Journal of Development Economics 2024年 10月刊 目录与摘要
刊发卷期：Volume 171
刊发时间：October 2024
期刊等级：ABS 3
出版厂商：Elsevier
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目录
1.Passing the message: Peer outreach about COVID-19 precautions in Zambia
Alfredo Burlando, Pradeep Chintagunta, Jessica Goldberg, Melissa Graboyes, Peter Hangoma, Dean Karlan, Mario Macis, Silvia Prina
2.Punishing mayors who fail the test: How do voters respond to information about educational outcomes?
Loreto Cox, Sylvia Eyzaguirre, Francisco A. Gallego, Maximiliano García
3.In-group competition for incentives
Michael Olabisi, Mywish Maredia, Jiawen Liu, Toyin Ajibade, Hakeem Ajeigbe
4.How important are matching frictions in the labor market? Experimental & non-experimental evidence from a large Indian firm
Abhijit V. Banerjee, Gaurav Chiplunkar
5.Spatial inefficiencies in Africa’s trade network
Tilman Graff
6.Faster, taller, better: Transit improvements and land use policies
Liming Chen, Rana Hasan, Yi Jiang, Andrii Parkhomenko
7.Evidence on designing sanitation interventions
Britta Augsburg, Andrew Foster, Terence Johnson, Molly Lipscomb
8.Information frictions, belief updating and internal migration: Evidence from Ghana and Uganda
Sarah Frohnweiler, Bernd Beber, Cara Ebert
9.How distortive are turnover taxes? Evidence from China
Jing Xing, Katarzyna Bilicka, Xipei Hou, Sepideh Raei
10.The long-run costs of highly competitive exams for government jobs
Kunal Mangal
11.College opportunity and teen fertility: Evidence from Ser Pilo Paga in Colombia
Michael D. Bloem, Jesús Villero
12.Formal insurance and altruism networks
Tizié Bene, Yann Bramoullé, Frédéric Deroïan
13.Roads, competition, and the informal sector
Elena Perra, Marco Sanfilippo, Asha Sundaram
14.Measuring sex-selective abortion: How many women abort?
Aditi Dimri, Véronique Gille, Philipp Ketz
15.Communist propaganda and women’s status
Ruoyu Qian
16.Pollution-induced trips: Evidence from flight and train bookings in China
Ruochen Dai, Dongmei Guo, Yajie Han, Yu Qin
17.Internal migration and drug violence in Mexico
Lorenzo Aldeco Leo, Andrés Jurado, Aurora A. Ramírez-Álvarez
18.Elite persistence in Sierra Leone: What can names tell us?
Yannick Dupraz, Rebecca Simson
19.Land allocation and industrial agglomeration: Evidence from the 2007 reform in China
Wenjia Tian, Zhi Wang, Qinghua Zhang
20.Energy policies and pollution in two developing country cities: A quantitative model
Rainald Borck, Peter Mulder
21.When beer is safer than water: Beer availability and mortality from waterborne illnesses
Francisca M. Antman, James M. Flynn
22.Supporting small firms in a fragile context: Comparing matching and cash grants in Burkina Faso
Michael Grimm, Sidiki Soubeiga, Michael Weber
23.A Farewell to Arms: Paramilitaries Demobilization, Political Competition and Public Goods in Colombia
Felipe Coy
24.Preprimary education and early childhood development: Evidence from government schools in rural Kenya
Pamela Jakiela, Owen Ozier, Lia C.H. Fernald, Heather A. Knauer
25.Returns to quality in rural agricultural markets: Evidence from wheat markets in Ethiopia
Jérémy Do Nascimento Miguel
26.Childhood migration and educational attainment: Evidence from Indonesia
Hanna Schwank
27.Unlocking the benefits of credit through saving
Sanghamitra Warrier Mukherjee, Lauren Falcao Bergquist, Marshall Burke, Edward Miguel
28.Allocating labor across small firms: Experimental evidence on information constraints
Morgan Hardy, Seongyoon Kim, Jamie McCasland, Andreas Menzel, Marc Witte
29.The seeds of misallocation: Fertilizer use and maize varietal misidentification in Ethiopia
Nils Bohr, Tim Deisemann, Douglas Gollin, Frédéric Kosmowski, Travis J. Lybbert
30.Trade liberalization, labor market power, and misallocation across firms: Evidence from China's WTO accession
Enze Xie, Mingzhi Xu, Miaojie Yu
31.Forced migration and local economic development: Evidence from postwar Hungary
Daniel Borbely, Ross Mckenzie
32.The enduring trauma: How officials' childhood famine experiences affect year-end spending surge
Xing Chen, Peng Zhang, Ping Zhang, Andong Zhuge
33.Social ties at work and effort choice: Experimental evidence from Tanzania
Martin J. Chegere, Paolo Falco, Andreas Menzel
34.Migration from developing countries: Selection, income elasticity, and Simpson’s paradox
Michael A. Clemens, Mariapia Mendola
35.Land expropriation, household behaviors, and health outcomes: Evidence from China
Wei Huang, Mi Luo, Yuqi Ta, Boxian Wang
