11 research outputs found
Vaccine hesitancy in Pakistan is growing: here’s how it can be tackled
No full textSince the start of the pandemic, Pakistanis have become less likely to say they will accept a COVID vaccine. Saher Asad (Lahore University of Management Sciences), Javaeria Qureshi (University of Illinois at Chicago), Mariam Raheem (Centre for Economic Research in Pakistan – CERP), Taimur Shah (CERP), and Basit Zafar (University of Michigan) looks at the findings of a new survey into vaccine hesitancy and suggests how the government could overcome it
The Pakistan remittance initiative and remittance flows to Pakistan
No full textThis study investigates the impact of the Pakistan Remittance Initiative (PRI) on remittance flows to Pakistan. In 2009, the Government of Pakistan launched the PRI aimed at facilitating the flow of remittances sent home by non-resident Pakistanis. The PRI is comprised of multiple incentive schemes that are aimed at making remittance transfer faster, cheaper, and more convenient, and at increasing the attractiveness of formal channels of transfer relative to informal channels. I find that the PRI is associated with a significant increase in the formal remittances sent to Pakistan as well as a strong shift in the channels used for remit-tance transfer. Estimates suggest that while the PRI led to a significant reallocation of remittances away from the informal channel to the formal channel, it is not clear that it has increased the total amount of remittances received.Non-PRPSSP; CRP2; IFPRI1DSGD; PIMCGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM
Additional Returns to Investing in Girls' Education: Impact on Younger Sibling Human Capital
No full textThe Pakistan remittance initiative and remittance flows to Pakistan
No full textThis study investigates the impact of the Pakistan Remittance Initiative (PRI) on remittance flows to Pakistan. In 2009, the Government of Pakistan launched the PRI aimed at facilitating the flow of remittances sent home by non-resident Pakistanis. The PRI is comprised of multiple incentive schemes that are aimed at making remittance transfer faster, cheaper, and more convenient, and at increasing the attractiveness of formal channels of transfer relative to informal channels. I find that the PRI is associated with a significant increase in the formal remittances sent to Pakistan as well as a strong shift in the channels used for remit-tance transfer. Estimates suggest that while the PRI led to a significant reallocation of remittances away from the informal channel to the formal channel, it is not clear that it has increased the total amount of remittances received
Estimating effects of school quality using multiple proxies
No full textAbstractThe recent literature on school quality has shown that the school a child attends has significant effects on achievement. However, the literature relating different school characteristics to student achievement has produced mixed results, particularly when using student-level data. Using data from the ECLS-K and a proxy variable model that addresses the problem of measuring school quality, we show that significant effects of teaching and resource quality can be detected from student-level data. We find a significant, positive relationship between school quality and student achievement if school characteristics such as class size and teachers' schooling are treated as noisy measures of school quality. However, this effect is not detected when using models which do not account for measurement error in school quality. Our results suggest that conventional approaches underestimate the effect of school quality by about 50%
Replication data for: Omitted Variable Bias in Interacted Models: A Cautionary Tale
No full textReview of Economics and Statistics: Forthcoming
Nudging at Scale: Evidence from a Government Text Messaging Campaign during School Shutdowns in Punjab, Pakistan
No full textText and voice messages have emerged as a low-cost and popular tool for nudging recipients to change behavior. This paper presents findings from a randomized controlled trial designed to evaluate the impact of an information campaign using text and voice messages implemented in Punjab, Pakistan during the COVID-19-induced school closures. This campaign sought to increase study time and provide academic support while schools were closed and to encourage reenrollment when they opened, to reduce the number of dropouts. The campaign targeted girls enrolled in grades 5 to 7. Messages were sent out by a government institution, and the campaign lasted from October 2020 until November 2021, when schools had permanently re-opened. Households were randomized across three treatment groups and a control group that did not receive any messages. The first treatment group received gender-specific messages that explicitly referenced daughters in their households, and the second treatment group received gender-neutral messages. A third group was cross randomized across the first two treatment arms and received academic support messages (practice math problems and solutions). The results show that the messages increased reenrollment by 6.0 percentage points approximately three months after the intervention finished. Gender neutral messages (+8.9 percentage points) showed larger effect size on enrolment than gender-specific messages (+ 4.3 percentage points), although the difference is not statistically significant. The message program also increased learning outcomes by 0.2 standard deviation for Urdu and 0.2 standard deviation for math. The paper finds a small positive effect on the intensive margin of remote learning and an (equivalent) small negative effect on the intensive margin of outside tutoring. In line with similar studies on pandemic remediation efforts, the paper finds no effect of the academic support intervention on learning. The findings suggest that increased school enrollment played a role in supporting the observed increase in learning outcomes
