German Development Economics Conference 2024

23 May 2024, 14:00 → 24 May 2024, 22:00 Europe/Berlin

Leibniz Universität Hannover

Andreas Fuchs (University of Göttingen), Axel Dreher (Heidelberg University), Christian Leßmann (TUD), Esther Gehrke (Wageningen University), Guenther Isabel (ETH Zurich), Krisztina Kis-Katos (University of Göttingen, Chair of International Economic Policy), Martin Gassebner (Leibniz Universität Hannover), Matthias Schündeln (Goethe University Frankfurt), Michael Grimm (University of Passau), Rainer Thiele (IfW Kiel)

The annual conference brings together international scholars and researchers of development economics and neighboring fields. Plenary sessions with keynote speakers, parallel sessions with contributed papers, and poster sessions will reflect the current state of research in development economics and provide a forum for exchange for researchers and practitioners.

Special events:
Keynotes: Sandra Sequeira (LSE) and Tavneet Suri (MIT)
Ceremony for the KfW Award for practice-oriented development research.

     

2024 Call for Papers GDE Hannover

2024 Program GDE final

Tavneet Suri Keynote Slides

Thursday, 23 May

14:15 → 15:15 Registration

15:15 → 16:15 Parallel Session 1: Conflicts in Agriculture

15:15 → 16:15 Parallel Session 2: Natural Resources

15:45 Mining for Evidence: Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)’s Impact in Africa

The debate on the impact of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activities by mining companies on local development has largely been based on anecdotal rather than empirical evidence. We provide empirical evidence on the impact of CSR of large-scale industrial mining companies on education, child undernutrition and household wealth in 14 African countries between 2010 and 2019. We combine a novel mining dataset with
individual-level data from the Demographic and Health Surveys. We estimate a two-way fixed effects model, Callaway & Sant’Anna (2021)’s model, and a spatial difference-in-differences model. We find that CSR initiatives have an no effect on education and child undernutrition and a negative effect on wealth. We also explore factors that could drive CSR contributions. Although results lean predominantly towards a functionalist motivations of CSR, the approach to CSR also aligns with development and Public Relations driven objectives

Speaker: Guenther Isabel (ETH Zurich)

15:15 → 16:15 Parallel Session 3: Climate Change

15:15 Climate change adaptation: Evidence from an RCT in rural Bangladesh

This study evaluates a women-focused livelihood support project in climate-affected regions of South-western Bangladesh, in Khulna and Satkhira districts. The evaluation, involving 3,120 households with women beneficiaries, exploits a randomized control trial to measure a project's impact on household income, food security, and resilience to climate change. Key findings include a significant increase in household income, improved food security, and enhanced preparedness for climate events. However, the project showed limited effects on women's decision-making power within households. These insights are vital for understanding the effectiveness of livelihood support in empowering women in vulnerable settings, highlighting both achievements and areas for future improvement.

Speakers: Alexandra Avdeenko (World Bank, University of Heidelberg), Jakob Jordi Gärtner (Uni Heidelberg)

15:15 → 16:15 Parallel Session 4: Poverty Measurement

15:15 → 16:15 Parallel Session 5: Female Workers

15:45 Information asymmetries and female labour exchange in rural Tanzania

Development economists have long studied how informal arrangements among community members may substitute for an imperfect and incomplete market. This paper assesses whether informal arrangements may actually promote exchanges in the market. We study rural labour exchange groups, an organization that is found in many different areas but still underdocumented in the economic literature. Our theoretical analysis shows that these teams offer an advantage to employers, who may outsource the monitoring of workers' effort to the team. Team members are incentivized to provide high effort because a deviation would lead to the team dissolution, including for home production. Using data from north-west Tanzania, we confirm the model's predictions: Women who are part of a labour exchange team are more likely to obtain paid farm work, and are more often hired for tasks for which teams have a comparative advantage.

Speaker: Christelle Dumas (University of Fribourg)

15:15 → 16:15 Parallel Session 6: Health Outcomes

15:15 Interplay of Financial Mechanisms and Agricultural Price Volatility: Implications for Child Health in Rural India

The study, addresses influence of financial infrastructure on child health outcomes in rural India, with a specific focus on how enhanced access to rural banks can mitigate the adverse effects of agricultural income shocks. The study employs data from the Indian National Family and Health Surveys (NFHS- 4 and 5), integrating them with local agricultural income fluctuations, as determined by the interaction between global agricultural price fluctuations and local agricultural conditions, alongside local indicators of financial development. The findings reveal that proximity to rural banks significantly mitigates the detrimental impacts of these shocks on child health. This challenges the conventional notion that rural communities with limited financial sector access experience minimal benefits. Instead, it uncovers the indirect yet substantial advantages of expanded financial accessibility in safeguarding children's health during economic instability.