36. How accurate is a poverty map based on remote sensing data? An application to Malawi
Roy van der Weide, Brian Blankespoor, Chris Elbers, Peter Lanjouw
37.Bribery, plant size and size dependent distortions
M. Nazım Tamkoç
38.Global Mobile Inventors
Dany Bahar, Prithwiraj Choudhury, Ernest Miguelez, Sara Signorelli
摘要
1.Passing the message: Peer outreach about COVID-19 precautions in Zambia
Alfredo Burlando, Pradeep Chintagunta, Jessica Goldberg, Melissa Graboyes, Peter Hangoma, Dean Karlan, Mario Macis, Silvia Prina
During public health emergencies, spreading accurate information and increasing adherence to recommended behaviors is critical for communal welfare. However, uncertainty, mistrust, and misinformation can slow the adoption of best practices. Preexisting social networks can amplify and endorse information from authorities, and technology makes peer-to-peer messaging scalable and fast. Using text messages and small cash incentives, we test a peer-based information campaign to encourage adherence to recommended COVID-19-related health behaviors in Zambia. None of the treatments affected health behavior among primary study participants or their peers. The suggestion to pass messages to peers increases dissemination, but financial incentives do not have any additional impact.
2.Punishing mayors who fail the test: How do voters respond to information about educational outcomes?
Loreto Cox, Sylvia Eyzaguirre, Francisco A. Gallego, Maximiliano García
This paper explores the electoral effects of providing information on the educational outcomes of municipal schools when the mayor is running for reelection. We designed and implemented an experiment in Chile whereby we sent 128,033 letters to voters in 400 randomly selected polling stations prior to the 2016 municipal elections. The letters included information on past test scores for local public schools (levels and changes), and either average or maximum outcomes for comparable municipalities. Our findings do not reveal a relevant average impact of the letters, but when they contain poor educational outcomes, voter turnout decreases, translating almost one to one in decreases in votes for the incumbent mayor. Voters respond to educational results in levels and to letters that have average results as a benchmark. The results are especially strong when poor educational outcomes come as bad news to voters. We also find spillover effects in the municipal council election. Overall, our findings suggest that voters hold politicians accountable when faced to certain (but not all) types of information on their performance.
3.In-group competition for incentives
Michael Olabisi, Mywish Maredia, Jiawen Liu, Toyin Ajibade, Hakeem Ajeigbe
How can one motivate field staff to meet activity goals on time? Can introducing competition within groups motivate workers to meet goals faster than simply setting targets for workers? We conducted an experiment that assigned temporary field workers for a mobile app registration project into two treatment groups: field workers pursuing individual goals versus competing for a shared group-goal. We measure whether field workers reached their goal, the time to reach the goal, and the number of registered users per field worker. Our model suggests that field workers complete tasks more quickly with in-group competitive targets compared to individual targets. In line with this prediction, we observed that in-group competition led to an increased number of registrations and faster target achievement. Although the effects do not significantly vary by gender, the competition treatment proved more effective for employed individuals, those with less experience, and those with higher ability.
4.How important are matching frictions in the labor market? Experimental & non-experimental evidence from a large Indian firm
Abhijit V. Banerjee, Gaurav Chiplunkar
This paper provides evidence of matching frictions in the Indian labor market. Using several methods to elicit genuine preferences of job-seekers over jobs, we show that: (a) there is substantial variation in job-seekers preferences over the same jobs; and (b) placement officers, responsible for placing job-seekers in jobs, have poor knowledge of it. Providing placement offers with this information improves matching of job-seekers to interviews, even after taking into account redistribution of jobs across job-seekers. Treated job-seekers get more preferred jobs and retain them in the short run (three months), but not in the longer run (six months).
