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Replication Data for "Using Split Samples to Improve Inference on Causal Effects"
No full textReplication Data for Fafchamps and Labonne (2017) "Using Split Samples to Improve Inference on Causal Effects
Replication Data for "Using Split Samples to Improve Inference on Causal Effects"
No full textReplication Data for Fafchamps and Labonne (2017) "Using Split Samples to Improve Inference on Causal Effects
Impact d’une réforme de la Politique Agricole Commune par le découplage
No full textThe reduction of the distortions to trade launched in 1992 and 1999 has led the CAP to systematise the uncoupling of agricultural aids from agricultural production . This analysis , focused on the price effect , makes it possible to assess the expected advantage to society , by means of model simulations under an assumption of constant European budgetary expenditure . Depending on the level of the uncoupling premium offered in substitution for existing aids , there is a change in the numbers of “ losers ” and “ winners ”, in their location , in the variation of the surplus , with the advantage as between producers and taxpayers for the 15-member EU compared with Agenda 2000 unchanged at euros 1,8 billion . The figure would be euros 0,8 billion in the case of partial uncoupling similar to that contained in the 2003 Luxembourg agreement .The reduction of the distortions to trade launched in 1992 and 1999 has led the CAP to systematise the uncoupling of agricultural aids from agricultural production . This analysis , focused on the price effect , makes it possible to assess the expected advantage to society , by means of model simulations under an assumption of constant European budgetary expenditure . Depending on the level of the uncoupling premium offered in substitution for existing aids , there is a change in the numbers of “ losers ” and “ winners ”, in their location , in the variation of the surplus , with the advantage as between producers and taxpayers for the 15-member EU compared with Agenda 2000 unchanged at euros 1,8 billion . The figure would be euros 0,8 billion in the case of partial uncoupling similar to that contained in the 2003 Luxembourg agreement .Labonne Julien, Jayet Pierre-Alain. Impact d’une réforme de la Politique Agricole Commune par le découplage. In: Économie & prévision, n°167, 2005-1. pp. 101-116
Essays on incentives in bureaucracy: experimental evidence from Pakistan
Get PDFPublic sector performance is a key determinant for a country’s economic growth and development. Yet, poor service delivery remains widespread across the developing world which is often attributed to weak monitoring and incentive systems. This thesis, written in a three-paper format, explores questions around how to improve the performance of frontline workers through the use of financial and non-financial incentives. I design two field experiments in collaboration with the Teacher Training Academy in Punjab Pakistan to explore the impact of employer recognition (a type of non-financial incentive) on the performance of public school teachers in in-service trainings. The first experiment serves as a pilot to the second experiment which is larger in scope and builds upon the findings of the pilot. These experiments are presented as Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 respectively. A third experiment is designed and implemented in collaboration with the Punjab Agriculture Department to evaluate the impact of a province-wide pay-for-performance programme on extension outreach and quality. This study is presented as Chapter 3.
In Chapters 1 and 2, I investigate whether non-financial incentives such as employer recognition can improve the performance of public school teachers in in-service trainings as measured through training test scores, and if so, what are the channels through which such tools operate?
In chapter 1 (pilot), I randomize 650 primary and secondary school teachers into three employer recognition schemes and a control group to understand the strength of different channels of employer recognition. The employer recognition incentive is a standard tournament-based incentive in which teachers are awarded a prestigious recognition certificate if they qualify. In T1 (Private arm), the certificate is given to the teacher privately; in T2 (Peer arm), the certificate is given in front of peers and colleagues; and in T3 (Career arm), the certificate is given privately but teachers are also told that their name would be added to an ‘excellent teacher list’ which will be shared with departmental leadership that can help them quality for future career opportunities in their districts. Results show that the source of individual motivation of bureaucrats for entering the civil service mediates the effectiveness of employer recognition. We find that teachers who report intrinsic reasons for entering the service such as ‘interested in the profession of teaching’ exhibit a positive treatment response and those who report extrinsic reasons such as ‘salary’ show a negative treatment effect, with the two effects being significantly different from each other. Further analysis shows that the positive treatment effect for intrinsic individuals comes from the “peer" and “career" channels of employer recognition, with no effects on the “private" channel. Treatment effects on endline self-efficacy beliefs show positive effects for intrinsic but negative effects for extrinsic individuals, indicating that self-efficacy beliefs may be an important causal mechanism for these effects. These results directly support the design of the study in Chapter 2.
