, violence is more likely to arise. Stronger measures of religious intensity are more strongly associated with social violence. Social violence is negatively associated with other
by Daniel L. Chen.
Ph.D.

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Hernández, Sara. "Essays on development economics." Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/101514.

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Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Economics, 2015.
Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 94-97).
This thesis is a collection of three chapters in empirical development economics. The first chapter investigates the impact of the dramatic growth of the fresh-cut flower industry in Colombia on different forms of violence. My empirical strategy exploits variation in the geo-climatic suitability for flowers to understand how export shocks affect violence at the municipality level. I show that flower shocks lead to a differential reduction in unorganized violent crime (homicide rates) in the suitable municipalities, but not to any changes in participation in guerrilla warfare. In contrast, increases in the coffee price are associated with a decrease in civil conflict (as in Dube and Vargas, 2013) but, as I find in this paper, an increase in homicide. I propose a household model where households both participate in and indirectly consume criminal activities (organized and unorganized) and women have different preferences than men, which can explain these asymmetric results. The second chapter studies the relationship between the arrival of employment opportunities in the fresh-cut flower industry and investments in human capital in Colombia. I study how schooling completion and grade enrollment respond to local employment shocks. I show that blooming periods for the flower industry are associated with a differential increase in the probability that a student will graduate from secondary schooling. I do not find evidence of an asymmetrical impact by gender. My results remain robust to different forms of shock aggregation, and accounting for differential trends by municipality characteristics. The third and final chapter uses the fresh-cut flower industry to understand the impact that the access to the export jobs had on the lives of Colombian women. My goal is to understand how flower shocks affect the timing of fertility and marriage decisions for women exposed to them during their adolescence. I find that girls exposed to the flower shocks are more likely to have initiated sexual activity, to be pregnant and married at younger ages. The results remain robust to different forms of shock aggregation, differential trends by municipality characteristics, accounting for migration, and geographically restricting the sample to the departments that concentrate flower production.
by Sara Hernández.
Ph. D.

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Ruthbah, Ummul Hasanath. "Essays on development economics." Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/38609.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 2007.
Includes bibliographical references.
This dissertation is a collection of three independent papers in empirical development economics. The first chapter studies the effect of a family planning program in Bangladesh, which successfully reduced fertility, on households' asset accumulation. In developing countries parents expect their children to take care of them when they are old. Children also help parents to smooth consumption over their life cycle. They send remittances when parents are old and have relatively low income. The chapter presents a model where asset accumulation and children are substitutes, and finds that households exposed to a family planning program have lower fertility and more assets than those who were not exposed to the program. Chapter 2 examines effect of the same program on female autonomy. Policy makers and planners often view family planning programs (FPP) as being conducive to female autonomy. They argue that when women have fewer children they can earn more income and enjoy more property rights, higher mobility and greater decision making power inside and outside the household. But this may not be true in all situations.
(cont.) Using household data from 142 villages in Bangladesh this paper shows that although a family planning program reduces women's fertility and thereby allows them to enjoy higher levels of private consumption through expanding their outside opportunities, it significantly reduces their decision making power within the household. A simple analytical model is presented to reconcile this empirical evidence. Finally chapter 3 explores the macroeconomic usage of aid using panel data for a broad sample of aid-recipients. An increase in aid must go toward a reduction in the current account balance (in which case there is a real transfer of resources from donor to recipient and aid is said to be absorbed), an increase in capital outflows, or into international reserves. We find that short-run absorption is typically very low. While absorption increases in the long-run, it is still significantly less than complete and only a tiny fraction of the absorbed aid dollars go towards investment. It is likely that the remaining aid is lost through the capital account. Moreover, aid spending, defined in terms of the increase in government fiscal expenditures as a result of aid, is significantly greater than aid absorption, implying that aid systematically leads to an injection of domestic liquidity in recipient economies, with possible adverse consequences for macroeconomic management.
(cont.) The evidence marshaled here may help illuminate the rather weak link between aid and growth found in the literature.
by Ummul Hasanath Ruthbah.
Ph.D.

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Keniston, Daniel Eben. "Essays in development economics." Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/65488.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 2011.
Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 111-113).
Chapter 1 looks at the empirical estimation of the welfare impacts of bargaining. Bargaining for retail goods is common in developing countries, but rare in the developed world. The welfare implications of this difference are theoretically ambiguous-if bargaining is a low cost form of price discrimination, it may lead to greater trade and welfare and even approximate the optimal incentive compatible outcome. However, if bargaining imposes large utility costs on the participants, then a fixed price may be preferable. I develop the tools to resolve this question, specifying a model of repeated trade with asymmetric information adapted to the context of bargaining, and developing a dynamic structural estimation technique to infer the structural parameters of the market. I then apply these techniques to the market for local autorickshaw transportation in Jaipur, India, using data I collected over 2008-2009. Chapter 2 carries out the first comparison of production function parameters estimated by structural techniques with those estimated via randomized instrumental variables using a unique dataset and field experiment performed by De Mel, McKenzie, and Woodruff (2008). In the context of a simple model of a household firm, I discuss the coefficients that each approach estimates, and the assumptions necessary to interpret those coefficients as the structural parameters of the model. I find that the values of structural and experimental estimators that most plausibly estimate the same parameters are indeed statistically and economically similar, suggesting that in some contexts structural models of production functions may be effective in recovering the parameters of production functions in the context of developing markets. These parameters may then be used to address questions relating to firm productivity and capital allocation that are both central to the study of firms in development, and potentially difficult to identify using randomized variation alone. Chapter 3 documents an attempt to overcome the challenges of police reform in the Indian state of Rajasthan, evaluated through a series of RCT (Randomized Control Trials). Four reform interventions were implemented in a randomly selected group of 162 police stations across 11 districts of the state: (1) weekly duty rosters with a guaranteed rotating day off per week; (2) a freeze on transfers of police staff; (3) in-service training to update skills; and (4) placing community observers in police stations. To evaluate these reforms, data was collected through two rounds of surveys (before and after the intervention) including police interviews, decoy visits to police stations, and a large scale crime survey-the first of its kind in India. The results suggest that two of the interventions, the freeze on transfers and the training, do have the potential to improve the police effectiveness and public image. The other reforms showed no robust effects, an outcome that may be due to their incomplete implementation.
by Daniel Eben Keniston.
Ph.D.

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Shenoy, Ashish, Emily Breza, and Arun G. Chandrasekhar. "Essays in development economics." Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/104494.