Speaker: Dimitrios Argyros (University College Dublin)

15:15 → 16:15 Parallel Session 7

15:15 ____________

16:30 → 18:00 Official Conference Welcome (Krisztina Kis-Katos, Maik Dierkes, and Martin Gassebner) and Keynote Tavneet Suri (MIT Sloan School of Management)

18:15 → 19:00 Poster Session

19:00 → 21:00 KfW reception, best paper award ceremony

Friday, 24 May

09:00 → 10:30 Parallel Session 1: Conflicts and Peace Building

09:00 → 10:30 Parallel Session 2: Social Networks

09:30 Combating Fake News in Health: An online Survey

Combating Fake News in Health: An online Survey

The rapid and far-reaching dissemination of misinformation on social media
is a threat to global health. As a consequence, several media platforms
have recently established tools to combat its spread like fact-checks or warning
signs of misinformation. In this research project, we assess the effectiveness
of two tools (pre- and debunking) on sharing behavior of accurate
and misleading news in the context of vaccination in Sub-Saharan Africa and
examine the underlying psychological mechanisms. A novelty of our study
is the introduction of endogenous information acquisition that allows us to
shed light on the impact of confirmatory search behavior. Using a large-scale
online survey experiment with 11,192 Facebook users from six African countries,
we show that fact-checks and forewarnings about misinformation are
reducing the sharing of misinformation. Fact-checks have a double effect,
increasing the circulation of accurate news if information is self-selected.
Generally, self-selected information are processed more intensely than nonselected
information, however are equally likely to be shared. The effects
can

Speaker: Maximilian Guigas (BNITM)

09:00 → 10:30 Parallel Session 3: Public Interventions

09:00 Improving Citizens’ Acceptance for Carbon Taxes in China

This paper aims to understand how to explain carbon taxes and how to design redistribution policies to win support for carbon taxes using a representative survey on 3,460 Chinese citizens. Each participant is randomly assigned to two sets of information: (i) what the carbon tax is and how it works; and (ii) personalized information on gains and losses under a specific carbon tax redistribution policy. We find that Chinese citizens are most convinced by the “polluters pay” element of carbon taxes. Moreover, providing detailed information on gains and losses usually does not increase the acceptance, except that receiving information on gains would increase the acceptance under the uniform redistribution scheme.

Speaker: Yuanwei Xu (Ruhr University Bochum)

10:00 ____________

09:00 → 10:30 Parallel Session 4: Commons in Agriculture

09:30 Small-scale farmers’ willingness to pay for information: A comparison of individual purchase decisions with contributions to a club good

Over-application of fertilizers is common in Indonesia harming the environment and reducing farmers’ profits. Soil tests combined with individualized fertilizer recommendations can help to reduce the over-application of fertilizer, yet they are rarely used and typically not offered by extension officers. Hence, high hopes are pinned on a market-based dissemination. In this paper, we elicit small-scale farmers’ revealed willingness-to pay for rapid low-cost soil test kits in Indonesia. We use an incentive-compatible auction, based on the Becker-DeGroot-Marschak (BDM) approach. We compare two different ways soil tests could be distributed among farmers outside of our experiment by government extension officers. In the first experimental arm, we offer farmers the chance to bid for the service of having their soil tested with a rapid soil test. In the second experimental arm, farmers are asked to make a bid for their contribution to buy the complete soil test kit including a training how to use them as a farmer group. A further design feature of our sample is that half of the farmers were randomly assigned to a one-day training on soil fertility management in 2022. Hence, we test whether farmers who were offered that training systematically differ in their price bids from those farmers who were not offered that training. Our results suggest that the willingness-to-pay for soil tests is substantial and hence, a provision by extension workers at a subsidized rate would be feasible. On a per test basis, both types of provisions imply comparable price bids. We do not find much free riding in the group setting. For lower subsidies the service provision would be more effective, but for higher subsidies uptake would be higher in the group setting. Yet, prior training in soil management has no or if at all a very small positive effect. These results provide the first evidence on the effectiveness of alternative distribution channels of rapid low-cost soil tests among small-scale farmers.

