WT Week 2 Flashcards
Motivation
Worms: Identifying Impacts on Education and Health in the Presence of Treatment Externalities (Miguel and Kremer, 2004)
To understand how deworming intervention can improve education.
Special settings
Worms: Identifying Impacts on Education and Health in the Presence of Treatment Externalities (Miguel and Kremer, 2004)
Worms infect 25% of people worldwide, particularly prevelant among school-age children in devleoping countries
Theory
Worms: Identifying Impacts on Education and Health in the Presence of Treatment Externalities (Miguel and Kremer, 2004)
- Worms spread by children as they have poor hygiene. Externality as poor hygiene of one affects others.
- With worms infecting ¼ people globally, most commonly in school-age-children in developing countries, the effect of falling ill and taking time off school reduces participation in education. Worm infection induce anemia which is known to affect educational outcomes or through protein energy malnutrition. Therefore, de-worming intervention may improve health and therefore increase participation in education. Cost of treatment is low, but re-infection rates are high.
- WITHIN SCHOOL EXTERNALITY: Even if they were not treated benefit from being surrounded by healthier people.
Empirical design
Worms: Identifying Impacts on Education and Health in the Presence of Treatment Externalities (Miguel and Kremer, 2004)
GROUP 1: Recieve treatment in 1998
GROUP 2: Recieve treatment in 1999
GROUP 3: Recieve treatment in 2000
“Identify cross-school externalities - the impact of deworming for pupils in schools located near treatment schools - using exogenous variation in the local density of treatment school pupils generated by the school-level randomisation (rather than at the individual level)
Educational impact estimated by comparing cognitive ability among those treated and comparison pupils who attend a later testing session
Identification problem due to underestimation of benefits due to comparison of post-treatment group with control group which has experienced spillovers
1) Given randomisation took place at school-level, can estimate overall effect of deworming on a school even if there’s treatment externalities among pupils within the school
2) Identify cross-school externalities using exogenous variation in local density of treatment school pupils generated by the school-level randomisation
Administered pupil and school questionnaires across 2 years and found the groups which were most similar; schools with geohelminth prevalence were mass treated every 6-months and those with over 30% treated annually. Treatment schools also received worm prevention education.”
Data
Worms: Identifying Impacts on Education and Health in the Presence of Treatment Externalities (Miguel and Kremer, 2004)
“Parasitological survey conducted by Kenya Ministry of Health (before treatment) of students in treatment and control groups
Survey on the availability of the anti-worm medication in local pharmacies”
Key findings
Worms: Identifying Impacts on Education and Health in the Presence of Treatment Externalities (Miguel and Kremer, 2004)
“Programme reduced school absenteeism by at least a quarter, particularly large participation gains among the youngest children –> deworming highly effective way to boost school participation among young children
Find deworming reduces worm burdens and increases school participation among children in neighbouring primary schools
Some evidence of within-school treatment externalities, although given that randomisation took place across schools rather than across pupils within schools, can’t use experimental indentifcation to decompose the overall effect on treatment schools into a direct effect and a within-school externality effect, and must rely on non-experimental methods.
Including exernality benefits, cost per additional year of school participation is $3.50
Do not find evidence that deworming increased academic test scores (due to not school participation gains not large enough to be statistically significance)
649 DALYs were averted, translating to cost of ~$5 each (time-based measure combining years of life due to premature mortality or years of healthy life lost due to disability)”
Interpretation / policy implications
Worms: Identifying Impacts on Education and Health in the Presence of Treatment Externalities (Miguel and Kremer, 2004)
“Deworming much more cost effective than other methods of increasing school participation (such as school subsidies)
Given the large effect on participation, highly likely that results would be replicable in other similar regions”
ISSUE OF EXTERNAL VALIDITY
Motivation
Economic Development and the Organisation of Labour: Evidence from the Jobs of the World Paper (Bandiera et al., 2022)
To show how the organisation of labour (nature of jobs and allocation) varies within and across countries at different stages of development.
