Working Papers
Impact evaluation of social programs in Nicaragua
Changing households’ investments and aspirations through social interactions: Evidence from a randomized transfer program in a low-income country (with Renos Vakis): pdf
Low aspirations can limit households’ investments and contribute to sustained poverty. Vice versa, increased aspirations can lead to investment and upward mobility. Yet how aspirations are formed is not always well understood. This paper analyzes the role of social interactions in determining aspirations in the context of a program aimed at increasing households’ investments. The causal effect of social interactions is identified through the randomized assignment of leaders and other beneficiaries to three different interventions within each treatment community. Social interactions are found to affect households’ attitudes towards the future and to amplify program impacts on investments in human capital and productive activities. The empirical evidence indicates that communication with motivated and successful nearby leaders can lead to higher aspirations and corresponding investment behavior.
Cash Transfers, Behavioral Changes, and Cognitive Development in Early Childhood: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment (with Norbert Schady and Renos Vakis): pdf
In many developing countries, cash transfer programs are an important component of the social safety net. A large number of studies have assessed the impact of such programs on consumption poverty, health status, nutrition, and education. Much less is known about the extent, if any, to which cash transfers also improve the cognitive and socio-emotional development of young children. This is important because a variety of theories of skill formation suggest that investments in schooling and other dimensions of human capital will have lower returns if children do not have adequate levels of cognitive and social skills at early ages. This paper analyzes the impact of a randomized cash transfer program on cognitive development in early childhood in rural Nicaragua. It shows that the program had significant effects on cognitive outcomes, especially language. Impacts are larger for older pre-school aged children, who are also more likely to be delayed. The program increased intake of nutrient-rich foods, early stimulation, and use of preventive health care—all of which have been identified as risk factors for development in early childhood. Households increased expenditures on these inputs more than can be accounted for by the increases in cash income only, suggesting that the program changed parents’ behavior. The findings suggest that gains in early childhood development outcomes should be taken into account when assessing the benefits of cash transfer programs in developing countries. More broadly, the paper illustrates that gains in early childhood development can result from interventions that facilitate investments made by parents to reduce risk factors for cognitive development.
Leveling the Intra-household Playing Field: Compensation and Specialization in Child Labor Allocation (with Ximena Del Carpio) : pdf
This paper analyzes changes in the allocation of child labor within the household in reaction to exogenous shocks created by a social program in Nicaragua. The paper shows that households that randomly received a conditional cash transfer compensated for some of the intra-household differences, as they reduce child labor more for older boys who used to work more and for boys that were further behind in school. The results also show that households that randomly received a productive investment grant targeted at women, in addition to the basic conditional cash transfer benefits, show an increased specialization of older girls in nonagricultural and domestic work, but no overall increase in girls’ child labor. The findings suggest that time allocation and specialization patterns in child labor within the household are important factors to understand the impact of a social program.
Note: for further information on Atencion a Crisis evaluation in Nicaragua available in English and Spanish
More on ECD
Seasonal Migration and Early Childhood Development (with Renos Vakis) : pdf
This paper provides unique evidence of the positive consequences of seasonal migration for investments in early childhood development. We analyze migration in a poor shock-prone border region in rural Nicaragua where it offers one of the main household income diversification and risk -coping strategies. IV estimates show, somewhat surprisingly, that shock-driven migration by mothers has a positive effect on early cognitive development. We attribute these findings to changes in income and to the intra-household empowerment gains resulting from mother’s migration, which offset potential negative early childhood development effects from temporary lack of parenting.
Property Rights, Conflicts, and Inequality
Increasing Inequality and Civil Conflict in Nepal : pdf
This paper investigates the relationship between increasing inequality and the escalation of a civil conflict. It hypothesizes that increasing differences in welfare between different groups - relative deprivation as opposed to absolute deprivation - can help explain why the civil conflict in Nepal escalated after a period of substantial growth and poverty reduction. The hypothesis is tested with data from 2 national-representative household surveys, matched with information regarding mass abductions by the Maoists from newspaper articles. The identification strategy relies on the fact that the months following finalization of the second round of data collection were characterized by a geographical escalation of the conflict. The paper first shows that households with relatively large landholdings gained disproportionably from growth between 1995 and 2003. It then shows that recruiting by Maoists through abduction of young people was more intensive in districts where inequality between the landed and the landless had previously increased.
