How Big Does a "Big Push" Need to Be? Evidence from Randomizing Asset Transfer Size (with Ragui Assaad, Adam Osman and William Pariente). Reject and Resubmit, American Economic Review.

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Abstract:

Poverty is persistent but the evidence regarding the existence of poverty traps is mixed. We provide a new experimental test of asset-threshold poverty traps, by randomizing households in Egypt into a standard asset transfer, a half transfer, or control. Both transfer groups show large, sustained gains in assets and consumption 40 months later. By comparing how assets grow after the transfer for households at different points in the baseline asset distribution, we find no support for the presence of a poverty trap. These results suggest that scarce anti-poverty resources need not be concentrated in large asset transfers to be effective.

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Contraceptive access, fertility and well-being in lower income countries, with Pauline Rossi. Forthcoming in the Oxford Handbook on the Economics of Fertility and Reproductive Health.

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Abstract:

What is the effect of contraceptive access on fertility and well-being in lower income countries? We start by presenting the long-standing debate on the importance of contraception as a driver of fertility decline, the underlying theoretical arguments and the implications for policies. Next, we review the empirical evidence, from older studies evaluating the effect of historical family planning programs to more recent randomized controlled trials in various contexts. We conclude that there is no strong evidence that simply making contraceptives more affordable and more available substantially reduces fertility and improves well-being. However, we argue that the limited effects of contraceptive supply interventions to date do not imply that all pregnancies are desired and that there is no room for public policy. Finally, we warn against extrapolating the limited effects of increasing supply to forecast the impact of decreasing supply---these are likely to be asymmetrical. This last point is especially important given the downward trend in international aid.

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Subjective Expectations of Husbands and Wives and Couples' Decision-Making Under Uncertainty, with Aureo de Paula. Draft coming soon.​

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Abstract:

Many important decisions are taken as a couple, and the outcomes of these decisions are often uncertain. It is well-known that spouses may have different preferences over outcomes, but little attention has been paid to the fact that spouses may have different subjective expectations ("beliefs") regarding the mapping between decisions and outcomes. We propose and implement a test of the relative weight couples put on her beliefs vs. his, as revealed by actual, high-stakes, contraceptive choices, and which does not assume that decisions are efficient unless spouses have the same beliefs. We find that husbands and wives have very different subjective expectations, and that the weight the couple places on the beliefs of each spouse varies across domains. These findings suggest that the optimal targeting of information interventions to husbands or wives is domain-dependent.

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Reducing Neonatal Mortality at Scale: Lessons for Targeting (with Hans H. Sievertsen and Mahesh C. Puri). This supersedes a paper circulated under the title "Saving Neonatal Lives for a Quarter".

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Abstract:

Neonatal mortality contributes an increasing share of under-5 mortality. Experimental estimates of a low-cost preventive measure (chlorhexidine cord care) vary widely across settings, leading to external validity concerns. We provide the first, quasi-experimental, estimates of the effect of a nationwide roll-out in Nepal and apply recently developed machine-learning techniques (ML) to analyze treatment effect heterogeneity. We find that the program decreases neonatal mortality by 36% and that a simple targeting policy leveraging heterogeneous treatment effects improves neonatal survival relative to WHO recommendations. Heterogeneous treatment effects extrapolated from our ML analysis are broadly in line with experimental findings across five countries.​​

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Probabilistic Beliefs about Contraception and Contraceptive Use in a High-Fertility Environment (with Grant Miller, Bintu Ibrahim Abba and Aureo de Paula). Draft available upon request.

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Abstract:

Over one in five married women in Sub-Saharan Africa report not wishing to become pregnant, but also not using any form of contraception---often not because of inadequate supply or cost of contraceptives. In this paper, we use detailed new data from a large, diverse sample of women and their husbands across Nigeria (the most populous country in Sub-Saharan Africa) to study the accuracy of probabilistic beliefs about pregnancy risk and contraception and their relationship to actual contraceptive choices. We document systematically mistaken beliefs held by respondents, and we find that two are also strongly related to actual contraceptive choices: women’s underestimation of pregnancy risk absent contraception and women’s mistaken beliefs about their partners’ approval of contraception. Partner approval may not easily be amenable to change, but importantly, our results suggest that credible, contextually-tailored information about pregnancy risk absent contraception could align women’s contraceptive choices more closely with their fertility desires and therefore reduce unwanted pregnancies.

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Parental Minimum Wages, Children's Education, and Racial Inequality (with Luyang Chen and Hans H. Sievertsen).

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Abstract

Parental income inequality contributes to disparities in educational outcomes. One of the most widely implemented strategies to address income inequality is the establishment of minimum wage mandates. Yet we do not know whether the children of those who benefit from these mandates gain more education. We test whether parental minimum wage coverage improves long-run education outcomes. We exploit variation in exposure to the 1966 Fair Labor Standards Act by child birth cohort and predetermined parental occupation. Parental minimum wage coverage during children's teenage years increases children’s completed education. This effect is larger among black children, contributing to lowering educational inequality. The main mechanism at play is the relaxation of household budget constraints. Indeed, we find larger education effects for groups experiencing larger first-generation wage increases and suggestive evidence of reduced teenage labor force participation and reduced dropout due to financial difficulties, especially for black children.