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Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Economics, 2016.
Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. Chapter two co-authored with Emily Breza and Arun Chandrasekhar.
Includes bibliographical references.
This dissertation examines three current topics related to development economics. In the first chapter I investigate spatial variation in earnings and the cost of internal migration in Thailand. The second chapter explore the unintended consequences of low accountability that accompany large technological investments in the Indian dairy sector. In the third chapter I develop a model of mutual insurance where agents can only partially observe each other's earnings. In the first chapter I estimate the perceived cost of internal migration and associated labor supply elasticity in Thailand using the revealed-preference location decisions of workers. I develop a multiperiod model of the location decision where observed earnings are an imperfect proxy for the net present value of a migration. I use global commodity prices to construct instruments that identify permanent and transitory components of local earnings. Reduced-form evidence suggests that workers are sensitive to the share of the permanent component in an earnings innovation. Given this, I estimate a structural model of migration to recover cost parameters, exploiting variation in net present value induced by the instruments. Over a range of discount rates, I estimate the average cost of migration to an individual to lie between 0.3 and 1.1 times annual earnings. Fixed costs of moving (which include both financial and psychic costs) account for 60 percent of this, with the remaining 40 percent varying by distance. Furthermore, variation in idiosyncratic preferences is more than double the spatial variation in earnings. Using the parameter estimates of the model, I find that migration contributes 8.6 percentage points to local labor supply elasticity, split almost evenly between workers entering a province and fewer locals exiting. The model suggests that 20% of long-term earnings differentials over space can be attributed to perceived moving costs. In the second chapter (co-authored with Emily Breza and Arun Chandrasekhar) I investigate the effects of technology investment in the Indian dairy sector. In India, village dairy cooperatives collect milk from rural producers and sell it in bulk to the regional market. In the last decade the Karnataka Milk Federation, the largest organizer of cooperatives in the Indian state of Karnataka, has invested heavily in bulk milk chillers (BMCs) that drastically lower the time between production and refrigeration. These chillers, by lowering the perceived risk of penalty for spoilage, both raise the potential returns to high quality milk and increase the temptation to engage in unsavory practices such as milk dilution. Risk declines both because chillers better preserve milk and because monitoring at chilling stations is more lax. Therefore the new technology both raises the returns to quality and lowers the cost of cheating. We investigate the net effects of village access to a BMC on the production process through a difference-in-difference approach using village-level data from the district of Kolar. We find that production quantity increases with access to a chiller but average production quality decreases, as does the likelihood of being punished for low quality. The results are consistent with a model in which villagers increase their use of dishonest practices such as dilution after being connected to a BMC because they face less risk of being punished. The effect size is strongest in villages that had the highest quality ex ante, suggesting an equilibrium shift brought on by the change in punishment probability. In addition, we find the strongest evidence of adulteration in villages with fewer outside agricultural options. In the third chapter I generalize a model of infinite-horizon risk sharing in which agents have private information about their stochastic income realizations. I extend the model so that agents also receive a noisy signal of each agent's earnings. Crucially, agents cannot change their action based on the signal, but contracts between the two agents may be conditioned on signal realizations. An efficient contract in this setting is one that maximizes total surplus subject to satisfying an aggregate resource constraint and ensuring that both agents truthfully reveal their private information. I first verify that an efficient contract exists and then characterize how the efficient contract incorporates information from the signal. Information increases surplus in the contracting relationship in two ways: first, it makes incentive compatibility easier to satisfy by allowing contracts to more precisely target individual types. Second, it allows contracts to better allocate resources to agents with low income by providing independent information on unobserved types. I show that under certain conditions, these two channels are mutually reinforcing and generate the unambiguous prediction that optimal contracts deliver greater payments to agents with signals associated with lower income realizations. Finally, I prove that under these conditions, as the signal gets more precise risk sharing improves monotonically and utility under an optimal contract approaches the first best.
by Ashish Shenoy.
Ph. D.

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Carvalho, Irineu E. (Irineu Evangelista) 1971. "Essays in development economics." Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2000. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/41802.

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Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 2000.
Includes bibliographical references.
In 1991, a reform was passed changing the rules for social security for rural workers in Brazil. The reform consisted of a reduction in the minimum eligibility age for old-age benefits, an extension of benefit eligibility to workers who are not the heads of their households, and an increase in the minimum value for benefits. As a consequence, elderly rural workers and their households found a substantive increase in their non-labor incomes. Because old-age benefits for rural workers are not means or retirement tested, this reform may be a very useful natural experiment for studying pure income effects. I use information from surveys administered before and after the reform is implemented to identify the effects of the reform on the actual receipt of benefits by the elderly. The first chapter studies the labor supply of elderly rural males in response to the reform. I find that elasticities of labor supply with respect to benefits generosity among rural men age 60 to 64 are greater than those estimated from developed country data. I find that benefit take-up rates are greatest among the better educated, but that least-schooled workers have the largest elasticities of labor supply. I also find that husbands respond to wives' benefits by increasing their labor supply, perhaps because of bargaining considerations within the household. Last but not the least, I find that anticipated benefits do not affect the labor supply of workers close to the minimum eligibility age. The second chapter studies the choice of living arrangements of unmarried elderly females, that is never married, divorced or widowed females. The main finding is that living arrangements are responsive to benefits income: Brazilian rural elderly females value their privacy and independence, choosing not to coreside with their adult children if they can afford to do so. This result suggests that substituting the extended family for formal transfer programs by means of severe filial responsibility laws and scaling back of social security may be a very costly measure for the elderly in Brazil. Because the estimates of this paper are based on the behavioral response of unmarried elderly females in the rural areas, one may reasonably argue that those effects are underestimates of the effects for the whole sample of elderly, males and females, married or unmarried, residing in rural or urban areas. The final chapter studies the effects of increases in non-labor income at the household level on children's outcomes, particularly labor participation and school enrollment. In this chapter I study the impact of this increase in non-labor income on children of ages 10-14 living in the same household as old-age beneficiaries. Counterfactual analysis based on reduced form estimates implies that little less than 20% of the gap between 100% enrollment and counterfactual enrollment rates was closed for girls living with at least an elderly who benefited from the reform, with a smaller effect for boys. Labor force participation of boys also seem to have been effected by the reform, with a reduction in participation rate around one-tenth of counterfactual participation rates. Those results may be underestimates of the effects of overall income growth because economy-wide increases in income are likely to be associated with shifts in social norms and attitudes towards children's labor participation and schooling.
by Irineu E. Carvalho.
Ph.D.

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Breierova, Lucia 1976. "Essays in development economics." Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2003. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/17569.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 2003.
Includes bibliographical references.
This dissertation brings together three essays on the relationship between education, health, and family structure in developing countries. The first essay studies the impact of the AIDS epidemic on children's schooling in Kenya. I draw on the relationship, established in previous literature, between the lack of male circumcision and HIV prevalence. The Luo ethnic group, who does not generally practice male circumcision, had a much larger increase in the HIV prevalence rate between 1993 and 1998. I show that there was a corresponding increase in orphan rates and a decrease in educational achievement among the children in this group. This does not seem to be accounted for by alternative explanations, such as changes in the political clout of the Luo or mean reversion. The second essay examines the impact of sibling sex composition on educational outcomes of children in Tanzania. The estimates suggest that 14-year-old children with three sisters are 24 percentage points less likely to complete primary school (7th grade) after completing 6th grade than children with no sisters, and 8.4 to 9 percentage points less likely to complete primary school overall. Having two or more older sisters, however, can benefit children in completing 4th, 5th, or 6th grade of primary school. These results are robust to the inclusion of parental background characteristics and an index measuring household assets. The third essay, co-authored with Professor Esther Duflo, takes advantage of a school construction program that took place in Indonesia between 1973 and 1978 to estimate the effect of education on fertility and child mortality. Time and region varying exposure to the school construction program generates instrumental variables for the average education in the household, and the difference in education between husband and wife.
(cont.) We show that female education is a stronger determinant of age at marriage and early fertility than male education. However, female and male education seem equally important factors in reducing child mortality. We suggest that the OLS estimate of the differential effect of women' s and men's education may be biased by failure to take into account assortative matching.
by Lucia Breierova.
Ph.D.

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Harari, Mariaflavia. "Essays in development economics." Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/103505.

