Graduate Student Research Projects Pivot due to COVID-19
This post was written by Corey Murray, Senior Operations Associate at the Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA).
The novel coronavirus pandemic has affected all parts of life, and PhD students at the University of California, Berkeley pursuing their own research projects are no exception. In the spring of this year, CEGA asked these students how additional funding could help them pivot their research designs to remote data collection or jumpstart entirely new projects focused on the direct effects of the crisis.
CEGA regularly awards small grants ($5,000 — $15,000) to high-performing PhD students exploring questions of poverty in low- and middle-income countries, to support the next generation of scholars and discover effective solutions. In this most recent spring 2020 funding round of our Development Economics Challenge, CEGA awarded nearly $45,000 to 5 research projects in 4 different countries — all advancing COVID-related questions or research shifts. Three of these projects support job-market PhDs who required additional funding to add remote data collection or enumerator support to ongoing projects. The two additional studies incorporate research questions on the direct impact of COVID-19 on trade and on corruption.
We’ve summarized the five awarded projects below, to give you a sense of the inspiring, student-driven work we’re supporting and the policy impact we hope it will generate. For graduate students pursuing a PhD in Economics (and possibly other disciplines) at the University of California Berkeley, there will be another round of the Development Economics Challenge held in September 2020. For the broader development economics community, stay tuned for detailed, forthcoming posts on many of the research projects summarized here.
Understanding Labor Supply in Indian urban labor markets
What are the determinants of labor supply choices among urban casual laborers in India, and how are these choices affected by behavioral biases such as attention and motivation? Luisa Cefala (UC Berkeley, Economics) explores how the very nature of these casual jobs — that typically lack formal contracts and experience fluctuations in labor demand — might exacerbate such behavioral biases.
The effect of COVID-19 pandemic on trade, corruption, and agriculture supply chains
Little is known about the small-scale, often informal agriculture traders who cross the border from Kenya to Uganda multiple times per week to source products they can sell at a higher price on the other side. Building on prior research, Eleanor Wiseman (UC Berkeley, Agricultural and Resource Economics) investigates the effects of COVID-19 on these cross-border traders in Kenya, specifically how lockdowns (including border and market closures, product bans, and movement restrictions) affect trade, traders’ businesses and food prices.
Traditional Chiefs, Climate Volatility, and Violence: Evidence from North-Central Nigeria
Why do some groups succumb to conflict while others manage to peacefully coexist in the face of increasing resource pressures, inter-group clashes or disputes? Catlan Reardon (Political Science, UC Berkeley) explores the role of traditional chiefs, who wield significant influence over local level dispute resolution, and may explain this variation. Specifically, her project seeks to understand why some traditional chiefs take pre-emptive action to calm tensions while others either actively inflame tensions or remain passive.
Bribery in the Time of COVID-19
COVID-19 has enabled a massive increase in government power (e.g. restricting economic activity, confining citizens to their homes, regulating access to food and medicine). At the same time, low and middle-income countries often have limited ability to enforce good-governance practices. Building on previous work examining how government bureaucrats’ time in office office affects corruption, Sam Leone (Economics, UC Berkeley) explores the extent of corruption in Tunisia during the COVID-19 pandemic, by investigating the bribes that import /export firms are currently paying as they focus on the trade in “essential” goods. In parallel, he uses an economic-surveillance phone survey supported by the Tunisian President’s office, to examine the bribes that ordinary households are currently paying, as they cope with their country’s social-distancing lockdown.
Parent-Child Preferences and Secondary School Choice: Evidence from Kenya
The COVID-19 pandemic is affecting educational outcomes across the world. With funding from CEGA, Stephanie Bonds (Economics, UC Berkeley) adds a phone survey module to ongoing work in Kenya to measure real-time educational impacts of COVID-19 in Busia County. The survey provides high-frequency descriptive data on schooling attitudes, home environment, and at-home learning for representative samples of 8th Graders in Busia sub-counties during the pandemic. As part of this effort, she also examines the extent to which a randomly assigned schooling intervention for 8th Graders can mitigate educational impacts of the crisis.