5.Spatial inefficiencies in Africa’s trade network
Tilman Graff
I assess the efficiency of transport networks for every country in Africa. Using spatial data from various sources, I simulate trade flows over more than 70,000 links covering the entire continent. I maximise over the space of networks and find the optimal road system for every African state. My simulations predict that Africa would gain 1.3% of total welfare from reorganising its national road systems, and 0.8% from optimally expanding it by a tenth. I then construct a dataset of local network inefficiency and find that colonial infrastructure projects significantly skew trade networks towards a sub-optimal equilibrium today. I find suggestive evidence that regional favouritism played a role sustaining these imbalances.
6.Faster, taller, better: Transit improvements and land use policies
Liming Chen, Rana Hasan, Yi Jiang, Andrii Parkhomenko
We study the interaction between transit improvements and land use policies. Bengaluru, one of India’s largest cities, inaugurated a metro system in 2011 but has extremely low building heights, even near metro stations. We build a rich dataset and a quantitative spatial model in which heterogeneous workers choose among different commuting modes. We find that the metro increases citywide output and welfare, even net of costs. However, the net gains are several times larger with transit-oriented development (TOD), i.e., when height limits are relaxed near stations. Moreover, TOD and the construction of the metro are complementary policies.
7.Evidence on designing sanitation interventions
Britta Augsburg, Andrew Foster, Terence Johnson, Molly Lipscomb
Sanitation is a public good, the responsibility for which is shared between households and the government. Interventions in the sector, therefore, must be designed with an eye toward reducing crowd out. We discuss the new findings on sanitation provision from the 12 papers in this special issue in the context of a simple model of household choice of levels of sanitation investment in the face of joint responsibility between the government and households over sanitation. The model provides micro-foundations for understanding when we should be particularly concerned about the potential for crowd-out together with intuition for the implications of the choice of intervention design between information, in-kind transfers, cash transfers, and subsidies. We use the framework of the model to discuss the findings of the papers in this special issue.
8.Information frictions, belief updating and internal migration: Evidence from Ghana and Uganda
Sarah Frohnweiler, Bernd Beber, Cara Ebert
Information frictions about benefits of migration can lead to inefficient migration choices. We study the effects of randomly assigned information treatments concerning regional income differentials in Ghana and Uganda to explore participants’ belief updating and changes in internal migration intentions, destination preferences, and actual migration. Treated participants prefer higher income destinations, while effects on intent plausibly follow subjects’ initial under- or overestimation of potential gains, with asymmetric updating propensities. Effects persist for 18 months, and discussions with others about migrating increase, but actual migration does not. Knowledge about income affects intentions and destination choices, but barriers to actual relocation are complex.
9.How distortive are turnover taxes? Evidence from China
Jing Xing, Katarzyna Bilicka, Xipei Hou, Sepideh Raei
We investigate the impact of tax cascading on upstream and downstream firms. As a natural experiment, we explore a reform that replaced turnover taxes with value-added taxes for service industries in China, which effectively removed tax cascading. We find a relative increase in sales, R&D investment, and employment for affected service firms. These changes are mainly driven by increased outsourcing from manufacturing firms, and are unlikely to be caused by changes in firms’ tax burden or output prices. Our study provides new evidence on how taxation affects supplier networks and firm performance.
10.The long-run costs of highly competitive exams for government jobs
Kunal Mangal
Public sector recruitment exams can be highly competitive. Does this competition encourage candidates to develop generalizable skills, or do investments in exam preparation burden candidates who fail to get selected? I address this question by studying the impact of a partial public sector hiring freeze in the state of Tamil Nadu, India on male college graduates. The hiring freeze eliminated 86% of the usual vacancies. This increased the applicant-to-vacancy ratio for the remaining posts. Cohorts that were exposed to the hiring freeze delayed full-time employment, most likely in order to invest more time in exam preparation. A decade after the hiring freeze ended, the affected cohorts demonstrate a lower earning capacity, have delayed household formation, and appear more likely to remain unemployed. Together, these results suggest that highly competitive exams encourage candidates to make investments that are ultimately unproductive.
11.College opportunity and teen fertility: Evidence from Ser Pilo Paga in Colombia
Michael D. Bloem, Jesús Villero
We study the effects of an increase in post-secondary educational opportunities on teen fertility by exploiting policy-induced variation from Ser Pilo Paga (SPP), a generous college financial aid program in Colombia that dramatically expanded college opportunities for low-income students. Our preferred empirical approach uses a triple difference design that leverages variation in the share of female students eligible for the program across municipalities and the fact that the introduction of SPP should not affect the education and fertility decisions of older women not targeted by the program. We find that after the introduction of SPP, fertility rates for women aged 15–19 years old decreased in more affected municipalities by about 6 percent relative to less affected municipalities. This effect accounts for approximately one-fourth of the overall decrease in teen fertility observed in the years following the program’s announcement. Our results suggest that increasing economic opportunities through expanding college access can contribute to lowering teen fertility rates.