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Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Economics, 2016.
Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 149-159).
This thesis consists of three essays in development economics. The first chapter investigates urban form in India. I focus on one of the determining factors of urban commuting efficiency, highlighted by urban planners but overlooked by economists: city shape. I retrieve the geometric properties of urban footprints in India over time, using satellite data on nighttime lights and historic maps. I propose an instrument for urban shape based on the interaction between topographic obstacles arid mechanically predicted city growth. I then investigate how city shape affects the location choices of consumers and firms, in a spatial equilibrium framework. More compact cities are characterized by larger population, lower wages, and higher rents, consistent with compact shape being a consumption amenity. The welfare cost of deteriorating city shape is estimated to be sizeable. The effects of unfavorable topography appear to be exacerbated by building height restrictions, and mitigated by infrastructure. The second chapter examines the human capital effects of inheritance law in Kenya. I study a 1981 statutory law reform granting Kenyan women equal inheritance rights. I employ a difference-in-differences strategy, exploiting variation in pre-reform inheritance rules across religious groups. Women exposed to the reform are more educated, less likely to undergo genital mutilation and more likely to be medically assisted during childbirth; they also tend to delay childbearing and to have better marriage market outcomes. These effects are more pronounced for women with fewer siblings, for whom the absolute inheritance share is potentially larger. In the third chapter, my coauthor Eliana La Ferrara and I conduct a disaggregated empirical analysis of civil conflict at the sub-national level in Africa over 1997-2011, using new gridded data. We construct an original measure of agriculture-relevant shocks exploiting within-year variation in weather and in crop growing season, and spatial variation in crop cover. Temporal and spatial spillovers in conflict are addressed through spatial econometric techniques. Negative shocks during the growing season of local crops affect conflict incidence persistently, and local conflict then spills over in space. We use our estimates to trace the dynamic response to shocks and predict how future warming may affect violence.
by Mariaflavia Harari.
Cities in Bad Shape: Urban Geometry in India -- Women's Inheritance Rights and Bargaining Power: Evidence from Kenya -- Conflict, Climate and Cells: a Disaggregated Analysis.
Ph. D.

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Zucker, Ariel D. (Ariel Dama). "Essays on development economics." Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/120239.

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Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Economics, 2018.
Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 209-219).
This thesis studies three questions in development economics. Chapter 1, co-authored with Shilpa Aggarwal and Rebecca Dizon-Ross, explores how the design of incentives should vary with the time preferences of agents. We formulate predictions for two incentive contract variations that should increase efficacy for myopic 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 effectiveness, suggesting limited impatience over payments. However, making the payment function dynamically non-separable increases cost-effectiveness. 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. Chapter 2 presents evidence that the standard electricity billing process contributes to inelastic demand. The paper assesses the elasticity of demand for electricity for customers using two metering and billing technologies. The first technology, postpaid metering, allows customers to use energy and subsequently bills them for the amount utilized. Many features of this system may reduce attentiveness to the marginal price of energy-consuming activities: electricity prices are buried in monthly bills; charges are aggregated over a lengthy billing period, making it difficult to match energy-consuming behaviors to kilowatt-hours used; and bills are delivered after consumption, potentially making cost less salient at the time of consumption. The second technology, prepaid metering, requires customers to purchase electricity prior to its use (similar to a prepaid phone plan). I find that customers who are charged under the second technology are approximately twice as price-elastic as those who are billed later. Chapter 3, co-authored with Nick Hagerty, presents an experimental protocol for a project that pays smallholder farmers in India to reduce their consumption of groundwater. This project will test the effectiveness of payments for voluntary conservation - a policy instrument that may be able to sidestep regulatory constraints common in developing countries. It will also measure the price response of demand for groundwater in irrigated agriculture, a key input to many possible reforms. Evidence from a pilot suggests that the program may have reduced groundwater pumping by a large amount, though confidence intervals are wide.
by Ariel D. Zucker.
Ph. D.

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Mantovanelli, Federico. "Essays in Development Economics." Thesis, Boston College, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/2345/3793.

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Thesis advisor: Scott Fulford
Thesis advisor: Mathis Wagner
This dissertation consists of three chapters. The first chapter investigates how the historical development of Protestantism may contribute to explain current literacy disparities in India. Combining information about the spatial distribution of Protestant missions in India at the end of the nineteenth century with contemporary district-level data, I find a strong long-term relationship between the historical exposure to Protestant missions and current literacy. I then verify that this relationship is not driven by unobserved characteristics that may affect both current literacy outcomes as well as the missionaries' location decisions. The second chapter exploits local variations in the historical exposure to Christianity to explain current differences in individual HIV-related sexual behaviors in Africa. I find that exposure to the presence of Catholic missions at the end of the nineteenth century is associated with a decrease in current HIV infection rates. I also examine whether historical Catholic and Protestant missions have a different impact on individual sexual behaviors. I find that Catholicism, while having a small negative impact on the propensity of condom use, is positively associated with the adoption of safer forms of sexual behavior (pre-marriage sexual abstinence, delay of first sexual intercourse and marital faithfulness). Finally, in the third chapter I examine the impact of international migration and remittances on the labor supply of the family members left behind. Using data from Albania, I find that international migration has a significant impact on labor force participation. Remittances receipts from abroad determine a substitution effect away from the labor market, particularly for the female population
Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2014
Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
Discipline: Economics

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Trias, J. M. "Essays on development economics." Thesis, University College London (University of London), 2013. http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1395926/.

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Chapter 1 investigates the impact of weather-related income shocks on infant mortality in rural Ecuador. I find that favorable weather conditions during the growing season have a negative effect on infant survival rates when the harvest takes place during the first and third trimester of pregnancy, and the first trimester following birth. My results suggest that the negative effects of an increased ma- ternal labour supply, following a positive agricultural productivity shock, during pregnancy and the first trimester after birth outstrip the positive effects resulting from the consequent higher income when considering year-to-year weather fluc- tuations. I also find that favorable weather during the growing season reduces -via maternal time- prenatal care, skilled assistance at birth, and breastfeeding duration and frequency. Chapter 2 explores the presence of spillover effects on schooling outcomes from the Colombian welfare program, “Familias en Acción”, on ineligible households in rural areas. The program provides cash subsidies to poor families conditional on children school attendance. I find that ineligible chil- dren — those living in a household that has not been classified as poor—residing in targeted areas are more likely to stay in the school during the transition pe- riod between primary and secondary school. My results suggest that peer effects might play an important role in schooling decisions as the increased grade com- pletion rate of the peer group increases the individual completion. Chapter 3 uses a randomized experiment to examine the causal effect of improving hous- ing conditions on child health, and adult mental health. We find that replacing floors, upgrading toilets, kitchen, and play areas has no impact on child health but these results are subject to a high level of non-selective attrition on children. We also find that the program improves caregiver’s mental health as measured by the CES-D depression score.

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Kirchberger, Martina. "Essays in development economics." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2013. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:1ee9ff16-cb50-447a-8e20-f9e5865334d6.

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This thesis comprises three stand-alone chapters: The first chapter is on the effect of natural disasters on labor markets. Using data from the Indonesia Family Life Survey, the Desinventar database, the US Geological Survey and district level employment indicators, we explore how a large earthquake in Indonesia affected local labor markets, in particular the evolution of wages and employment across sectors. We find that wage growth in the agriculture sector is significantly higher in earthquake affected areas. We propose two mechanisms for this result and show evidence for both mechanisms. The second chapter investigates the intra-household allocation of leisure and consumption among siblings. Children are often treated as passive members in the household and their preferences over consumption and leisure are rarely modeled. This chapter considers children as agents with their own preferences over leisure and consumption and builds a theoretical and empirical model for children's time and consumption allocations in a household. We test the predictions of the model with data from Ethiopia, India, Peru and Vietnam. The results suggest that differences in siblings' relative time and consumption allocations are driven by their relative preferences over leisure and consumption rather than differences in parents' relative altruism. The third chapter examines the cost of transport infrastructure in developing countries. To our knowledge, this is the first study that analyzes drivers of unit costs of construction of transport infrastructure using a large data set of 3,322 unit costs of road work activities in low and middle income countries. We find a large dispersion in unit costs for comparable work activities. Unit costs are significantly higher in conflict and corrupt countries, and these effects are robust to controlling for a country's public investment capacity and business environment. Finally, higher unit costs are significantly negatively correlated with infrastructure provision.