Speaker: Michael Grimm (University of Passau)

10:00 ____________

09:00 → 10:30 Parallel Session 5: Migration

10:00 ____________

09:00 → 10:30 Parallel Session 6: Social Policies

09:00 Delivering primary care to the homeless - Evidence from Brazil

In this paper, I study the effect of Mobile Street Clinics on health care utilization and social assistance uptake among the homeless in Brazil. I exploit the staggered introduction of Mobile Street Clinics across different municipalities in a difference-in-differences setting, comparing never- or later-treated to earlier-treated municipalities. I find that the opening of a Mobile Street Clinic is associated with a strong increase in primary health care utilization among homeless indivduals, without affecting social assistance utilization. The results provide first quantitative evidence for the effectiveness of delivering targeted health care to the homeless.

Speaker: Malte Becker

09:00 → 10:30 Parallel Session 7: Research Methods

09:00 A slippery slope: topographic variation as an instrumental variable

A key identification assumption required for causal claims of instrumental variables (IVs) is the exclusion restriction. This paper assesses the validity of this assumption for topographic variation as a widely used IV in empirical economics. A systematic review of leading economics journals identifies 56 different variables that the reviewed literature causally links to topographic variation. We interpret this as strong indication for a problematic prevalence of confounding variables in most topography-based IV studies. While we find that it is common in the literature to control for some of these variables, we point out that this leads to violations of another key identification assumption, the unconfoundedness of the instrument. As an example, we assess in more depth the interwined causal relationship of roads and electrification for Dinkelman (2011), a seminal study that popularized the use of topographic variation IVs. We apply tests to gauge the strength of potential exclusion-restriction violations and discuss common issues in the literature, including IV weakness in the presence of potential exclusion-restriction violations. Our findings suggest a higher standard in transparently discussing, systematically testing, and ultimately choosing to use topographic variation as an IV.

Speaker: Nils Haveresch (RWI-Leibniz Institute of Economic Research, Essen)

09:30 Lost in the Design Space? Construct Validity in the Microfinance Literature

While results from individual Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) often do
not hold beyond their particular setting, the accumulation of many RCTs can be
used to guide policy. But how many studies are required to confidently
generalize? Our paper examines construct validity, an often neglected yet
important element affecting generalizability. Construct validity deals with how
the operationalization of a treatment corresponds to the broader theoretical
construct it intends to speak to. The universe of potential operationalizations is
referred to as the design space. We use microfinance as an empirical example,
a literature that is exceptionally rich in RCTs. By systematically reviewing 38
microfinance RCTs, we demonstrate that even this deep experimental literature
only covers a tiny fraction of the design space and that small variations in the
treatment design matter for the observed treatment effects. Most papers
nevertheless generalize from the operationalized treatment to a broad
construct. We conclude that, to maintain construct validity, RCTs should
semantically limit their inference to the operationalized treatment under
evaluation – thereby trading relevance for rigor.

Speaker: Christina Petrik (Universität Passau)

10:30 → 11:00 Coffee

11:00 → 12:30 Parallel Session 1: Post-conflict Environments

11:30 Unintended Consequences of UN Reports: Evidence from a Post-Conflict Context

International organizations play a crucial role in the reintegration of former rebels.
They are often the main guarantors and providers of reincorporation projects and
are pivotal in revealing violence during the post-conflict period. Some studies, however,
associate the presence of international missions with political violence. I argue
that international organizations can increase the probability for members of successor
rebel parties to reconsider the use of political violence by providing condemning
reports that reveal government misconduct. How these messages are currently communicated
does not take into consideration the higher psychological susceptibility,
existential vulnerabilities, and volatile environment surrounding this audience. I
test my arguments in Colombia, where the former rebel group FARC participated
for the first time in elections in 2018. Based on a unique sample of FARC supporters
and an experimental design, I show that members of former rebel groups were
more prone to support the reconsideration of political violence when they were confronted
with UN reports condemning government misconduct against their group. I
also show that the FARC did not share these messages on Twitter, indicating that
the FARC leadership is aware that these reports could have the leverage to influence
a critical threshold for former rebels. These results suggest that UN reports
have the potential to negatively affect volatile post-conflict contexts and reveal the
necessity for reevaluating how the UN communicates at the local level.

Speaker: Marcela Ibáñez (University of Zurich)

12:00 ____________

11:00 → 12:30 Parallel Session 2: Politicians

11:30 Social networks, local elections, and female representation: Evidence from Nepali voter registration data

We use the universe of Nepali voter registration records to examine how social networks shape local-level elections. Using information on individual-level kinship ties among 13.9 million registered voters in 2017, we show how connectedness of individuals to other registered voters and politicians matters for selection into politics. We first establish that political candidates chosen by their party are better connected to voters and other politicians. Further, we show that this correlation is not due to correlated unobservables. Using a regression discontinuity design, we establish a causal link from the political success of one person to the candidacy of their relatives. We show that relatives of bare winners in previous elections are more than twice as likely to be chosen as the party’s candidate for female-reserved seats than relatives of bare losers. To study mechanisms, we investigate effect heterogeneity and find that young women and in-laws are more likely to run if they reside in the same village as the male politician in their family, evidence consistent with women serving as proxies to fill low-ranking female-reserved seats. We also find limited evidence that successful relatives serve as role models that inspire women to run for office.

