Three Empirical Essays in Development Economics in India

Three Empirical Essays in Development Economics in India PDF Author: Sisir Debnath
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ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Three Empirical Essays in Development Economics in India

Three Empirical Essays in Development Economics in India PDF Author: Sisir Debnath
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Languages : en
Pages :

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Empirical essays in development economics

Empirical essays in development economics PDF Author: Kamilya Tazhibayeva
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Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Three Empirical Essays in Development Economics

Three Empirical Essays in Development Economics PDF Author: Jorge Huerta Munoz McNabb
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ISBN: 9781392134887
Category : Development economics
Languages : en
Pages : 185

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This dissertation studies three empirical questions on development economics. The first two chapters investigate the impact of the Mexican health program Seguro Popular on vulnerability to poverty and educational outcomes. Seguro Popular is a health program that provides healthcare services and medicines to households not covered via salaried jobs and does not provide cash transfers or income to disabled individuals. Enrollment is free for households in the poorest three income deciles. Through November 2018, it covered about 50% of the population. The last chapter investigates the extent to which the Peru's 2010 Progress out of Poverty index (PPI) can be used to predict poverty transitions of households. The PPI has become a preferred proxy means test used by government agencies and non-governmental agencies for its accuracy in measuring poverty and as it is quick, inexpensive, and easy to implement.Currently, the Mexican government evaluates poverty using a national income poverty line and monitors poverty using a multi-dimensional poverty index that tries to account for other aspects of wellbeing beyond a monetary metric. However, there is no estimation of the level of exposure to future poverty, which is an element that should be relevant for anti-poverty and human development programs, especially because households around the poverty line are likely to become poor after they experience a negative shock. Chapter 1 investigates the extent to which Seguro Popular can be used to reduce vulnerability to poverty in Mexico. The empirical analysis provides evidence that Seguro Popular helps reduce vulnerability to poverty. A more granular analysis also shows that households are exposed to different factors, such as macro-economic conditions, labor income changes, and weather events, and that Seguro Popular only helps households cope with negative shocks related to health-related expenses. Thus, when analyzing the program's impact on vulnerable households, Seguro Popular does not have an impact on the most vulnerable households, households with the fewest assets, individuals with the least education, or individuals working mostly in non-salaried jobs.Chapter 2 evaluates the impact of Seguro Popular on education outcomes. Previous studies have helped elucidate the unintended effects of Seguro Popular on labor outcomes decisions, fertility, and healthcare services use, among others. Overall, this study validates the hypothesis that Seguro Popular has a positive impact on educational outcomes for children aged six to 11. On average, participation increases enrollment in elementary school and increases the time spent on schoolwork. Additionally, among the unintended effects, the labor time of children decreases for households enrolled in Seguro Popular.Finally, Chapter 3 investigates the extent to which the PPI can be used to predict poverty transition. Chapter 3 analyzes the PPI indicators that are used to estimate the likelihood that households can be identified as living in poverty. In doing so, it quantifies both the relevance of each variable and the predictive power of the PPI score to determine poverty status. For policymaking, a metric that can help predict future status and measure graduation out of anti-poverty programs, while remaining accurate and limiting measurement errors (which are a waste of the financial budget), is necessary. The results show the effectiveness of using PPI to predict poverty transition in terms of targeting accuracy and measurement errors. However, as with previous results, this study shows that such an approach should be complementary to additional information.

Empirical Essays in Development Economics

Empirical Essays in Development Economics PDF Author: Valeria Groppo
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Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Four Empirical Essays in Development Economics

Four Empirical Essays in Development Economics PDF Author: Eric Akobeng
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Languages : en
Pages :

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Three Essays on Development Economics

Three Essays on Development Economics PDF Author: Mizuhiro Suzuki (Ph.D.)
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ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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This dissertation studies how households and individuals in developing countries deal with economic shocks and economic needs. In the first chapter, I study a Latin American ceremony, quinceaǹ³eras, and how households manage the large expenditures on the expensive ceremony. I explore the coping strategy of households in Mexico and how such expensive events can affect economic outcomes such as household businesses and social networks. While the large expenditures on festivals and ceremonies in developing have been documented in the literature on development economics, few empirical studies have been conducted, especially on how poor households afford the events and what the economic consequences of such events are. This study fills the gap in the literature. The second and third chapters investigate the effect of weather shocks on individual behaviors in the context of developing countries. In the second chapter, I explore how temperature affects the work performance of bureaucrats. In particular, I study how the contents of corruption reports are affected by temperature during fieldwork. Using the federal audit program in Brazil, I find evidence that heat increases the probability of reporting corruption. This suggests that the work performance of bureaucrats is affected by external and seemingly irrelevant factors such as temperature. In the third chapter, I investigate the effect of temperature on exam performance and the interaction between exam stakes and exam performance. I approach these research questions by using exam score data in a centralized exam in Brazil and an institutional reform that increased the stakes of the exam. I find that the high temperature negatively affects the students' exam scores and the temperature effect becomes smaller when exam stakes are higher.