In Chapter 2, I randomize 3,394 head teachers attending a mandatory government training into four different designs of recognition incentives that are tied to training performance and a control group. Treatment 1 (Peer arm) leverages the peer/collegial approval channel of recognition – trainees are told that those with the top score in the training post-test and the most improved score (over the pre-test) will be provided certificates in a district level ceremony which will be attended by their peers and colleagues in their district; Treatment 2 (Career arm) leverages the career-benefits channel of recognition – it is the same as Treatment 1 except trainees are told that those who qualify will receive the certificates privately but at the same time their name will be added to an ‘excellent teacher list’ (which will be shared with the School Education Department leadership) that can help them qualify for future opportunities in their districts. This leverages informal career incentives in the system such as postings to preferred schools, transfers to other lateral postings, or getting selected for promotion earlier once eligible; Treatments 3 and 4 (Public PLUS and Career PLUS) cross the first two treatments with a self-efficacy enhancing frame that aims to bolster teacher perceptions in their ability to do well in the training and their jobs more broadly. I find that employer recognition can improve teacher training performance if it is linked to tangible career benefits in the future but the positive effects can also backfire depending on how these incentives are framed. When a self-efficacy frame is added to either of the first two treatments, it improves teacher self-efficacy but makes teachers overconfident, reducing performance in the training. These findings have implications for how to design more powerful non-financial incentives that are effective for eliciting higher teacher effort, specifically in trainings and more broadly in schools and classrooms. At the same time, they point towards the sensitivity of such incentives to framing effects and suggest caution in how these are framed.
In Chapter 3, we partner with the Agriculture Extension Department to evaluate the impact of three alternative pay-for-performance schemes on extension outreach and quality. Extension service delivery is a typical setting where agents carry out tasks that include easily measurable and hard to measure dimensions, and hence the merits and demerits of objective versus subjective incentive systems are unclear. The performance schemes leverage the departmental digital monitoring system called AgriSmart and link incentives to objective metrics available on AgriSmart (Objective arm), supervisors’ own subjective evaluation (Subjective arm), or supervisors’ own subjective evaluation with an additional element of top-down monitoring to align supervisors’ incentives with the objectives of the principal (Subjective Plus arm). Early results show that while all treatments improve performance on AgriSmart metrics, Subjective Plus also shows positive and significant effects on farmer experience of extension outreach and quality, and farmer agricultural practices. In addition, we also find strong and positive effects on AD performance in their managerial tasks (such as assigning farmer training programmes to frontline extension agents) in the Subjective Plus arm, which form an important input into how frontline staff carry out extension outreach. Additional data collection will explore whether the results in Subjective Plus are driven by the effective use of discretion by supervisors in their evaluations, an improvement in AD performance and practices, or both. It will also explore mechanisms that explain why treatment effects observed on AgriSmart outreach indicators in the Objective and Subjective arm do not translate to farmer experience of extension outreach and quality.
This thesis generates three key findings. First, it highlights how to bolster teacher engagement, effort, and subsequently the acquisition of knowledge and skills in in-service trainings. It indicates that non-financial incentives that are linked to potential career benefits in the future are a feasible and cost-effective way for improving the impact of in-service trainings, where some of these career benefits such as postings to preferred schools or transfers to other lateral positions may be less formal and easier to exercise in the system as compared to promotions. More broadly, the results in Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 point towards the existence of such informal career incentives in the system and how they could be leveraged to make the design of non-financial incentives sharper. Second, the impact of non-financial incentives is mediated through individual sources of motivation and non-cognitive traits such as beliefs about ability and individual self-efficacy. This makes such incentives highly contextual, where the impact can often be negative depending on the group-type being incentivized. This implies a need for caution in how such incentives are designed and framed. Third, settings where tasks are multi-dimensional and quality of performance is hard to measure, incentive systems which give discretion to supervisors can be effective as long as supervisors incentives can be aligned with the objectives of the principal
Essays on political economy and governance
Get PDFThis article-based thesis aims to study political economy and governance in developing countries through the lens of crime, policing, and politics.
Chapter 2 studies the impact of election timing on crime and the nature of law enforcement in a developing country known for electoral violence. Using administrative crime data from India in the 2008-2019 period, I undertake fixed effects and difference-in-differences analyses, and provide detailed and rigorous causal evidence for change in the nature of crime and the composition of policing effort as elections approach. I show that upcoming elections increase crimes against public order while reducing crimes against individuals, such as those related to bodily offences, property, or women. I suggest that these cycles are driven by changes in police behaviour – as elections approach, the police sharply increase preventive activity and the enforcement of crimes related to public order, and reduce the enforcement of other crimes. These changes are consistent both with the multitasking of bureaucrats as well as political incentives for re-election, and contribute to our understanding of the nature of crime, politics, and policing during elections.
One in three elected representatives in the lower house of national and state legislatures in India is criminally accused. Using detailed and granular crime data from India, Chapter 3 estimates the impact of politicians with criminal backgrounds on local crime. On one hand, criminal politicians may be elected not despite of, but because of, their ability to control crime and get things done in an environment with weak rule of law. On the other hand, given their criminal backgrounds and political control over local police, criminal politicians may seek to consolidate their rent-seeking interests during their time in office. I use a close election regression dis- continuity design and find that having a criminal politician in office lowers weekly counts of serious crimes by 23.6%, even though the total number of complaints re- mains unchanged. This reduction in crime seems to be partly driven by reduced recording of crime. Further, this chapter suggests that the specific nature of a politician’s criminal background matters for outcomes.