Speaker: Simon Heß

11:00 → 12:30 Parallel Session 3: Micro-entrepreneurs

12:00 Scaling up financial education among micro-entrepreneurs. Evidence from a randomized saturation experiment

We study direct, spillover and saturation effects of a financial education program on micro-entrepreneurs in Uganda. We randomize the program at the cluster-level, and then randomize the share of treated individuals within treated clusters. 15 months later, the treated show expected effects, such as increased use and amount of mobile money savings or higher investments. Spillovers on untreated peers tend to be insignificant. However, when the share of treated in treated clusters (i.e., saturation) increases, the beneficial effects on the treated become smaller, so that the net effect of the program may turn insignificant if operated at scale.

Speaker: Lukas Menkhoff

11:00 → 12:30 Parallel Session 4: Firms

11:00 ICTs’ adoption and informal firms performance in Africa

This paper analyses the impact of mobile money adoption on informal firms performance in 8 African countries. Firm performance is approximated by firms’ total revenues,
total revenues per employee and number of employees. Measuring the impact of mobile
money adoption raises problems of endogeneity and selection bias, since the choice of
adopting mobile money (or not) is not random. Following recent developments in the
literature concerning these issues, we apply the entropy balancing matching method to
transform our data so that the treatment group (firms that have adopted mobile money)
and the control group (firms that have not adopted mobile money) become similar in
terms of moments of our variables of interest. We then measure the impact of mobile
money adoption using weighted least squares with weights generated by balancing
entropy. Finally, we validate the sensitivity of our results by performing the Oster (2019)
test for variable omission bias. Interpreting our most complete regressions, we can
say that mobile money adoption increases annual sales for our sample of informal
firms by 41% and annual sales per employee by 31%. We also check whether selection
on unobservables could affect our results by doing Oster (2019) test. We find that
(unobservables) biais adjust treatment effect has the same magnitude as our complete
regressions and unobservables selection is not sufficient to drive a zero effect of mobile
money on firms’ performance

Speaker: Magloire SESHIE (Université Mohammed VI Polytechnique (Morroco) & Université Clermont Auvergne (France))

11:30 Bargaining Over Taxes: Evidence from Zambian firms

We study tax compliance of microenterprises under turnover taxation. Using administrative data on the universe of tax filings from Zambia, we document strong and sharp bunching (i) in strictly dominated regions where firms would be better off by reducing turnover and (ii) at amounts which imply round number tax liabilities. These observations reject predictions from standard models of tax compliance but can be rationalized when interpreting tax payments as outcomes of negotiations between taxpayers and tax collectors. We conduct a survey of more than 500 microenterprises in Zambia and document that discussing tax payments with officials before filing tax returns is a widespread phenomenon, lending support to the the negotiation channel.
Finally, a randomized lab-in-the-field experiment provides evidence against competing explanations for the observed bunching behavior.

Speaker: Daniel Overbeck (University of Mannheim)

12:00 Carbon taxation in emerging economies

This paper delivers the first comprehensive analysis of how firms respond to carbon taxation in emerging economies. Our evidence builds on exhaustive administrative data from South Africa, the $13^{th}$ largest emitter worldwide. The presented results are twofold. First, we establish stylized facts on the types of firms that are affected, how much revenue is generated from which sector and which share of national emissions the tax is able to capture. Second, we study the dynamic impact of the carbon tax on firm-level outcomes such as sales, profits, capital and labor inputs. We show that the design of the South African Carbon Tax leads to substantial heterogeneity across sectors in terms of how strongly firms are affected. Contrary to the concern that carbon taxes may impede economic growth we measure no negative effects on firm performance on average. However, this result masks important heterogeneity as we indeed estimate substantial differences across affected industries.