12.Formal insurance and altruism networks
Tizié Bene, Yann Bramoullé, Frédéric Deroïan
We study how altruism networks affect the demand for formal insurance. Agents with CARA utilities are connected through a network of altruistic relationships. Incomes are subject to a common shock and to a large individual shock, generating heterogeneous damages. Agents can buy formal insurance to cover the common shock, up to a coverage cap. We find that ex-post altruistic transfers induce interdependence in ex-ante formal insurance decisions. We characterize the Nash equilibria of the insurance game and show that agents act as if they are trying to maximize the expected utility of a representative agent with average damages. Altruism thus tends to increase demand of low-damage agents and to decrease demand of high-damage agents. Its aggregate impact depends on the interplay between demand homogenization, the zero lower bound and the coverage cap. We find that aggregate demand is higher with altruism than without altruism at low prices and lower at high prices. Nash equilibria are constrained Pareto efficient.
13.Roads, competition, and the informal sector
Elena Perra, Marco Sanfilippo, Asha Sundaram
We examine the impact of competition from better connectivity to domestic markets on formal and informal firms. Combining geolocalized information on road improvements under a large infrastructure investment programme with data on manufacturing firms in Ethiopia between 2001 and 2013, we show that an increase in competition is associated with higher labour productivity, capital-intensity, investment in physical capital and wages in the formal sector. On the contrary, there is no associated increase in labour productivity or wages in the informal sector. In fact, increased competition results in lower capital-intensity and investment, a shift in composition towards workers without primary education and a lower likelihood of operating in the informal sector. We thus highlight that the benefits of infrastructure improvement programmes may not accrue uniformly in the economy.
14.Measuring sex-selective abortion: How many women abort?
Aditi Dimri, Véronique Gille, Philipp Ketz
This paper demonstrates that sex-selective abortion induces a correlation between birth interval length and the sex of the next-born child. Using a statistical model, we show that shorter birth intervals for next-born girls indicate repeated sex-selective abortions between consecutive births. Analyzing data from India, we find evidence of repeated sex-selective abortions at birth order 2 when the first child is a girl, and strong evidence at birth order 3 when the first two children are girls. To quantify the extent of repeated abortions, we propose a maximum likelihood estimator that provides the number of women who abort and their likelihood of performing repeated abortions. Our estimation results reveal significant heterogeneity across birth orders, sibling compositions, and socio-demographic and geographic groups. Notably, literate and urban women who first had a girl rarely abort a second time, whereas women in northern India who first had two girls show a 13% likelihood of repeated sex-selective abortion. In this group, the estimated number of aborted female fetuses—the standard measure of sex-selective abortion—is 50% higher than the number of women who abort.
15.Communist propaganda and women’s status
Ruoyu Qian
This paper examines how communist propaganda affects gender norms and behavior in China. Improving women’s status and promoting gender equality were significant themes of revolutionary propaganda in China from the 1950s to the 1970s. Exploiting plausibly exogenous variation resulting from topography, I find that exposure to radio broadcasts during the Cultural Revolution improved educational gender equality, and such effects were stronger in areas with weaker Confucian norms. Using individual-level census data, I also find positive effects of radio exposure on women’s family-related and career-related outcomes. I explore the possible mechanisms using data from two surveys on gender norms, and my evidence is consistent with rational updating. The significant persuasion effects disappear when more recent data are employed, implying temporary communist influences on entrenched social norms.
16.Pollution-induced trips: Evidence from flight and train bookings in China
Ruochen Dai, Dongmei Guo, Yajie Han, Yu Qin
Utilizing a novel database including nearly 2.2 billion booking records in China, we examine whether people escape from pollution by traveling to “cleaner” places. Combining an instrumental variable approach with high-dimensional fixed effects, we find a 50-unit increase in the AQI gap between a city pair leads to a 1.30% (1.33%) increase in train and airline ticket bookings from the origin to the destination city departing within one day (2–7 days). In addition, the destination of such pollution-induced trips is more likely to be an intra-province city with more tourist attractions. We also measure willingness to pay for clean air.
