Congrats to the Winners of CEGA’s 2018 Development Economics Challenge!
This post was written by Corey Murray, CEGA Operations Associate.
CEGA regularly awards small grants ($5,000–15,000) to high-performing PhD students researching poverty in low- and middle-income countries, to support the next generation of scholars and bolster innovation.
This year, CEGA organized two rounds of our Development Economics Challenge, awarding over $100,000 to 11 research projects in 11 different countries. Funded research covers a range of topics relevant to CEGA including work & education, financial inclusion, and institutions & governance. We’ve summarized all of our 2018 projects below, to give you a sense of the inspiring, student-led work we’re supporting and the policy impact we hope it will generate. For graduate students pursuing a PhD in Economics at the University of California Berkeley, there will be another round of the Development Economics Challenge held next Spring, in May 2019.
Demand for Education in Kenya
Many students in Sub-Saharan Africa continue to drop out before secondary school due to perceived low returns and high costs. Stephanie Bonds (UC Berkeley, Economics) will travel to Busia County, Kenya to explore an experiment that will vary the information sent to families to evaluate the effect on perceived benefits of schooling and subsequent educational attainment.
The Impact of Cash Transfers on Individuals and Communities
Arlen Guarin and Juliana Londono-Velez (UC Berkeley, Economics) will study the impact of large cash transfers on individuals and communities in Colombia. They will use data from the Victim’s Compensation program which provides financial compensation to victims of human rights violations and infractions of international humanitarian law during the country’s 50 year conflict, which ended in 2016. These cash transfers are unique because of their magnitude and scale; to date, almost 2.1 million people have received compensation packages and amounts are 17 to 40 times the countries monthly minimum wage. Their project will estimate the impacts of cash transfers on victims and municipalities receiving these compensation packages.
Youth Enfranchisement: Political Engagement and Peer Effects
It has been shown that politicians change laws and policies to cater to new voting groups, but it’s unclear if this a response to an increase in political engagement by newly enfranchised (eligible) groups. Marina Dias and Felipe Vial (UC Berkeley, Economics) will lead an experiment in schools in Brazil to study the effects of enfranchisement and information on political engagement. Students between 16 and 18 years old have the possibility (but not the obligation) to register to vote. They will provide different treatments that aim to increase the probability of registering and the analyze political behavior outcomes.
The Difference a Job Makes: Evidence from the Dominican Republic
Matthew Pecenco and Carlos Schmidt-Padilla (UC Berkeley, Agricultural Resource Economics and Political Science) are investigating the effect of random procurement lotteries for government contracts, which by law make up 3% of overall government procurement spending, on the enterprises that are chosen in the Dominican Republic. In addition to comparing these effects across different types of organizations and whether small or female-headed firms benefit more, they will also compare randomly chosen contracts against more formal bidding processes or other contracting choices.
Improving Social Mobility by Helping Rural Students Make Informed College Choices
In China, college education is an important runway for upward mobility. Ao Wang (UC Berkeley, Economics) will investigate why students from rural areas tend to enroll in lower-quality universities while students from urban areas tend to enroll in higher-quality universities, when standardized test scores (the only admissions criteria) are the same. Given this difference, the information students have about colleges may contribute to the quality of university they attend. Ao’s project uses data on students’ exam scores to investigate this, and to understand which information interventions can reduce this gap.
Tax Capacity and State Accountability
Using Uganda’s monthly Pay-As-You-Earn (PAYE) tax, Isabelle Cohen (UC Berkeley, Economics) is assessing whether low-cost messages to firm owners improve tax compliance. She will study the effects of different types of messaging, as well as examine how increased compliance differentially affects employers (who pay the tax) and employees (from whom it is withheld).
The Productivity Effects of Joining Multinational Supply Chains: Evidence from Firm-to-Firm Linkages
Isabela Manelici and Jose Pablo Vasquez Carvajal (UC Berkeley, Economics) are studying the effects of start supplying multinational corporations (MNCs) on domestic firms in Costa Rica. Using administrative data they show that first-time suppliers to MNCs experience strong and persistent improvements in firm performance. For instance, four years after they start supplying an MNC, these firms exhibit gains of 6–9 percent in proxies of productivity. Their business with other buyers (excluding their first MNC buyer) improves as well, in terms of both average sales and number of buyers. With CEGA’s support, they are conducting surveys to MNCs and domestic firms for additional insight into the ways in which MNCs have helped domestic suppliers improve their performance.
Corruption (Mis)Perceptions
Sam Leone (UC Berkeley, Economics) will conduct a survey to understand the perception of corruption in Tunisia. Given that bribes are overestimated which can result in underinvestment in profitable activities. With this in mind, Sam will run an experiment to give citizens information on the real-world levels of bribery and corruption and attempt to measure the change in human-capital and financial investments.
Preferences for wage frequency and implications for behavior
Luisa Cefala & Nicholas Swanson (UC Berkeley, Economics) are studying the effect of changing the frequency of wages among low-wage, daily workers in India, including how frequency impacts saving and expenditure behavior. They will also test how this preference interacts with features of the environment such as missing credit markets, or familial constraints.
Understanding Subjective Performance Pay
Christina Brown (UC Berkeley, Economics) is exploring the effect of incentivizing teachers based on an objective criteria (additional pay) versus a subjective criteria (their principal’s performance evaluation). In addition, she varies how much exposure principals have to teachers in the lead up the evaluation. She will implement in 300 private schools in Pakistan and measure effects on student test performance and a variety of teacher behaviors including attendance, clock in and out, and 40 in-classroom behaviors recorded from 5 hours of classroom footage.
The Impact of Chinese Firms in Local Labor Markets
David Wu (UC Berkeley, Economics) is investigating the impact of increasing Chinese firms on local labor market in Ethiopia. He will obtain firm registration data from Ethiopian government and visit both local firms and Chinese firms in industrial parks. He seeks to better understand the entry of Chinese firms, relevant policies, and the impact on local employment.