Speaker: Johannes Gallé (MCC Berlin)

11:00 → 12:30 Parallel Session 5: Structural Change

11:30 Colonial (Dis)Integration: Concession Companies and Human Development in Mozambique

Concessions to private companies were a common form of economic and administrative organization during the colonial era in Africa. In 1891, Portugal granted the central and northern regions of Mozambique as concessions to private companies, the Mozambique and Niassa Companies. These companies operated with state-like powers and implemented a vast forced labour regime that exploited the natural resources of the leased territories. I use the river-defined concession borders to provide evidence on the long-term effect of this form of private colonization on human development. Using a novel dataset and a regression discontinuity (RD) design, I find that the concession system had contrasting effects on present-day wealth, health, and education outcomes. Individuals living in villages located just inside the former concession borders of the Mozambique Company have significantly higher levels of health and education compared to those living just outside them. They are also wealthier when considering the operational de facto borders. In contrast, individuals living in villages located just inside the former concession borders of the Niassa Company have significantly lower levels of health and education compared to those living just outside them. My results shed light on the enduring impact of colonial-era private concessions and aim to advance understanding of the origins of the lack of integration in Mozambique.

Speaker: Orlando Roman (Geneva Graduate Institute)

12:00 The Breakdown of the English Society of Orders: The Role of the Industrial Revolution

We study the emergence of modern social mobility in England, connected to the breakdown of a society regulated by ascriptive inherited characteristics, and its association with the Industrial Revolution. We combine two new datasets on individual wealth holdings before and after the Industrial Revolution. We show that ascriptive characteristics, such as hereditary titles, occupational last names,or ethnic identity explain less of the variation in wealth and are less predictive of being rich, after the Industrial Revolution. Moreover, these declines are larger in the parts of England most impacted by the revolution. We then study a key facet of this increased social mobility - geographical mobility. We show that areas that experienced greater outward mobility were those that were; more urbanized; less agrarian; had institutionalized markets; higher incomes; were more politically competitive; were less feudal; and where common lands has been enclosed by an act of Parliament.

Speaker: Cara Ebert (RWI - Leibniz Institute for Economic Research)

11:00 → 12:30 Parallel Session 6: Education

11:00 Learning together: Experimental evidence on parental involvement in education in Uganda

Parental involvement in education can be an important contribution to children’s learning, and a crucial complement to other inputs, such as text books. We here report from a field experiment in Uganda, where households were offered educational material and an action plan to engage them in the learning process of their primary-school child. Our findings show that the intervention increased the time mothers spent on learning activities with their child and the time the child spent doing homework. Moreover, the intervention caused an improvement in educational outcomes, with a marked increase in exam enrollment and with improved test scores for children in the lowest-income families. The increased parental involvement in education did not cause an increase in stress or domestic violence.

Speaker: Arne Nasgowitz (Center for Applied Research at NHH (SNF))

11:00 → 12:30 Parallel Session 7: International Trade

11:30 Industrial policy and input market access: Evidence from Nigerian fertiliser

Many economies use industrial policy to nurture sectors that produce inputs critical to economic development. While there are theoretical reasons that justify such state interventions, there is limited direct evidence on whether industrial policy in input markets could effectively induce productivity gains for firms that purchase these inputs. In this paper, I make progress on this front by evaluating an import substitution policy in Nigeria that sought to expand domestic production of inorganic fertiliser, a modern input to agriculture. In particular, I focus on assessing two components of the policy: the construction of domestic fertiliser manufacturing plants and a ban on imports of fertilisers. Combining household surveys and geospatial data on plant locations, I estimate the effects of policy-induced changes in access to fertiliser on adoption rates, and crop yields. To deliver credible estimates, I take advantage of the fact that farm-households were differentially exposed to the policy based on their distance to sources of fertiliser. I find that farms closer to sources of fertiliser exhibit higher rates of adoption on both the extensive and intensive margin, as well as greater crop yields. Preliminary evidence also suggests that the observed effect works through retail prices

Speaker: Ricardo Guzman (Aix-Marseille School of Economics)

12:30 → 13:30 Lunch

13:30 → 15:00 Plenary Session Keynote Sandra Sequeira (London School of Economics)

15:00 → 16:30 Parallel Session 1: Race, Religion and Identity

15:30 Natural Disasters and Sharia Laws

The paper studies the effect of natural disasters on the introduction of religious laws using a unique dataset on Sharia laws in the largest Muslim country – Indonesia. We find that districts in proximity to a natural disaster are 37 percent more likely to introduce Sharia law in the following year, and the effect persists over the following years. Testing for the mechanism, we use a longitude survey to show that natural disasters are associated with higher self-reported religiosity and frequency of praying in areas closer to the natural disasters. This is the first study to link natural disasters and religiosity to the institutionalization of religious laws.