17.Internal migration and drug violence in Mexico
Lorenzo Aldeco Leo, Andrés Jurado, Aurora A. Ramírez-Álvarez
We study how internal migration responds to an increase in criminal violence in the context of Mexico’s 2007 War on Drugs. To identify causal effects, we exploit the changes in homicides generated by conflict between drug-trafficking organizations. Instrumental variable regressions show that high skilled individuals are less likely to migrate to a municipality where the homicide rate increased. Conversely, we find out-migration from municipalities that experienced an increase in murders but only to other municipalities in the same commuting zone. We interpret these facts as evidence that the migration response to increases in violence is tempered by moving costs. Using a discrete-choice model over destination choices, we estimate individuals would be willing to accept a reduction in wages of 0.15% to 0.58% to decrease the local homicide rate by 1%. The welfare cost of the post-2007 spike in homicides is in the order of 10% of GDP per year.
18.Elite persistence in Sierra Leone: What can names tell us?
Yannick Dupraz, Rebecca Simson
Is elite persistence weaker in Africa than in other parts of the world, given historical barriers to intergenerational inheritance of status, such as limited private property rights and frequent economic and political crises? In the absence of linked intergenerational data, we use name analysis to address this question. Using surnames associated with two Sierra Leonean elites, Krio descendants of settlers and members of chiefly lineages, we measure elite persistence in politics, education and business since 1960. Both groups were highly overrepresented in elite positions at independence, and remain overrepresented today. Benchmarking our results against other countries shows that Sierra Leone's educational elites are as persistent as elsewhere, but elite persistence in the political sphere is lower than in the United Kingdom, our main comparator. We also show marked path dependence: chiefly descendants remain more overrepresented in politics and mining, while the Krio are highly over-represented in education and the professions.
19.Land allocation and industrial agglomeration: Evidence from the 2007 reform in China
Wenjia Tian, Zhi Wang, Qinghua Zhang
This paper highlights the crucial role of land allocation mechanisms in fostering industrial agglomeration by examining China's 2007 industrial land market reform. By introducing transparency into the land-selling process, the reform facilitated more buyers to compete for land (as evidenced by increased land sale prices), enabling local governments to allocate land to the most suitable users. Utilizing comprehensive data sets that include information on initial local industrial structure, new industrial establishments, and industrial land transactions, the empirical analysis finds that the reform significantly increased the entry of firms from industries aligned with local specialization, particularly in regions that implemented the reform more strictly. Industries characterized by substantial unrealized agglomeration economies or highly localized spillover effects experienced amplified effects. A well-functioning capital market further enhanced the land market reform's impact. Supporting evidence demonstrates the reform's positive effect on economic growth (as evidenced by changes in nighttime luminosity), potentially through increasing local firms' TFP.
20.Energy policies and pollution in two developing country cities: A quantitative model
Rainald Borck, Peter Mulder
We study the effect of energy and transport policies on pollution in two developing country cities. We use a quantitative equilibrium model with choice of housing, energy use, residential location, transport mode, and energy technology. Pollution comes from commuting and residential energy use. The model parameters are calibrated to replicate key variables for two developing country cities, Maputo, Mozambique, and Yogyakarta, Indonesia. In the counterfactual simulations, we study how various transport and energy policies affect equilibrium pollution. Policies may induce rebound effects from increasing residential energy use or switching to high emission modes or locations. In general, these rebound effects tend to be largest for subsidies to public transport or modern residential energy technology.
21.When beer is safer than water: Beer availability and mortality from waterborne illnesses
Francisca M. Antman, James M. Flynn
We investigate the impact of beer on mortality during the Industrial Revolution in 18th century England. Due to the brewing process, beer represented an improvement over available water sources during this period prior to the widespread understanding of the link between water quality and human health. Using a wide range of identification strategies to derive measures of beer scarcity driven by tax increases, weather events, and soil quality, we show that beer scarcity was associated with higher mortality, especially in the summer months when mortality was more likely to be driven by waterborne illnesses related to contaminated drinking water. We also leverage variation in inherent water quality across parishes using two proxies for water quality to show that beer scarcity resulted in greater deaths in areas with worse water quality. Together, the evidence indicates that beer had a major impact on human health during this important period in economic development.