Three Essays on Development Economics

Three Essays on Development Economics PDF Author: Mizuhiro Suzuki (Ph.D.)
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ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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This dissertation studies how households and individuals in developing countries deal with economic shocks and economic needs. In the first chapter, I study a Latin American ceremony, quinceaǹ³eras, and how households manage the large expenditures on the expensive ceremony. I explore the coping strategy of households in Mexico and how such expensive events can affect economic outcomes such as household businesses and social networks. While the large expenditures on festivals and ceremonies in developing have been documented in the literature on development economics, few empirical studies have been conducted, especially on how poor households afford the events and what the economic consequences of such events are. This study fills the gap in the literature. The second and third chapters investigate the effect of weather shocks on individual behaviors in the context of developing countries. In the second chapter, I explore how temperature affects the work performance of bureaucrats. In particular, I study how the contents of corruption reports are affected by temperature during fieldwork. Using the federal audit program in Brazil, I find evidence that heat increases the probability of reporting corruption. This suggests that the work performance of bureaucrats is affected by external and seemingly irrelevant factors such as temperature. In the third chapter, I investigate the effect of temperature on exam performance and the interaction between exam stakes and exam performance. I approach these research questions by using exam score data in a centralized exam in Brazil and an institutional reform that increased the stakes of the exam. I find that the high temperature negatively affects the students' exam scores and the temperature effect becomes smaller when exam stakes are higher.

Essays in Empirical Development Economics

Essays in Empirical Development Economics PDF Author: Owen Whitfield Ozier
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ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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This dissertation encompasses three empirical studies in the economics of western Kenya. In Chapter 1, I estimate the impacts of secondary school on human capital, occupational choice, and fertility for young adults in Kenya. Probability of admission to government secondary school rises sharply at a score close to the national mean on a standardized 8th grade examination, permitting me to estimate causal effects of schooling in a regression discontinuity framework. I combine administrative test score data with a recent survey of young adults to estimate these impacts. My results show that secondary schooling increases human capital, as measured by performance on cognitive tests included in the survey. For men, I find a drop in the probability of low-skill self-employment, as well as suggestive evidence of a rise in the probability of formal employment. The opportunity to attend secondary school also reduces teen pregnancy among women. In Chapter 2, I investigate whether a large-scale deworming intervention aimed at primary school pupils in western Kenya had long-term effects on young children in the region, exploiting positive externalities from the program to estimate the impact on younger children who did not receive treatment directly. I find large cognitive effects--equivalent to half a year of schooling--for children who were less than one year old when their communities received mass deworming treatment. I also find modest positive effects on stature. Because mass deworming was administered through schools, I also estimate effects among children who were likely to have older siblings in school to receive the treatment directly; in this subpopulation, effects are twice as large. In Chapter 3, Pamela Jakiela and I measure the economic impacts of social pressures to share income with kin and neighbors in rural Kenyan villages. We conduct a lab experiment in which we randomly vary the observability of investment returns to test whether subjects reduce their income in order to keep it hidden. We find that women adopt an investment strategy that conceals the size of their initial endowment in the experiment, though that strategy reduces their expected earnings. This effect is largest among women with relatives attending the experiment, who invest 22 percent less when income is observable. At the village level, the extent to which experimental subjects engage in income hiding within the experiment is negatively associated with the probability of skilled employment and the value of household assets.

Essays in Empirical Development Economics

Essays in Empirical Development Economics PDF Author: Esther Duflo
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 183

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Essays in Empirical Development Economics

Essays in Empirical Development Economics PDF Author: Shuang Zhang
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ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 146

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This dissertation is a set of three independent essays on empirical development economics, with a focus on China. The first chapter examines the effect of maternal education on infant health by exploiting exogenous variation in women's exposure to the wholesale closure of rural high schools immediately after the Cultural Revolution, from 1977 to 1984. The second chapter explores the longterm effect of prenatal exposure to the 1978-84 land reform on academic performance, as captured by college entrance exam scores. The third chapter examines the effect of land reform on the sex ratio imbalance by comparing the sex of the second child between families with a first girl and those with a first boy before and after the reform.