Speaker: Fabian Haas (Department of International Economic Policy, University of Freiburg)

16:00 Teachers’ caste bias affects students’ mental health and aspirations in Bihar, India

Social identity-based prejudice has a debilitating effect on various life outcomes. While the social science literature primarily focuses on the economic and social consequences, the mental health effects of such biases are vastly under-studied. We investigate this question in the context of caste discrimination in Bihar, India, using a large-scale, detailed, representative survey of public schools. Our analysis shows that a backward caste student has 0.42sigma higher depression score and is 19 percentage points more likely to be categorized as `depressed', relative to a forward caste student, when taught by a forward caste teacher. To understand the source of the effect on mental health, we show that forward caste teachers systematically underestimate the learning levels of backward caste students relative to forward caste ones. This constitutes an objective measure of teachers' caste-based prejudice. Further, backward caste students also exhibit considerably lower levels of educational aspirations relative to their forward caste counterparts. Our estimates suggest that about 7.7m students suffer from depression in Bihar, and out of that 6.7m are from backward castes. A significant proportion of such cases arise because of teachers’ caste prejudice.

Speaker: Ritwik Banerjee (IIM Bangalore)

15:00 → 16:30 Parallel Session 2: Democratic Institutions

16:00 Does Development Contribute to Democracy? Microeconomic Evidence from Severe Climate Events

This paper first shows the potential of climate change to affect the stability of political systems. More specifically, using data from Africa, I show that experiencing extreme weather events decreases support for democracy in the population. Second, I show evidence that suggests that variation in food availability is a channel that connects weather events with support for democratic systems. Finally, the results provide a fresh perspective on the relationship between economic development and democracy. Using individual-level data allows me to tie the analysis closely to some of the micro-foundations in existing theories. The results show that improvements in living conditions lead to stronger support for a democratic system.

Speaker: Matthias Schündeln (GNOI)

15:00 → 16:30 Parallel Session 3: Youth Career Interventions

15:00 Unlocking young women's minds? The impact of a low-cost career guidance program

Young people lacking job-qualifying skill formation are likely to face precarious labor market conditions in the future. This might be particularly the case for youth from disadvantaged backgrounds and young women facing rigid gender norms at risk of not entering the labor force. Career guidance prior to making major career choices has the potential to alleviate these risks. We examine whether and how a low-cost 10-hour long career guidance program implemented during school hours can facilitate career choices as well as labor market entry in the future. Our results from a school-level clustered randomized controlled trial ($n>5000$) in urban India with primarily female students in the final grade of 45 secondary schools show that the program increases the share of students pursuing further skill formation and encourages students to consider their interests as the most important criterion for the selection of their career path.

Speaker: Ankush Asri (Radboud University)

16:00 Better programs, better jobs? Evaluating a skills-training program for disadvantaged young women in Ghana

Improved workforce development programs and education in general are of high priority for national governments and development cooperation to tackle the rising youth underemployment in many Sub-Saharan African countries coupled with continued population growth and increasing urbanization rates. Nevertheless, rigorous evidence of their effectiveness remains scarce and finds mixed results. We conducted a randomized controlled trial of a best-case scenario training program in Ghana. The program improved participants’ employment probability and certain aspects of employment quality and livelihoods, but the impact strongly depends on the program design and implementation. Expectation surveys reveal that stakeholders are overly optimistic about program effectiveness and update their beliefs only to a limited extent when presented with evaluation results.

Speaker: Sarah Frohnweiler (RWI - Leibniz Institute for Economic Research)

15:00 → 16:30 Parallel Session 4: Resilience and Adaptation

15:00 Resilience to shocks and poverty in developing countries: Empirical evidence from rural households in Southeast Asia

The question “How resilient are rural households?” is becoming an important research issue, especially in the context of more frequent and severe shocks in rural areas of developing countries. We use balanced panel data from 3367 households from Thailand and Vietnam collected in 2010, 2013, and 2016 to estimate a (latent) variable reflecting resilience capacity of rural households and examine the influences of resilience capacity on mitigating the impact of shocks and improving household welfare. We employ a generalized structural equation model (GSEM) to estimate the latent variable representing households’ resilience capacity. The results from fixed-effects estimations show that the lagged resilience capacity of rural households has a significant and negative correlation with losses caused by shocks. Moreover, the results of fixed-effects estimations with a control function approach indicate that an improvement in the resilience capacity can prevent rural households from falling into poverty in absolute and multidimensional terms.

