CEGA Funds Four Promising Graduate Student Projects
This post was written by Sam Bordia, CEGA’s Finance and Reporting Senior Associate.
Every year, CEGA runs two rounds of the Development Economics Challenge, a program that competitively awards funding to original research projects led by UC Berkeley PhD students. Proposed research must involve rigorous evaluation of programs or policies designed to alleviate poverty and promote social or economic development in low- and middle- income countries (LMICs)–in alignment with CEGA’s mission. These funds are critical for students, allowing them to launch their own projects–many of which result in Job Market Papers–and engage in invaluable professional development opportunities as they build their careers.
Since 2016, the Development Economics Challenge has provided over $400,000 in funding to more than forty student projects in 22 countries. In fall 2021, CEGA awarded $46,560 in seed funding to the four new graduate student projects highlighted below. There will be another funding round in Spring 2022–stay tuned for details on the CEGA website and for updates on these projects as students analyze results.
Labor Market Constraints to Technology Adoption in Rural Burundi
Casual laborers skilled in advanced agricultural techniques are scarce in rural Burundi–so do labor market frictions play a role in slowing the adoption of profitable technology? Luisa Cefala (UC Berkeley, Economics) is working in Burundi with One Acre Fund (OAF), an international NGO serving more than one million farmers across nine countries, on a randomized evaluation to determine the impact of providing laborers with specialized or basic training. She will then monitor technology adoption to determine whether training laborers leads to widespread take-up of advanced planting techniques while also investigating whether the generalizable skills of these advanced planting techniques create misaligned incentives for farmers to train laborers.
With this study, Luisa, OAF, and other NGOs working to increase productivity among small-scale farmers in sub-Saharan Africa stand to learn where scarce training dollars can be best spent. As Luisa shares, “Our proposal contributes to a policy-relevant strand of literature that provides accessible evidence to NGOs and extension workers regarding who should be targeted with new information about technologies.”
Misperceptions of Career Incentives and Turnover
Maximiliano Lauletta and David Wu (UC Berkeley, Economics) are also studying labor market frictions, but in a different context. Their project, receiving its second round of funding from the Development Economics Challenge, examines a major industrialization project, the Hawassa Industrial Park in Ethiopia, which provides formal employment to thousands of workers. Though these jobs typically offer high amenities and pay, 31% of workers at Hawassa quit within the first month. Currently, human resources managers at the industrial park do not disclose information on mid- and upper-level salaries or the likelihood of promotion. Maximiliano and David hypothesize that providing transparent information on supervisor salary can help employees make better career decisions and, in turn, boost retention.
The two will build on their preliminary results that suggest workers who are given information on upper-level salaries and the percentage of workers promoted to upper-level positions are less likely to search for a new job immediately after hiring. They will increase their sample from 550 to 1,550 workers and give these workers varying amounts of information on salary increases and promotion. Six months later, Maximilliano and David will follow up to observe turnover, promotion, skill development, and a variety of other factors to understand the impact information can have on employee retention and satisfaction.
Unlocking Chinese Growth with Historical Satellites
What was the observed level of poverty during the tumultuous period encompassing the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution? From 1960 to 1972, the US CORONA spy satellite program collected high-resolution daytime images covering the entire globe. Oliver Kim and Joel Ferguson (UC Berkeley, Economics) will combine declassified photographs from this repository with deep learning techniques to better understand China’s historic economic transformation, including examining the effects of specific agricultural and industrial policies on crop yields and development.
Driving Greener Mobility
Robert Pickmans (UC Berkeley, Agricultural and Resource Economics) will examine how incentives affect the adoption of electric motorcycle taxis, which are critical to the economic functioning of cities in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). They provide a cheap, efficient, and relatively fast means of conveyance, but also contribute heavily to localized air pollution. Electric motorcycles (e-motos) can theoretically provide the same service with a limited impact on air quality.
Robert will study how policymakers can leverage subsidies to increase the uptake of e-motos. In his study, Robert’s team will partner with a company in Kigali, Rwanda that offers e-motos for sale as well as a battery swap service for drivers. One group will be offered promotions that discount the price of the battery swap service while another will receive the standard offer. Robert and his team will then examine how these offers can contribute not only to e-moto purchases but also to the kilometers that one is willing to drive when presented with discounted “re-fueling costs.” The project is timely as similar electric motorcycle subsidies are being considered by policymakers in Rwanda and across eastern Africa.