22.Supporting small firms in a fragile context: Comparing matching and cash grants in Burkina Faso
Michael Grimm, Sidiki Soubeiga, Michael Weber
We used a randomized controlled trial to compare matching grants earmarked for technical training and consulting services with more flexible cash grants and with a control group. The experiment was implemented in a semi-urban and rural fragile setting where subsidizing innovative activities might be particularly important. Firms were selected on the basis of a business plan competition. After two years, beneficiaries of cash grants showed higher survival rates, improved business practices, a higher degree of formalization, and more activities for innovation relative to recipients of matching grants and the control group, but we saw no effects on profits, sales, and employment. Across all outcomes, beneficiaries of cash grants performed better than beneficiaries of matching grants, for them the treatment effects are smaller and often insignificant, though implementation costs were higher. Recipients of cash grants also increased their capital stock more and were more resilient to the COVID-19 crisis.
23.A Farewell to Arms: Paramilitaries Demobilization, Political Competition and Public Goods in Colombia
Felipe Coy
Scholars have highlighted how local elites can use their de facto power to capture democracy. This makes electoral competition particularly vulnerable in armed conflicts driven by politics. Would a reduction in politically motivated violence perpetrated by local elites promote electoral competition? To investigate this, I employ a synthetic difference-in-differences strategy within the setting of Colombia’s demobilization of paramilitaries, who were heavily connected with local elites across the country. Following demobilization, I observe an increase in competition. I show that this improvement in competition is consistent with a decrease in repressive violence, leading to an increased likelihood of electoral candidacy for parties that would have potentially been victims of violence in the absence of demobilization. However, I also find that parties associated with elites increased their electoral presence, showing an effort to compensate for the loss produced by demobilization. Finally, I present evidence that public goods investment in territories previously controlled by paramilitaries undergoes a transformation, now benefiting a broader sector of the population, which I argue is partly explained by the increased competition.
24.Preprimary education and early childhood development: Evidence from government schools in rural Kenya
Pamela Jakiela, Owen Ozier, Lia C.H. Fernald, Heather A. Knauer
We provide evidence on the link between enrollment in public preschool and child vocabulary, a critical precursor to early literacy. We measure early childhood development among both in-school and out-of-school children in Kenya, allowing us to examine the association between preschool enrollment and cognitive outcomes. Children in our sample are more likely to start school at age three rather than age four if they live within a few hundred meters of the nearest primary school. Three-year-olds living closer to the school also have stronger vocabulary skills, though a similar pattern does not exist among older children. Using proximity to school as an instrument for preprimary enrollment, we find that preprimary enrollment raises mother tongue receptive vocabulary by more than one standard deviation at age three, but does not impact vocabulary at later ages.
25.Returns to quality in rural agricultural markets: Evidence from wheat markets in Ethiopia
Jérémy Do Nascimento Miguel
In many Sub-Saharan countries, farmers cannot meet the growing urban demand for higher quality products. While the literature has focused on production-side constraints to enhance smallholder farmers’ output quality, there is scarce evidence of market-side constraints. Using a sample of 60 wheat markets in Ethiopia, I assess whether farmers received a price premium for supplying higher quality outputs. I exploit a unique feature of the data which precisely measures observable and less or unobservable quality attributes, and relate them to transaction prices. Observable attributes cannot serve as proxies for less observable ones. Transaction prices further reflect this, indicating that markets only reward quality attributes that are observable at no cost. However, these results hide cross-market heterogeneity. Farmers engage in relational contracts receive a higher price but similar rewards for quality. Observable quality attributes are better rewarded in markets with more traders per farmer, while unobservable attributes are rewarded in the presence of other value chain actors (i.e., grain millers and farmer cooperatives). Both regression and machine learning approaches support these findings.
26.Childhood migration and educational attainment: Evidence from Indonesia
Hanna Schwank
Millions of families migrate every year in search of better opportunities. Whether these opportunities materialize for the children brought with them depends on the quality of the destination that their parents selected. Exploiting variation in the age of migration, I analyze the impact of destination quality on the educational outcomes of childhood internal migrants in Indonesia. Using Population Census microdata from 2000 and 2010, I show that children who spend more time growing up in districts characterized by higher average educational attainment among permanent residents tend to exhibit greater probabilities of completing primary and secondary schooling. Moreover, educational outcomes of migrants converge with those of permanent residents at an average rate of 1.7 to 2.2 percent annually, with children from less educated households benefiting more from additional exposure. My findings suggest substantial heterogeneity of returns to childhood migration with respect to destination.