Speaker: Manh Hung Do (Institute for Environmental Economics and World Trade, Leibniz University Hannover)

15:30 Climate-Induced Extreme Weather Events: Can Rural Households Recover? Evidence from India

Against the background of growing climate change-related extreme weather events leading to environmental/natural disasters, we assess the capacity of rural households to manage recovery in developing countries. We investigate this in the context of floods in South India by studying both the extent and patterns of financial damage and the recovery from flood-induced damage.
Using primary data from 600 households before and after the floods of 2018, we find that the majority of the households (66 percent) report suffering financial damage in flood and only 22 percent reported some form of reinvestment to repair or replace flood-induced damage. In this study, we investigate both these phenomena and the factors influencing them in two parts. In the first part, we examine the diverse aspects of flood-induced financial damage. In the second part, we look at the recovery from the extreme weather events which have differential impact in the regions sampled. As borrowing is identified as an important way to manage risks and emergencies by households in developing countries where alternate risk management mechanisms are not available, we examine the role of debt literacy in recovery. Using Ordinary Least Squares and Tobit regressions, we provide evidence that there exists a positive association between debt literacy and reinvestment post-flood (at 10 percent). We find that the relationship remains positive and significant (at 5 percent) in the case of reinvestment in crops and durables. This implies that higher debt literacy might be enabling better access to formal channels of credit for reinvestment. The findings could help policymakers to devise effective risk mitigation and management strategies in the aftermath of shocks in regions lacking formal risk management mechanisms. Informed policies could improve the financial well-being of vulnerable rural households using suitable institutional credit supply mechanisms to support reinvestment.

Speaker: Remya Tressa Jacob

15:00 → 16:30 Parallel Session 5: Labor Markets

15:00 → 16:30 Parallel Session 6: Healthcare Utilization

15:00 Impacts of Public Insurance on Health Access and Outcomes - Evidence from India

At more than 50%, India has one of the world’s highest out-of-pocket healthcare expenditure rates. Historically, low cost healthcare has been provided by the government through public healthcare facilities. Faced with a high demand for tertiary healthcare and an overcrowded public healthcare infrastructure, the central and various state governments adopted a model of public-private-partnership where the government will pay the insurance premium for low income households who will be covered by the insurance at various government and private hospitals for their tertiary care needs. However, given the wide disparity in quality across
private hospitals, it is not clear how such a framework would affect the demand for private healthcare or overall health outcomes. We analyse a pioneering public insurance scheme in India, the Rajiv Aarogyasri program (RAS), introduced by the state of Andhra Pradesh(AP) between 2007 and 2008, on maternal and child health outcomes. India has consistently ranked
low in maternal and child health outcomes among its peers and a leading factor contributing to high infant and maternal mortality rates is the low rate of institutional deliveries. Since RAS covers institutional reproductive care, particularly subsidizing private care, we first
examine if RAS increases institutional deliveries, particularly in private hospitals. Second, we study if the program led to improvements in key outcome variables that might have come from increased access to institutional care, specifically out-of-pocket costs and infant mortality. Using pooled cross-section data from three waves of District Level Health Survey(DLHS), we estimate a difference-in-differences model, by exploiting variation in the timing of births between 2000-2015 and using contiguous districts in the neighboring states without RAS as a plausible control group. Our tests confirm parallel pre-treatment trends between the treatment and the control districts. We find that deliveries in private hospitals increased, and government hospitals decreased after the introduction of the program. However, even as the use of private facilities increased, we find that out-of-pocket costs declined. Further
examination shows that these effects come from households who were more likely to be using government hospitals before the introduction of RAS suggesting a substitution effect of the relative price change – a switch to private from government hospitals. We do not find an overall increase in access to tertiary care, nor any effect on infant mortality. However,
heterogeneity analysis reveals that the program likely bridged the gender gap in access to costly private healthcare. Even as we observe a more pronounced decrease in OOP expenses for male births relative to female births, girls are more likely to be born at private facilities
following the implementation of RAS, whereas boys’ likelihood of being born in private facilities remains unchanged before and after RAS. This suggests that parents were more inclined to opt for costly private institutional deliveries for male children in comparison to female children prior to the introduction of RAS.

Speaker: Titir Bhattacharya (University of Warwick)

15:30 Health Insurance Preferences for Outpatient Care – A Discrete Choice Experiment in Pakistan

State-funded health insurance schemes are increasingly implemented in the Global South, but utilization and acceptance often remains lower than desired for Universal Health Coverage. Including features that address the beneficiary population’s preferences could improve this. We conducted a Discrete Choice Experiment to elicit preferences for a new public outpatient health insurance for low-income households in Pakistan at scheme design stage. We included five attributes that reflected the dimensions of real policy trade-offs during scheme design: healthcare providers, services, health conditions, coverage amount and premium. The main effects reveal relevance of all attributes and strong preferences for including higher-level healthcare providers as well as telemedicine and for covering chronic disease needs. We see suggestive evidence that even in a setting with low insurance literacy, choices regarding which health conditions to cover were made to maximise benefits along known, pre-existing health complaints and risk-factors. We do not detect substantial heterogeneity in preferences across socio-demographic strata, respondent and household health status, indicating rather homogenous preferences.