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Rud, Juan Pablo. "Essays on development economics." Thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science (University of London), 2008. http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/2184/.

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This thesis presents three papers that contribute to the measurement and understanding of the process of economic development. In particular, I deal with issues of significant importance in the current literature in development economics: the provision and regulatory institutions of infrastructure, firms and industries' behaviour and performance, and the process of human capital accumulation and its link to gender issues. In Chapter 2 I investigate the effect of electricity provision on industrialization using a panel of Indian states from 1965-1984. To address the endogeneity of investment in electrification, I use the introduction of a new agricultural technology intensive in irrigation (the Green Revolution) as a natural experiment. As electric pumpsets are used to provide farmers with cheap irrigation water, I use the uneven availability of groundwater to predict divergence in the expansion of the electricity network and, ultimately, to quantify the effect of electrification on industrial outcomes. I present a series of tests to rule out alternative explanations that could link groundwater availability to industrialization directly or through other means than electrification. Overall, the uneven expansion of the electricity network explains between 10 and 15 percentage points of the difference in manufacturing output across states in India. In Chapter 3 I explore how firms in India cope with the erratic and expensive provision of electricity. In a model that combines upstream regulation with downstream heterogeneous firms in a monopolistic competition firework, I investigate the role of the electricity regulator's preferences and the economic environment (i.e. regulation and openness) in determining the decision to adopt a captive generator of electricity and industries' aggregate productivity. I show that a firm's productivity, the electricity regulator's disregard for the well-being of industrial producers consuming electricity and greater industry protection from competition are associated with greater adoption of captive power. The mechanisms I propose are present for a representative repeated cross-section sample of Indian firms in the 1990s, with heterogeneous effects along dimensions such as location. In Chapter 4 I investigate the effect of the Green Revolution on rural literacy and rural women's employment and literacy levels, using a panel of 254 districts for census years, before and after the introduction of the high yield variety (HYV) seeds. Even though the new technology has been shown to increase returns to education, aggregate effects on literacy are ambiguous a priori, if claims are correct that the process excluded most poor farmers and that mechanization replaced women labour and their effects are strong. I find robust evidence that the increase in adoption of the new seeds is associated with increases of around 2 percentage points in literacy levels. The effects are only present for treated cohorts. Additionally, I find no evidence of a Green Revolution related increase in the gender gap: even though results indicate that the percentages of working and literate women in rural India fall over time, a greater intensity in HYV is shown to mitigate this trend.

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Moscoso, Miranda Henry Bernard. "Essays in Development Economics." Doctoral thesis, Universitat de Barcelona, 2021. http://hdl.handle.net/10803/672623.

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Development economics seeks to provide evidence to improve life quality standards of the societies. This thesis contributes to this field with a multidisciplinary research on health, environmental and crime economics. This essay is composed of 3 academic papers that analyze actual social problems that have received little attention by policy makers and scholars, and that are negatively affecting newborns health and women wellbeing, in the context of Ecuador. The pivotal economic literature has shown the relevance of studying the impact of different types of externalities on health at birth and infant health (Barker, 1995; Almond et al., 2005; Black et al., 2007; Almond and Currie, 2011; Almond, Currie, and Duque, 2018). Social problems such as insecurity or environment pollution play a fundamental role in the newborns’ growing environment. Nowadays, there is a wide evidence on the consequences that adverse environmental externalities received during intra-uterine growth generate in the future development and living conditions of the population, affecting relevant aspects like their cognitive ability, psychological and personality traits, scholarity, and wages (Currie and Vogl, 2013; Bharadwaj et al., 2013; Almond, Currie, and Duque, 2018). Similarly, there is a growing empirical evidence on the negative consequences of insecurity and crime on infant cognitive capacity and human capital formation (Duque, 2017; Sharkey et al., 2012). Moreover, crime generates psychological stress to those individuals who are directly or indirectly exposed to it (Aizer, 2016; Koppensteiner and Manacorda, 2016; Currie et al., 2020). This thesis contributes to this literature examining three relevant problems that affects the population of Ecuador: environmental pollution due to the use of pesticides in agriculture; maternal stress due to violent crimes, and violence against women. Moreover, each chapter provides strong evidence to address future public policy design. The second chapter of the thesis examines the effects of the use of pesticides in the banana plantations of Ecuador on newborns’ health outcomes. The results drawn from this research reveal that the exposure to the intensive use of pesticides leads to a deficit in the birth weight when the exposure occurs during the first trimester of gestation. Moreover, exposure to intensive use of pesticides during the last gestation stage increases the likelihood of low birth weight and low Apgar score at first minute. The third chapter of the thesis reveals the existence of a retaliation effect after a reform of the penal code in 2014 that increased the penalties for gender-related violence and that introduce the femicide penalty type. I show that this legislative reform, and its enforcement, led to a (temporally) increase in the women victimization rates. The fourth chapter of this thesis examines the effects of the maternal stress generated by violent crimes on newborns’ health outcomes. The results obtained from this research reveal that mothers’ indirect exposure to homicides during pregnancy causes a deficit in the birth weight, which is especially important when this exposure occurs during the first trimester of gestation. Moreover, I demonstrate that mothers’ past exposure to violent crimes attenuates the effects of homicides during pregnancy. Furthermore, the exposure to homicides during the last gestation term reduces gestation length and the Apgar score at the first minute.

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Cassidy, Rachel. "Essays in development economics." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2017. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:211fd89c-c31a-4d68-99c1-157e5a58b9b2.

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The thesis comprises three chapters on the microeconomics of development. The first chapter consists of a lab-in-field experiment in rural Pakistan. I test whether anticipated changes in individuals' liquidity constraints can cause individuals spuriously to appear "present-biased" or "future-biased". The design uses experimental windfalls to create fully exogenous variation in subjects' liquidity constraints. The results suggest that the effect of liquidity constraints on "present-bias" and "future-bias" in monetary tasks exists, is large, and does not operate via changing cognitive function or risk preferences. Importantly, and in contrast with other recent studies, I establish that the causation runs from tighter liquidity constraints to appearing "present-biased"ârather than truly present-biased individuals making choices which lead to tighter liquidity constraints. The findings have important implications for the measurement of time preferences, and for interventions offering commitment. The second chapter - co-authored with Marije Groot Bruinderink, Wendy Janssens and Karlijn Morsink - describes a field experiment in the slums of Matola, Mozambique. We model and test how intra-household bargaining affects adoption of dual-protection contraceptive technologies, when women place a greater weight than men on the health costs of unprotected sex. To do so, we evaluate an intervention which provides women with information about and free access to male and female condoms. We find strong impacts on adoption of female condoms, using both survey data and data from weekly coital diaries. As predicted by the model, take-up of female condoms is higher among women with low household bargaining power at baseline, including women who are unable to convince their partner to use male condoms. The third chapter â co-authored with Marcel Fafchamps â reports the findings from a survey of Village Savings and Loan Associations (VSLAs) in Malawi. We ask whether some individuals adopt VSLAs as a commitment savings technology, and whether they sort into groups with borrowers. Using dyadic regression analysis we find evidence of negative assortative matching on a measure of "present-bias", which suggests that this is the case. This may increase financial intermediation, and welfare, in villages with low access to formal banking.

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Islam, Mahnaz. "Essays on Development Economics." Thesis, Harvard University, 2015. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:17465323.