Insecurity of Property Rights and Social Matching in the Tenancy Market (with Alain de Janvry and Elisabeth Sadoulet): pdf
This paper shows that insecurity of property rights over agricultural land can have large efficiency and equity costs because of the way it affects matching in the tenancy market. A principal-agent framework is used to model the landlord’s decision to rent when he takes into account the risk of losing the land to the tenant and when contract enforcement is decreasing in social distance with the tenant. These effects are quantified for the case of local land rental markets in the Dominican Republic. Results show that insecure property rights lead to matching in the tenancy market along socio-economic lines, severely limiting the size of the rental market and the choice of tenants for landlords, both with efficiency costs. Social segmentation reduces access to land for the rural poor, with high equity costs. Simulations suggest that improving tenure security would increase rental transactions by 21% and the area rented to the poor by 63%. Increased property rights security is hence beneficial not only to asset owners, but also to those with whom they might interact in the market.
Land Titles and Conflicts in Guatemala (contact me by email for latest version)
This paper analyzes the impact of formal property rights on plot use and credit access in 20 communities in Guatemala, and shows how these impacts differ depending on the community conflict context. The paper proposes a new instrument based on detailed information about the geographic location of the plots and historical titling processes to address the endogeneity concerns that are common in the property rights literature. The paper sheds light on whether the effect of land titles on plot use and credit access varies with the prevalence of conflicts and different types of conflict resolution mechanisms. The findings suggest that these factors might be crucial to understand the potential impacts on plot use of possible titling programs.
Ethnic Divisions, Contract Choice, and Search Costs in the Guatemalan Land Rental Market (contact me by email for latest version)
This paper shows how ethnic diversity in a context of weak property rights enforcement can result in market segmentation. The paper analyzes how contract enforcement problems affect the joint decision of partner and contract choice by landlords in the land rental market in Guatemala. The empirical method allows partner choice to be determined not only by the characteristics and relative scarcity of the specific landowner and tenant, but also by the characteristics of other potential tenants. The results show that landowners without formal title are more likely to restrict their partners to tenants from the same ethnic group. Partner choice is found to be less important for renting with interlinked land-labor contracts.
Property Rights Imperfections, Asset Allocation and Welfare: Co-ownership in Bulgaria (with Liesbet Vranken, Nivelin Noev, and Jo Swinnen) (contact me by email for latest version)
This paper analyzes how imperfections of property rights affect allocation of assets and welfare, using micro-survey data from Bulgaria. Co-ownership of assets is widespread in many countries due to inheritance. Central and Eastern Europe offers an interesting natural experiment to assess the effects of such rights imperfections because of the asset restitution process in the 1990s. Bulgaria is particularly interesting because of the prominence of the co-ownership problem (about half of all land plots are co-owned), because of the strong fragmentation of land, and because of legislation providing an instrument to separate out chosen (endogenous) versus forced (exogenous) forms of co-ownership. We find that land in co-ownership is much more likely to be used by less efficient farm organizations or to be left abandoned, and that it leads to significant welfare losses.
Completing the Land Reform in West Bengal? An ex-ante evaluation (contact me by email for latest version)
This paper provides an ex-ante evaluation of a program that would grant ownership rights to sharecroppers with protected user rights in West Bengal. Using a non-parametric regression framework, it compares outcomes of two types of beneficiaries of the original West Bengal land reform, i.e. households that received land in ownership versus households that received only secure user rights. Both types of beneficiaries are the product of the same reform legislation that was implemented during the same period and using similar methods, which motivates the comparison. The paper estimates the expected gains from granting ownership and draws lessons regarding optimal targeting of the proposed policy.
Survey methodology
Comparing a Direct with an Indirect Approach to Collecting Household Level Data: Who tells the truth? (contact me by email for latest version)
This paper aims at validating the use of key informants to collect household level information, and at testing the extent to which private information is public at the level of the community. Selected key informants from the communities were asked to answer detailed questions about characteristics of all the individual community members and their plots. In addition the same set of questions was asked to the heads of a random sample of households themselves. I analyze the differences between the two types of respondents and their potential sources using regression and error analysis. I distinguish between different types of variables, and test for consistency, attribution error by the key informants, and strategic answering by the household heads.