27.Unlocking the benefits of credit through saving
Sanghamitra Warrier Mukherjee, Lauren Falcao Bergquist, Marshall Burke, Edward Miguel
Access to microcredit has been shown to generate only modest average benefits for recipient households. We study whether other financial market frictions – in particular, lack of access to a safe place to save – might limit credit’s benefits. Working with Kenyan farmers, we cross-randomize access to a simple savings product with a harvest-time loan. Among loan offer recipients, the additional offer of a savings lockbox increased farm investment by 11% and household consumption by 7%. Results suggest that financial market frictions can interact in important ways and that multifaceted financial access programs might unlock dynamic household gains.
28.Allocating labor across small firms: Experimental evidence on information constraints
Morgan Hardy, Seongyoon Kim, Jamie McCasland, Andreas Menzel, Marc Witte
We document interest in labor reallocation among small firm owners in Ghana; 60% and 41%, respectively, self-report willingness to hire or work for the average local firm owner. Firm owners also exhibit high willingness-to-pay for information on a random subset of hiring firms and jobseeking firm owners during a Becker–Degroot–Marschak exercise. Conditionally random variation in access to this information generates immediate labor adjustments within and between firms, though rarely of firm owners themselves, and impacts firm closure 5-months post-intervention. Our findings suggest that labor market information of this kind is both valuable and actionable in our context.
29.The seeds of misallocation: Fertilizer use and maize varietal misidentification in Ethiopia
Nils Bohr, Tim Deisemann, Douglas Gollin, Frédéric Kosmowski, Travis J. Lybbert
Optimal input allocation in agriculture leverages production complementarities. For example, improved seeds are generally more responsive to fertilizer than traditional seeds. Thus, inaccurate beliefs about whether seeds are improved may result in sub-optimal fertilizer application. We document precisely this pattern using data from Ethiopia that allows us to compare farmer beliefs about their maize seeds with genotyping data that identify the true genetics of these seeds. We find that 15 percent of farmers believe incorrectly that they are using improved varieties and use far more fertilizer than farmers who correctly believe that they sowed traditional varieties. Conversely, we find that about 15 percent of farmers believe incorrectly that they are growing traditional material and use far less fertilizer than those farmers who correctly believe that they are growing improved material. We extrapolate from our nationally representative sample to estimate the national-level magnitude of fertilizer misallocation due to incorrect seed beliefs.
30.Trade liberalization, labor market power, and misallocation across firms: Evidence from China's WTO accession
Enze Xie, Mingzhi Xu, Miaojie Yu
This paper studies the impact of trade liberalization on the heterogeneity of labor market power among manufacturing firms, which is a potential source of misallocation. The model shows that heterogeneity of labor market power distorts the allocation of the factors of production, and the variance in the natural log of the markdown serves as a sufficient statistic to infer its negative impact on overall production efficiency. Using China's accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) as a natural experiment, the empirical results suggest that lower input tariffs decrease the variance in the natural log of the markdown, which reflects the improvement in misallocation. In contrast, reductions in output tariffs have no significant effects.
31.Forced migration and local economic development: Evidence from postwar Hungary
Daniel Borbely, Ross Mckenzie
We investigate the effects of forced migration on sending economies using the post-WW2 expulsion of German minorities from Hungary as a natural experiment. We combine historical and contemporary data sources to show that the forced migrations led to lasting reductions in economic activity. Plausible mechanisms driving this result appear to be sectoral change (shift towards agriculture) and skills differences between Germans and the settlers that replaced them. Our analysis reveals that forced migration can cause lasting regional inequalities in sending economies.
32.The enduring trauma: How officials' childhood famine experiences affect year-end spending surge
Xing Chen, Peng Zhang, Ping Zhang, Andong Zhuge
This study investigates the impact of government officials’ childhood famine experiences on year-end spending surges (YESS), a phenomenon where organizations rush to spend unspent funds at fiscal year-end. We propose that early-life famine trauma fosters fiscal conservatism, leading to underutilized budgets, but the “use it or lose it” rule forces spending by the fiscal deadline. Analyzing data from Chinese cities (2008–2018), we find that officials who experienced famine in childhood significantly increased YESS, reducing fiscal efficiency and hindering local economic development. The effect is most pronounced among those who experienced famine in early childhood and is amplified in financially autonomous cities governed by officials with extensive local networks. Additionally, the observed correlation between mild depression and famine trauma suggests psychological mechanisms underlying the persistent effects of early trauma on fiscal behavior.