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This dissertation studies agricultural technology adoption, child labor and development. Although adoption of fertilizers has been high in South Asia, farmers may fail to use it efficiently. Besides higher costs incurred by households engaged in agriculture, inefficient use of fertilizers may also have negative consequences for the environment. The first chapter of this dissertation uses a field experiment in Bangladesh to study whether providing farmers access to a simple rule-of-thumb tool (leaf color chart) to manage the timing of fertilizer applications can improve efficiency of fertilizer use and lead to productivity gains. The second chapter explores whether characteristics of agricultural trainers, who introduced the leaf color charts to the farmers in the treatment group, play an important role in the adoption and use of leaf color charts by farmers. The final chapter of this dissertation studies the impact of a large public workfare program targeting rural households in India on children. In particular, we study the impact of time use by the youngest and oldest children in a household as adult time use changes in response to new work opportunities.
Public Policy

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Trucco, Laura Carolina. "Essays in Development Economics." Thesis, Harvard University, 2015. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:23845454.

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Economic development, more often than not, is tightly connected to good governance and adequate provision of public goods and services. My dissertation examines characteristics of developing countries that are relevant to the quality of government, as they affect the interaction between citizens and government. In chapter 1, I focus on squatters and the opportunities for political intermediation associated with the lack of property rights on land. In this chapter, I study an extensive land titling program in urban Mexico and its effect on clientelism. In chapter 2, I examine the costs of party turnover for the quality of public education in Brazilian municipalities, a context where the bureaucracy is not shielded from the political process. In chapter 3, I study the feedback effect of government work on citizens’ participation. To this end, I focus on maintenance work on the public space and citizens’ complaints in the City of Buenos Aires.
Economics

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Lichand, Guilherme Finkelfarb. "Essays in Development Economics." Thesis, Harvard University, 2016. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:33493343.

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Chapter 1 studies the effects of fighting corruption on public service delivery. While corruption crackdowns have been shown to effectively reduce missing government expenditures, their effects on public service delivery have not been credibly documented. This matters because, if corruption generates incentives for bureaucrats to deliver those services, then deterring it might actually hurt downstream outcomes. The chapter exploits variation from an anti-corruption program in Brazil, designed by the federal government to enforce guidelines on earmarked transfers to municipalities, to study this question. Combining random audits with a differences-in-differences strategy, we find that the anti-corruption program greatly reduced occurrences of over-invoicing and off-the-record payments, and of procurement manipulation within health transfers. However, health indicators, such as hospital beds and immunization coverage, became worse as a result. Evidence from audited amounts suggests that lower corruption came at a high cost: after the program, public spending fell by so much that corruption per dollar spent actually increased. These findings are consistent with those responsible for procurement dramatically reducing purchases after the program, either because they no longer can capture rents, or because they are afraid of being punished for procurement mistakes. Chapters 2 and 3 study the psychology of droughts. Chapter 2 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 recent rainfall shocks and survey experiments 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. Chapter 3 investigates whether index insurance can shield farmers against the cognitive effects documented in the previous chapter. In theory, insurance could mitigate those effects by alleviating the material consequences of rainfall risk. To test this hypothesis, we randomly assign offers of an index insurance product, and find that it does not affect farmers’ cognitive load. These results suggest that farmers’ anxiety might be relatively difficult to alleviate.
Political Economy and Government

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Deserranno, Erika. "Essays in development economics." Thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science (University of London), 2015. http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/3262/.

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This thesis contains three chapters that fall under the broad banner of development economics, with a particular focus on the study of mechanisms and strategies that improve public goods delivery. The first chapter studies the role of financial incentives as signals of job attributes when these are unknown to potential applicants. I create experimental variation in expected earnings and use it to estimate the effect of financial incentives on candidates’ perception of a newly created health worker position in Uganda and, through this, on the size and composition of the applicant pool. I find that more lucrative positions are perceived as entailing a lower positive externality for the community, and discourage agents with strong prosocial preferences from applying. While higher financial incentives attract more applicants and increase the probability of filling a vacancy, they hamper retention and performance. This is because the signal they convey reduces the ability to recruit the most socially motivated agents, who are found to stay longer on the job and to perform better. The second chapter analyzes the role of social connections on the targeting choices of delivery agents. During the expansion of an agriculture extension program in Uganda, we randomly selected one delivery agent out of two eligible candidates per community. We find that social connections matter: relative to farmers connected only to the non-selected candidate, those connected only to the selected delivery agent benefit more from the program. They are indeed more likely to receive advice, training and more likely to adopt improved seeds, a new beneficial technology. We show that these results are consistent with delivery agents (a) putting positive weight on the utility of farmers connected to them (altruism) and (b) putting a negative weight on the utility of farmers connected to the rival candidate (spite). This sheds light on the importance of both positive and negative social preferences in shaping program delivery. The third chapter studies the effect of movement restrictions on education. The evidence is based on the construction of the West Bank Separation Barrier in 2003. The exposure of an individual to the Barrier is determined both by her locality of residence and by whether she was in school or about to start school when the Barrier was built. Using a difference-indifferences approach, I find that movement restrictions increase the probability of dropping out from elementary and preparatory school by 3.7 and 6 percentage points respectively, i.e. a 50% increase relative to localities with no movement restrictions, while the proportion of children who have never attended school increased by 3.6 percentage points. Among all households, the poorest ones are the most affected, indicating that movement restrictions not only deteriorate the average education level but also increase income inequality.

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Molina, Campodonico Oswaldo. "Essays on development economics." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:68f7a892-da8d-4104-a948-79cab1357d42.

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This thesis is a collection of essays on the relevance of property right reforms on the wellbeing of poor households in developing countries; specifically titling programmes in urban Peru. The first essay assesses the effects of titling on housing investment. The availability of a unique dataset permits us to trace households' investment behaviour. This allows us to investigate if tenure security induces households to make sizeable investments, the evolution of this effect over time, and whether heterogeneous expectations about future tenure security matter for the estimated impact. Evidence reveals significant effects, especially on large investment; however, the response on this type of investment may take several years to become effective. The second essay contributes to the debate on the sustainability of property rights reforms by emphasising the importance of strong registration systems. Policymakers have focused on the process of granting titles but the conditions needed to maintain the formality of future plot transactions have been left unattended. The analysis exploits an exogenous variation in legislation to examine the impact of a change in the registration process on the registration rate of plot transactions. Evidence suggests a large negative effect, implying that a weak registration system could threaten the reform. The third essay explores the impact of titling on the risk preferences of slum dwellers. The analysis provides evidence that titled dwellers reported lower values of the risk aversion measure than their non-treated counterparts. Results also suggest that tenure security can influence slum dwellers' preference formation process. Evidence shows that beneficiaries who were exposed to tenure security during their youth report on average lower values of the risk aversion indicator than individuals titled at an older age.

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Trako, Iva. "Essays on Development Economics." Thesis, Paris Sciences et Lettres (ComUE), 2018. http://www.theses.fr/2018PSLEH043/document.