Speaker: Alina Imping (University of Erlangen-Nürnberg)

15:00 → 16:30 Parallel Session 7: Connectivity

16:30 → 17:00 Coffee

17:00 → 18:00 Parallel Session 1: Regional Favoritism

17:00 Wedded to Prosperity? Informal Influence and Regional Favoritism

We investigate the informal influence of political leaders' spouses on the subnational allocation of foreign aid. Building new worldwide datasets on personal characteristics of political leaders and their spouses as well as on geocoded development aid projects (including new data on 19 Western donors), we examine whether those regions within recipient countries that include the birthplace of leaders' spouses attract more aid during their partners' time in office. Our findings for the 1990-2020 period suggest that regions including the birthplaces of political leaders' spouses receive substantially more aid from European donors, the United States, and China. We find that more aid goes to spousal regions prior to elections and that developmental outcomes deteriorate rather than improve as a consequence. For Western aid but not for China, these results stand in some contrast to those for leader regions themselves. This suggests that aid from Western donors is directed from serving obvious political motives to promoting more hidden ones.

Speaker: Lennart Kaplan (GAU)

17:00 → 18:00 Parallel Session 2: Foreign Aid

17:00 Regional Effects of the Belt and Road Initiative

This paper addresses the gap in the literature concerning the impact of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) infrastructure projects at a regional level. Utilizing a staggered difference-in-differences approach, we analyze the effects of BRI transport infrastructure, including railways, roads, and logistic hubs, on local development. To achieve this, we develop a geographic dataset detailing the timelines of project implementation and completion, and combine it with night light output and population data at the pixel level. Our results indicate a modest increase in population development following project completion, but no significant long-term regional economic growth as measured by nightlight output. The construction phase, however, temporarily boosts economic activity, which subsides after completion. Logistic hubs demonstrate greater developmental impacts compared to railways and roads. Additionally, we observe no significant local migration during the construction phase. Overall, this paper contributes to our understanding of the potential effects of transport infrastructure on regional economies.

Speaker: Alexander Bareis (Universität Siegen)

17:00 → 18:00 Parallel Session 3: Energy Use

17:00 Lost in transition – The decline of LPG usage and the charcoal renaissance in urban Senegal

Claims for removing fossil fuel subsidies in the Global South are based on climate and equity concerns, but they can be at odds with improving access to LPG as a clean cooking fuel. We examine the case of urban Senegal where LPG usage rates were among the highest in Sub-Saharan Africa in the late 2000s. Using representative data, we show that LPG usage rates declined sharply following the removal of LPG subsidies in 2009. Counterintuitively, the decline was not reversed when world market prices led to a local price decrease. To explore this puzzle, we use detailed household data from a survey we conducted in two waves in 2009 and 2019. We find that households switched back to charcoal after the subsidy removal, yet over time they increasingly use newly promoted energy-efficient charcoal stoves. These stoves make the transition back to LPG less attractive. Our results suggest that the energy transition of the poor is a highly price responsive process. Pricing instruments such as end user subsidies and carbon taxes should be used cautiously and with an eye on the poor.

Speaker: Julian Rose (RWI - Leibniz Institute for Economic Research)

17:00 → 18:00 Parallel Session 4: Shock-coping Strategies

17:30 Solar technology as a shock-coping device: Evidence from rural Tanzania

Solar home systems, a technology that is by now widely used to access electricity by households not connected to the grid, can also provide a strategy for income diversification.
We demonstrate this based on unique high-frequency loan repayment and electricity usage data of about 20,000 Tanzanian farmers over four years. Relying on machine learning based classification, we predict the likelihood that farmers run a small-scale business on a daily basis. Conditional on household and district-year fixed effects, we show that some farmers take advantage of their solar home system to generate income in the aftermath of vegetation shocks. Business uptake provides a short-term shock coping strategy, especially in more remote areas where electricity related services are scarce. This application also highlights new potential uses of high-frequency observational data in contexts where survey data is scarce.

Speaker: Friederike Lenel (PIK; Uni Göttingen)

17:00 → 18:00 Parallel Session 5: Gender Norms

17:00 → 18:00 Parallel Session 6

17:00 ____________

17:00 → 18:00 Parallel Session 7

17:00 ____________

18:00 → 18:30 Conference Closing

18:30 → 20:00 Dinner (at own expense)