33.Social ties at work and effort choice: Experimental evidence from Tanzania
Martin J. Chegere, Paolo Falco, Andreas Menzel
Many firms hire workers via social networks. Whether workers who are socially connected to their employers exert more effort on the job is an unsettled debate. We address this question through a novel experiment with small-business owners in Tanzania. Participants are paired with a worker who conducts a real-effort task, and receive a payoff that depends on the worker’s effort. Some business owners are randomly paired with workers they know, while others are paired with strangers. We find that being connected to one’s employer does not affect workers’ effort on average, but increases the effort of workers without children. Our results are consistent with workers having an altruistic drive in exerting effort when they work for someone they know, which fades away when their valuation of private income becomes stronger.
34.Migration from developing countries: Selection, income elasticity, and Simpson’s paradox
Michael A. Clemens, Mariapia Mendola
The economic causes and effects of migration from developing countries depend on patterns of self-selection that are difficult to observe. We estimate the degree of migrant self-selection—on both observed and unobserved determinants of income—for 99 developing countries using nationally representative survey data on 653,613 people. In low-income countries, people actively preparing to emigrate have 14 percent higher incomes explained by observed traits such as schooling, and 12 percent higher incomes explained by unobserved traits. The simulated income elasticity of emigration is positive in the aggregate (+0.23) despite being negative in subpopulations, an instance of Simpson’s paradox.
35.Land expropriation, household behaviors, and health outcomes: Evidence from China
Wei Huang, Mi Luo, Yuqi Ta, Boxian Wang
Using a nationally representative dataset from China, we exploit an event study approach to trace out the consequences of land expropriation on household economic behaviors and health outcomes. The expropriated rural households receive an average compensation per capita of over 6 thousand yuan (60 percent of pre-event income) immediately after expropriation and thus have a higher income level. Among the people in these households, the likelihood of working in the agricultural sector decreases while that of working in the non-agricultural sector increases. Meanwhile, medical consumption per capita increases substantially by 0.4 thousand yuan and the saving rate rises by 14 percentage points. People in these households experience a significant improvement in subjective health status, in terms of self-reported health and depression, while their health-related behaviors do not change significantly. Overall, land expropriation influences the economic and health conditions of the affected rural households by providing additional liquidity.
36.How accurate is a poverty map based on remote sensing data? An application to Malawi
Roy van der Weide, Brian Blankespoor, Chris Elbers, Peter Lanjouw
This paper assesses the reliability of poverty maps derived from off-the-shelf remote-sensing data. Employing data for Malawi, it first obtains small area estimates of poverty by combining household expenditure survey data with population census data. It then ignores the population census and obtains a second poverty map by combining the survey with predictors of poverty derived from remote sensing data. The two approaches reveal the same patterns in the geography of poverty. However, there are instances where the two approaches obtain markedly different estimates of poverty. Poverty maps obtained using remote sensing data may do well when the decision maker is interested in comparisons of poverty between assemblies of areas yet may be less reliable when the focus is on estimates for specific small areas.
37.Bribery, plant size and size dependent distortions
M. Nazım Tamkoç
I document that small plants spend a higher fraction of their output on bribery than big plants, and that non-bribe-paying plants face higher distortions compared to bribe-paying plants in Türkiye. I develop a one-sector growth model in which size-dependent distortions, bribery opportunities, and different plant sizes coexist. In the model, plants are able to avoid distortions through bribery. The model parameters are calibrated with distortions and bribery opportunities in order to account for the plant size distribution as well as bribery expenditures by different plant sizes in the Turkish data. Counterfactual exercises show that size-dependent distortions become less distortionary in the presence of bribery opportunities. An increase in the size dependency of distortions has smaller aggregate effects since plants are able to circumvent distortions by paying larger bribes. Quantitatively, when bribery opportunities are present in the economy, mean plant size and output are 7.8 and 2.0 percent higher, respectively.
38.Global Mobile Inventors
Dany Bahar, Prithwiraj Choudhury, Ernest Miguelez, Sara Signorelli
The number of Global Mobile Inventors (GMIs), inventors moving across borders during their career, has increased more than tenfold over the past two decades, and the corridors of mobility have shifted towards a growing presence of emerging markets. We document that GMIs that have patented in a given technology before moving are 70% more likely to be among the pioneering inventors in that technology once they arrive at destination, which we interpret as evidence of knowledge diffusion across borders. Returnees, which are typically inventors from emerging markets that go back after having spent some time in the US and other advanced economies, are twice as likely to file pioneering patents once returned than migrants when arriving abroad. Finally, we find that the more central the GMIs in the network of inventors during the early stages of the technology life-cycle at destination, the faster the technology-specific knowledge is absorbed by local inventors.