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Le chapitre 1 évalue l'impact d'une politique publique au Pérou visant à améliorer l'accès à la justice et à réduire la violence contre les femmes. Ce chapitre utilise des données sur les centres de justice pour femmes (CJF) au Pérou, des institutions spécialisées qui emploient principalement des femmes et fournissent des services de police et des services juridiques pour réduire la violence fondée sur le genre. En examinant le déploiement progressif des CJF dans les districts, nous constatons que l'ouverture d'un centre augmente de 40 % le nombre de signalements de crimes spécifiques au genre et réduit d'environ 10 % l'incidence de la violence fondée sur le genre, mesurée par la violence domestique, les féminicides et les hospitalisations pour cause de santé mentale. Nous constatons en outre qu'une diminution de l'exposition des femmes à la violence domestique a des effets intergénérationnels : les CJF augmentent considérablement les investissements en capital humain pour les enfants, ce qui augmente la scolarisation, la présence scolaire et les résultats aux examens. Le chapitre 2 examine l'effet de la fécondité sur les décisions des parents albanais en matière d'offre de travail. Afin d'aborder la question de l'endogénéité potentielle de la décision de fécondité, j'exploite la préférence des parents albanais pour avoir des garçons combinés avec l'instrument de composition du genre des frères et sœurs comme source exogène de variation. En utilisant un échantillon représentatif de parents ayant au moins deux enfants, je constate un effet positif et significatif de la fécondité sur l'offre de travail pour les parents plus jeunes, moins scolarisés ou vivant dans une famille élargie. Les estimations pour les mères montrent qu'elles augmentent l'offre de travail en termes d'heures travaillées et de probabilité de travailler hors secteur rural. De même, la probabilité pour le père de travailler hors secteur rural et d'avoir un deuxième emploi augmente à la suite d'autres naissances. L'analyse de l'hétérogénéité suggère deux mécanismes plausibles : les services de garde offerts par des adultes non-parentaux (grands-parents) dans les familles élargies et les coûts financiers plus élevés liés au maintien d'un plus grand nombre d'enfants. Le chapitre 3 analyse l'effet du déplacement forcé de populations sur l'offre de travail des adultes et la scolarisation des enfants dans le contexte de l'après-guerre au Kosovo. Ce chapitre utilise la guerre du Kosovo de 1998-1999 et les déplacements massifs de population comme une expérimentation naturelle afin d'estimer l'impact du déplacement forcé dû au conflit sur les Kosovars qui sont partis et qui ont décidé de revenir par rapport à ceux qui sont restés pendant la guerre. J'exploite l'intéraction de la variation spatiale de l'intensité du conflit - mesurée par le nombre de victimes et de bombardements - et de la distance à la frontière albanaise comme source de variation exogène dans le statut de déplacement. Les résultats indiquent que les hommes kosovars déplacés sont moins susceptibles d'être employés dans le secteur agricole et de travailler pour leur propre compte, tandis que les femmes kosovares déplacées sont plus susceptibles d'être inactives. La perte d'actifs (terres, bétail, etc.) dans une économie agraire fondée sur les compétences et la perte de réseaux sociaux dans un marché du travail informel pourraient avoir réduit davantage la probabilité de trouver un emploi par rapport aux personnes qui sont restées. Toutefois, peu après le retour au pays, les résultats indiquent également que les hommes et les femmes kosovars déplacés sont plus susceptibles de travailler hors secteur rural, en particulier dans les secteurs de la construction et de l'administration publique, ce qui indique une reprise relativement rapide. En outre, les filles kosovares déplacées sont plus susceptibles d'être inscrites à l'école primaire, mais je ne constate aucun effet sur la scolarisation des garçons
Chapter 1 evaluates the impact of a policy intervention in Peru aimed at improving access to justice and reducing violence against women. In many developing countries, access to justice remains unequal, especially for women. What are the implications of this inequality for gender-based violence, intra-household bargaining, and investment in children? This paper provides evidence from Peru on all-women's justice centers (WJCs), specialized institutions that mostly employ female officers and provide police and legal services to reduce gender-based violence. Examining the gradual rollout of WJCs across districts/ villages, we find that the opening of a center increases reporting of gender-specific crimes by 40% and reduces the incidence of gender-based violence measured by domestic violence, femicides and hospitalizations due to mental health by about 10%. We find, moreover, that a decrease in the exposure of women to violence has intergenerational effects: WJCs substantially increase human capital investments in children, raising enrollment, attendance, and test scores. These results are consistent with a bargaining model in which women's access to justice determines the threat point. Chapter 2 examines the effect of fertility on labor supply decisions of Albanian parents, with particular attention to the intervening role of childcare provided by grandparents in extended families. In order to address the potential endogeneity in the fertility decision, I exploit Albanian parental preference for having sons combined with the sibling’s sex-composition instrument as an exogenous source of variation. Using a repeated cross-section of parents with at least two children, I find a positive and statistically significant effect of fertility on parental labor supply for those parents who are more likely to be younger, less educated or live in extended families. In particular, IV estimates for mothers show that they increase labor supply, especially in terms of hours worked per week and the likelihood of working off-farm. Similarly, father’s likelihood of working off-farm and having a second occupation increase as a consequence of further childbearing. The heterogeneity analysis suggests that this positive effect might be the result of two plausible mechanisms: childcare provided by non-parental adults in extended families and greater financial costs of maintaining more children. Chapter 3 analyzes the effect of forced displacement on adult’s labor market outcomes and children’s schooling in the context of the post-war Kosovo. This chapter uses the 1998-1999 Kosovo war and the following massive displacement of people as a natural experiment in order to estimate the impact of conflict displacement on Kosovars that left and decided to come back relative to those who stayed in the province. I exploit the interaction of the spatial variation in conflict intensity -as measured by casualties and bombings- and distance to the Albanian border as a source of exogenous variation in the displacement status. Results indicate that displaced Kosovar men are less likely to be employed in the agricultural sector and to work on their own account, while displaced Kosovar women are more likely to be inactive. Loss of assets (e.g. land, livestock) in an agrarian skill-based economy and also loss of social networks in an informal labor market might have further decreased the probability to find employment relative to stayers. However, shortly after the return home, the results also indicate that displaced Kosovar men and women are more likely to be working off-farm, especially in the construction and public administration sectors, which indicates a relatively quick recovery. In addition, displaced Kosovar girls are more likely to be enrolled in primary school, but I find no effect on education for boys. The refugee camp experience might have provided better conditions to young Kosovar girls compared to the precarious pre-war “parallel" education system

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Ugochukwu, Michael Anyanwu. "Essays in Development Economics." Doctoral thesis, Luiss Guido Carli, 2019. http://hdl.handle.net/11385/201071.

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This thesis is a combination of two essays in development economics that explores the implication of income inequality and capital liberalization on economic development. The first essay — Income Inequality, Rent-seeking and Economic Growth in Resource Abundant Countries, revisits the debate on the relationship between income inequality and economic growth. Prevailing research on the inequality-growth nexus suggests that inequality has a negative impact on economic growth of a country. In addition to the relationship between inequality and economic growth, this essay reviews studies that aim to ascertain the reasons behind the observation that countries who have abundant natural resources do not outperform resource-scarce countries – the so called resource curse hypothesis. Following the literatures, we hypothesize that inequality is more detrimental to economic performance in resource-abundant countries. Using the system generalized method of moments (GMM) dynamic panel estimation method and data set for the period 1988-2012, we compare the relationship between inequality and economic growth in resource and nonresource abundant countries. Our results confirm that the negative impact of income inequality on economic growth is amplified for countries that are endowed with abundant natural resources. In the second essay — Greasing The Revolving Door: Foreign Aid, Governance and Private Capital Flows, we revisit the debate on the importance of capital liberalization on economic performance. Using Three-Stage Least Squares (3SLS) estimation technique that is proposed in Zellner and Theil (1962), we synthesize studies on the determinants of governance and capital flows. We find evidence of a revolving door relationship. Foreign aid has a negative impact on governance and, thereby, reduces capital inflows since poor governance hinders capital inflows. The need to fill the gap that is created by private capital outflows encourages inflow of foreign aid, which in turn harms governance. Our empirical result has a clear policy implication. Capital liberalization could grease a revolving door and handicap economic development in the aid receiving countries.

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BONAN, JACOPO DANIELE. "Essays in development economics." Doctoral thesis, Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/10281/46828.