Special settings
Economic Development and the Organisation of Labour: Evidence from the Jobs of the World Paper (Bandiera et al., 2022)
Labour is sole endownment of poor and its efficient employment is key to understanding poverty at macro level
Empirical design
Economic Development and the Organisation of Labour: Evidence from the Jobs of the World Paper (Bandiera et al., 2022)
”- meta analysis of training programmes designed to bring women into paid work and test whether their effectiveness depends on the macro context
- we broadly document participation in measured work, whether paid or unpaid
- distinguish between self-employed work and wage work focus on the types of occupations that are available in the economy”
Data
Economic Development and the Organisation of Labour: Evidence from the Jobs of the World Paper (Bandiera et al., 2022)
Combine microdata from National Censuses and large scale individual surveys, coverig employment data and gender data across 100 countries
Key findings
Economic Development and the Organisation of Labour: Evidence from the Jobs of the World Paper (Bandiera et al., 2022)
“1) Marketisation of work occurs as labour moves from unpaid household work, family business/farm to paid work which happens as countries get richer and larger share of the output is sold in the market, creating new jobs as a results; larger gender differences than wealth. measures of unpaid work are similar for men and women,but women report less
paid work, especially in low- and middle- income countries.
* the decline in women’s measured work going from low to middle income countriesdriven entirely by the decline in unpaid labour (Schultz 1990) and this is what drivethe U-shape in overall measured work
MARKETS COME WITH INEQUALITY:
* The shift from home to markets coincides with the rise of wealth and gender, as a determinant of the allocation of labour
* at low levels of development, the share of people engaged in work is higher in the bottom quintile but as unpaid work disappears the ordering by wealth reverses
* men specialise in paid market work while women “disappear” from the measured labour force
* The U-shape is most prevalent for the poorest women (unlikely to be driven by an income effect)
2) Emergence of firms as main organising unit of work pulling workers out of self-employment due to emergence of firms which employ wage workers; follows gender and wealth lines (men from wealthy households get them first, then poor men, then women). the shift of labour out of agriculture can only partly explain the rise in wage work, which happens within both the agricultural and non-agricultural sector. While the transition is slower in agriculture, at high levels of national income wage work is the dominant form of work in every sector.
3) Increasing specialisation and creation of ““new”” jobs within firms, perhaps due to new tech and management practices that allow for higher degree of specialisation than a dissociated group of self-employed workers. Women increasingly likely to be in professionals/technicians/clerks whereas men more likely to be in crafts/machine operators; increased occupational segregation by gender
Training programmes to bring women into paid work effective in countries only when female employment is high –> social norms display tipping points (need to consider the macro context when evaluating micro interventions)”
a bad organisation of labour is one that allocates jobs according to criteria other than people’s productivity, for instance, by family, wealth, gender, religion, or race
a good organisation of labour makes use of human potential in a way that is both efficient and fair
when the talent of a large proportion of the world’s population is trapped in poverty, it is poverty that limits growth
Interpretation / policy implications
Economic Development and the Organisation of Labour: Evidence from the Jobs of the World Paper (Bandiera et al., 2022)
“Main consequence of gendered division of labour is the talent lost to misallocation (i.e. if allocated based on talent rather than gender, output would be higher for same inputs)
Policies to equalise access to jobs can benefit society as a whole given it will improve national income
Only policies targeting outcomes by the actual carer (i.e. training or other interventions to facilitate re-entry into labour force after birth of child) will achieve desired effect
At current fertility rates and life expectancy, most women could restart long career after children have reached school age
Likely understated results given the challenge of measuring prodctivite activities within the home”
three key ingredients:
* combining tasks into jobs
* allocating the right people to the right jobs
* keeping it all together
Motivation
The African Growth Miracle, Young, 2012
- Motivated by the need to reevaluate the prevailing narrative on economic growth in sub-Saharan Africa. Difficulties in measurement of such developing regions- difficult to get a clear picture.
- GDP doesn’t proxy living standards in subsistence economies
- In fact, it is not even measured
Data
The African Growth Miracle, Young, 2012
- Use of DHS data to construct estimates for the growth of real consumtpion in 29 sub-Saharan and 27 other developing countries.
- DHS contain questions on asset holdings, wealth , health etc.
- Young uses all available surveys since 1990: 1.6 million HH, 56 countries
- the idea here is to “convert” car, and coughs into something that we observe for most households can be converted into income
- DHS reports education for everyone. Link education and income by the subsample of individuals for whom we have data.
- Now we have a common unit and can build real consumption at the national level
Key findings
The African Growth Miracle, Young, 2012
Actual growth is approx. 4 times greater than the reported in international data sources, between 3.4 and 3.7%. Results show that growth in sub-Saharan Africa is easily on par with other developing economies yet Africa is still much poorer than other developing regions. Young found data to argue for heterogeneity across countries (each have varying growth rates). Overall school attendance, health standards and family consumption is rising.