Chapter 4 focuses on low participation of women in politics, and explores the impact of gender-specific polling stations on turnout. Using data from Pakistan, which has one of the lowest rates of female voter turnout in the world, we analyse the impact of creating separate-gender polling stations for males and females on voter turnout. The results show that separate gender polling stations reduce turnout for females by 2 percentage points on average, and for males by 1 percentage point on average. The results remain consistent after controlling for the role of resources, norms and mobility-related costs. This paper indicates that the policy of separate- gender polling stations does not alleviate gender-based voting constraints, and may in fact, worsen women’s access to voting.
Together, these three papers improve our understanding of crime during elections, criminal governance, and the participation of women in the electoral process, and contribute towards the literature in the fields of economics and political science
Essays in gender and development economics
Get PDFThis dissertation analyzes how social and behavioral frictions in decision-making contribute
to gender inequality in developing economies. It studies factors that have received relatively
little attention in economics – namely social norms, role models, and concerns about
preserving identity – and examines their impact on behavior, including intimate partner
violence (IPV). I use field and survey experiments in Rwanda and Nigeria to provide
empirical evidence on these relationships.
Economic progress has brought about significant improvements in global living conditions, yet it has not always translated into improvements for women and girls (Dhar,
Jain, & Jayachandran 2018; Duflo 2012). Currently, women comprise only 39 percent
of the world’s labor force, they spend two to ten times more time on unpaid domestic
and care work than men, and one in three women experiences IPV at some point in
her lifetime (Ferrant, Pesando, & Nowacka, 2014; WHO, 2013). The persistence of IPV
and other gender gaps in all economies and at all income levels suggests that there is no
mechanical improvement in gender equality as countries become richer. Instead, sticky
gender identities and social norms appear to play a role in maintaining gender inequality
(Alesina, Brioschi, & La Ferrara 2020; Jayachandran 2015).
In my first paper, co-authors and I conducted a two-level randomized control trial to
test the effectiveness of a government-run IPV prevention program in Rwanda, randomly
assigning 98 villages and 2,042 couples into treatment and control groups. The intervention
involved 22 weekly facilitated group discussions designed to reduce IPV by improving
couples’ communication skills, changing individuals’ gender attitudes, and spreading a
message of gender equality through the community. Randomizing at two levels– villages
and couples– we assess the program’s effect both on trained couples and on ‘spillover
couples’– control couples living in treated villages. Six months after the program ended,
we find that it caused large, unintended increases in IPV. Women assigned to the couples
training report experiencing more emotional, physical and sexual IPV compared to control
couples living in control villages, with increases of 11%, 15% and 24% respectively.
Spillover couples have even larger IPV increases when compared to control couples, with
increases of 11%, 33% and 40% respectively. We present evidence suggesting that the
IPV impacts represent a true increase in violence rather than an increase in women’s
likelihood of reporting. Evidence on mechanisms suggests that the program may have
increased violence because men backlashed against the perceived threat to their identity
posed by program messages about women’s empowerment, and against their wives’ more
progressive gender attitudes and greater aspirations.
In my second paper, I use a measurement experiment in Rwanda and Nigeria to
analyze the magnitude and predictors of misreporting on intimate partner and sexual
violence. I randomly assigned respondents to answer questions about IPV using one
of three survey methods: an indirect method (list experiment) that gives respondents
anonymity; a direct, self-administered method that increases privacy; and the standard,
direct face-to-face method. In Rwanda, IPV rates are double, and in Nigeria, they increase
by up to 39 percent when measured using the list method compared with the direct
methods. Misreporting was associated with indicators commonly targeted in women’s
empowerment interventions, including gender norms. This suggests that the standard
way of measuring IPV may result in significant prevalence underestimates and biased
correlations and treatment effect estimates.
For my third paper, I ran a survey experiment in Rwanda to test whether an individual’s
perceptions about social norms influences their own attitudes and behaviors. I provide
evidence that while the majority of men and women privately do not hold conservative
gender attitudes, most over-estimate the share of others who do. I then randomly assigned
women and men who over-estimated conservative gender norms to receive information
updates with the ‘true’ norm (measured 12 months prior), also varying the type of role
model about which people are given information. I measure the impact of this information
update on an index of self-reported gender attitudes and behavior in an incentivized spouse
dictator game. I find that men’s gender attitudes improve and they give more to their
spouse after having their misperceptions corrected; there is no average impact for women.
On role models, I find that men give more to their spouse after being told about all role
models, but there is suggestive evidence that they respond most to information about
village leaders. For women, there is no significant difference between being updated about
men or women role models, though results suggest that women may respond negatively
to having their beliefs corrected about other women. My results indicate a potentially
important factor in gender inequality, where misperceived social norms affect individuals’
own gender attitudes and related behaviors.
Together, my papers contribute to our understanding of the measurement of IPV, the
social and behavioral factors that contribute to gender inequality, and the effectiveness of
interventions to reduce it. My research suggests that identity and norms likely represent
important frictions in decision-making, and may therefore be important to address to
overcome gender gaps and other forms of inequality. My research also provides evidence
that interventions that challenge prevailing identities can provoke large backlashes, and that
even programs intended to target individuals can cause negative spillovers to communities.
This has important implications for social scientists studying gender, IPV, and other topics
tied to identities, and for policymakers trying to change behaviors rooted in cultural norms
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
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