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Gaps in financial access remain stark in the largest part of developing countries and have relevant consequences on poor households’ economic decisions, such as credit, saving and risk management. Lack of availability of formal financial services provided by either the market or public authorities (e.g in case of health insurance) have been compensated by the activity of informal groups, associations and arrangements. Old and new forms of community-based groups have been largely documented in most of developing countries and are shown to be active in several crucial economic domains. They have different levels of institutionalization as they can simply rely on social norms or can have rules and a certain degree of formalization concerning e.g. selection criteria, enforcement, sanctions. They all have in common the voluntary participation of people from the same community (village, neighbourhood, people of the same profession), the delivery of services to members, the non-profit character, the underpinning values of solidarity and mutual help. Some examples of community-based groups in Sub-Saharan Africa are analysed in this thesis: Rotating Saving and Credit Associations (roscas), funeral groups and mutual health organizations (MHOs). The importance of studying community-based arrangements lies in the premise that interventions at the level of a local community can deliver more effective and equitable development. Moreover, examining the mechanics of the informal market is very important for two reasons. First, the strength of the informal market is important for measuring and predicting how effective specific formal sector interventions could be, in the perspective of scaling-up. Second, lessons learned in the informal markets can help shape policy in the formal (Karlan and Morduch 2009). In chapter 1, drawing on data from a household survey in urban Benin1, we examine membership in two types of informal groups that display the characteristics of a commitment device: rotating savings and credit associations (roscas) and funeral groups. We investigate whether agents displaying time-inconsistent preferences are sophisticated enough to commit themselves through taking part in such groups. We provide evidence indicating that women who are hyperbolic are more likely to join these groups and to save more through them, but men displaying similar preferences appear naïve with regards membership. Moreover, we find that hyperbolic agents, irrespective of their gender, tend to restrain consumption of frivolous goods to a larger extent. Furthermore, weak evidence is provided that microcredit can be used as a device to foster self-discipline. We also ensure that our results cannot be explained by intrahousehold conflict issues. The second chapter largely draws on Bonan J, Dagnelie O., LeMay-Boucher P. and Tenikue M. (2012) “Is it all about Money? A Randomized Evaluation of the Impact of Insurance Literacy and Marketing Treatments on the Demand for Health Microinsurance in Senegal”, Working Papers 216, University of Milano-Bicocca, Department of Economics. It is based on a field work we carried out in Spring-Summer 2010 in Thies, Senegal, which I coordinated and supervised. The chapter presents experimental evidence on mutual health organizations (MHOs) in the area of Thiès, Senegal. Despite their benefits, in some areas there remain low take-up rates. We offer an insurance literacy module, communicating the benefits from health microinsurance and the functioning of MHOs, to a randomly selected sample of households. The effects of this training, and three cross-cutting marketing treatments, are evaluated using a randomized control trial. We find that our various marketing treatments have a positive and significant effect on health insurance adoption, increasing take-up by around 35%. Comparatively the insurance literacy module has a negligible impact on the take up decisions. We attempt at providing different contextual reasons for this result. The third chapter is an extension of the second and draws on the same dataset. We measure the willingness to pay (WTP) for MHOs premiums in a Senegalese urban context. WTP valuations can help both policy makers and existent MHOs in better understanding the characteristics of the demand of microinsurance products. This chapter considers the role of individual and household socio-economic determinants of willingness to pay for a health microinsurance product and add to the previous literature evidence of the role of income, wealth and risk preferences on individual WTP. We find that richer, more wealthy and more risk-averse head of households are more likely to reveal a higher WTP for health microinsurance. Conscious of the potential limits of our elicitation strategy (bidding game), we incorporate the existent literature on the effects of ‘preferences anomalies’ (Watson and Ryan 2007) and estimate WTP accounting for structural shift in preferences (Alberini et al. 1997), anchoring effect (Herriges and Shogren 1996) and the two effects together (Whitehead 2002). We find evidence of slight underestimation of the median WTP if preferences anomalies are not taken into consideration. However, the extent of such difference is far from being relevant. Previous results on the determinants of WTP are robust to the effect of such preference anomalies. We also provide an analysis of the predictive power of WTP on the actual take-up of insurance following our offering of membership to a sample of 360 households. WTP appears to have a positive and significant impact on actual take-up.

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STADENBERG, IDA. "Innovative Cluster Organizations in Tanzania : A Minor Field Study evaluating cluster performance and actor collaborations within the clusters included in ISCP-Tz." Thesis, KTH, Nationalekonomi, 2016. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-198691.

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Cluster Organizations, as a means of promoting competition and innovation in industrial clusters, have become increasingly popular over the world. Cluster organizations aim to increase growth and competitiveness of clusters within a region, and have become a central part of economic policy-making across the world. Recently, the concept has been used to a larger extent as a tool for economic development and poverty alleviation. This thesis seeks to examine the cluster organizations that are part of the Sida funded program Innovation Systems and Cluster development in Tanzania (ISCP-Tz), by evaluating performance, goals and development of the program based on cluster facilitators perceptions, and assess linkages and actor collaborations between clustered actors. The data in this thesis is collected through a telephone-administered questionnaire, as well as interviews and visits to cluster sites. The results show a positive impact on cluster firms performance as assessed by cluster facilitators, but show that actor collaborations in many cases are inadequate and need to be improved.

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Hu, Guohua. "The state (re)production of scale : a case study of Shenshan Special Cooperation Zone, China." HKBU Institutional Repository, 2020. https://repository.hkbu.edu.hk/etd_oa/854.

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The scale is a fundamental yet controversial concept in human geography. Among diverse views over scale, this thesis draws insights from the process-based approach of scale jumping. It is a key notion to understand scale as a process, yet few explorations have been made on making use of its methodological values. Thus this thesis seeks to elaborate the notion by redeveloping it as an analytical framework. Four key elements are therefore concerned: (a) actors and their purposes; (b) directions; (c) approaches; and (d) outcomes. These elements form a framework to investigate the rescaling process of economic space in China. Conventional studies suggest that in the context of global competition, the role of state in scale (re)production has changed from a passive to an active actor. In China, where the state plays an active role in facilitating the economy, different levels of state actors, such as government officials and institutions, are involved in the (re)production of scale. Using the production of Shenshan Special Cooperation Zone (SSCZ) as a case study, the abovementioned four elements are investigated. Specifically, there are three research questions: (a) why do local governments rescale their economy? (b) How do local governments build SSCZ? And (c) what is the outcome of rescaling through SSCZ? The qualitative research method is used to collect data and other information for this research. This includes desktop searches and interviews of businessmen, planners, government officials, and local residents. Through a detailed investigation of the production of SSCZ, this research reveals the role of local governments, their intentions for rescaling, the approaches they used, and the outcomes of the rescaling

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Spash, Clive L., and Tone Smith. "Of Ecosystems and Economies: Re-connecting Economics with Reality." WU Vienna University of Economics and Business, 2019. http://epub.wu.ac.at/6903/1/sre%2Ddisc%2D2019_03.pdf.

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This discussion paper looks at the connections between economies and ecosystems, or more generally biophysical reality. The term "economies" is used, rather than "the economy", because of the prevalent false claim that there is only one type of economic system that is possible. We outline how the ecological crises is linked to the dominant drive for economic growth and the tendency to equate growth with progress and development; common even amongst those apparently critical of the need for continued growth in the materially rich countries. The unreality of mainstream economics is epitomised by the accolades given to those justifying mild reformist policy in response to human induced climate change in order to continue the pursuit of economic growth. We emphasise the structural aspects of economies as emergent from and dependent upon the structure and functioning of both society and ecology (energy and material flows). Finally, that the structure of the global economy must change to avoid social ecological collapse, poses the questions of how that can be achieved and what sort of economics is necessary? We explain the need for: (i) a structural change that addresses the currently dysfunctional relationships between economic, social and ecological systems, and (ii) an economics that is interdisciplinary and realist about its social and natural science relations.
Series: SRE - Discussion Papers

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Chiang, Alvin L. "Three Essays in Economic Development, Growth, and Trade." FIU Digital Commons, 2017. http://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd/3485.

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This dissertation is composed of three essays and analyzes the effects of both health outcomes and international trade on economic development and growth. In the first chapter, I develop a theoretical model using a Nelson-Phelps framework in order to establish a causal relationship between health outcomes and economic growth. I also econometrically test this approach to quantify the magnitude of the effects observed. Using the international epidemiological transition as a baseline and instrumental variable regression, I find that both life expectancy growth rates and initial levels of life expectancy are the main drivers of economic growth, and improvements in both indicators lead to significant, positive changes in the income per-capita growth rate. In the second chapter, I design an overlapping generations model that showcases how individuals determine their optimal fertility, education, labor supply, and life-cycle consumption decisions under uncertain survival probabilities. Under partial equilibrium, exogenous shocks in mortality lead to explicit changes in economic growth and development through the above mechanisms, but under general equilibrium, predictions are ambiguous due to offsetting substitution and income effects. I complement the theory with an empirical analysis, constructing age-specific birth rates, age-specific death rates, and life expectancies from the Demographic and Health Surveys in 36 Sub-Saharan African countries. Using system-GMM estimation, the results show that improvements in health will have a positive and statistically significant impact on economic growth and development. In the third chapter, I develop an analysis similar to Hausmann, Hwang, and Rodrik (2007), whose main argument is that what countries export has significant predicting power on its economic growth and development. Giving greater transparency to both the data collection and the empirical methodology, I replicate their research and instead use imports as a robustness check. The results confirm previous studies and shows that exports, not imports, matter for economic growth. Thus, we conclude that the type and quality of goods in which a country specializes and exports is directly related to its subsequent economic performance.

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Ncala, Thembekile. "The political economy of oil in Nigeria: How oil's impact on rent distribution has contributed to Nigeria's sub-optimal economic performance." Master's thesis, University of Cape Town, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/22938.

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Nigeria is an oil-rich country, and one of the largest oil producers in the world, however, its economic and developmental statistics have consistently ranked among the worst in the world. This paradox is widely believed to be a result of the natural resource curse. The natural resource curse is a phenomenon attributed to the inverse relationship between economic growth rates and the natural resource abundance of countries, and several notions have been put forward as to the mechanism through which the curse arises. These notions are generally categorised as either market-based explanations or political economy-based explanations. However, market-based explanations rely on assumptions that often do not apply in developing countries such as Nigeria. Consequently, the literature has come to increasingly focus on political economy explanations, two of the most prominent of which are rent seeking, and domestic conflict and political instability. Therefore, this paper seeks to identify some the drivers of the curse in Nigeria by particularly assessing the influence that rent seeking and domestic conflict and political instability may have had on Nigeria's economic experience. Since much of the resource curse literature is based on quantitative analysis, this paper aims to extend the literature using a qualitative approach, which involves the process tracing of major events in Nigeria. This approach is motivated by the fact that qualitative analysis is better suited to the task of identifying crucial insights concerning underlying dynamics of a specific country. Furthermore, this paper uses the limited access order (LAO) framework to guide its analysis. This framework is useful given that it involves the analysis of rent distribution as a means of curbing violence. Therefore, overall, this paper focuses on deciphering how oil's impact on the nation's economic rent distribution contributes to Nigeria's economic performance. Rent distribution, which largely occurs through patronage and corruption in Nigeria, is analysed through two different dimensions: (i) Formal rent distribution, which is institutionalised, and which mainly involves examining oil influenced changes to the revenue allocation formula and (ii) less formal rent distribution, which primarily involves examining discretionary and covert rent distribution in the oil industry. Based on the analysis, this paper concludes that oil's impact on rent distribution contributes to Nigeria's substandard growth in two ways; directly and indirectly. Regarding the first dimension, the effect is indirect, as oil's impact on formal rent distribution becomes a driver of conflict, which in turn adversely affects the economy's growth performance. However, regarding the second dimension, the effect is more direct, because oil's impact on discretionary rent distribution leads to massive economic waste, which contributes to the suboptimal growth of Nigeria's economy. Overall, with the lack of good institutions that can limit the power of the federal government, and effectively enforce checks and balances in the oil sector, Nigeria's experience of conflict and economic underperformance will remain perpetual in nature.

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Vika, Lutho. "Gender dynamics in the South African apparel value chain: a case study on the Western Cape province." Master's thesis, University of Cape Town, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/22975.

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Since the early 2000s, South Africa's once thriving sector started to whither due to a combination of domestic and international factors. The result was a sharp decline in manufacturing output, low productivity levels, factory closures and massive job losses across the sector. The blow to the industry was exasperated by the surge of cheap imports, both legal and illegal, primarily coming from China. The poor performance and consequent contraction of the industry had a profound impact on the predominately female workers. In recent years, however, the clothing industry has started to stabilise and is beginning to show positive trends in terms of performance and competitiveness. This paper therefore examines whether female workers have gained from the changes that have taken place in the industry, looking specifically at the Western Cape region. It finds that although the Western Cape clothing industry was the most severely hit by the challenges of global competition, it is now doing relatively well. Furthermore, it argues that the sector is upgrading and providing increased opportunities for women in terms of employment and skills development. This can be attributed to the changes in policy approach by government as well as new and improved production methodologies that are being adopted by firms. Moreover, it argues that the Cape Clothing and Textiles Cluster (CCTC) has played a critical role in driving these processes in the industry primarily through high level trainings and the exposure of executives to the latest industry developments, both nationally and internationally.

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Adaiah, Keren Lilenstein. "Integrating indicators of education quantity and quality in six francophone African countries." Master's thesis, University of Cape Town, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/20561.

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Research and policy-making in education have historically focused on quantitative measures of education when assessing the state of education across countries. Recently, large-scale cross-national tests of cognitive skills have emerged as one way of moving beyond mere quantitative indicators of education, and instead allow researchers to incorporate qualitative elements of education, most notably what students know and can do. Notwithstanding the above, research and development initiatives too often assess these complementary aspects separately, which can lead to biased conclusions. To resolve this issue, the research presented here follows the method developed by Spaull and Taylor (2015) and provides composite measures of educational quantity (grade completion) and quality (learning outcomes) for six Francophone African countries. These composite measures are termed access to literacy and access to numeracy for literacy and numeracy rates respectively. This work also explores quantity and quality indicators separately to ascertain whether problems of access to schooling, or problems of quality among those already enrolled, is a more pertinent development issue. Finally, this work also contributes to understanding the extent and nature of inequalities, by looking at gender and socioeconomic status groups separately when considering (1) access, (2) learning outcomes, and (3) a composite measure of access and learning. Results of this work point to an education crisis within these African countries where both non-enrolment and a lack of learning within schools are contributing to dismal educational outcomes, even at the grade 2 level but especially at the grade 5 level. For example, only 18% and 25% of the grade 5 cohort investigated have access to literacy and access to numeracy, respectively, in Togo. Furthermore, inequality within socioeconomic groups is extremely large resulting in near zero estimates of competency levels for the most economically disadvantaged in some countries. Gender discrimination is dwarfed by economic discrimination but mean estimates suggest that while educational opportunities are similar for males and females at a grade 2 level, gender discrimination may already be visible at the grade 5 level.

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Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Development economics'

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