JDE《发展经济学》2022年第156卷目录及摘要
全文链接：
https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/journal-of-development-economics/vol/156/suppl/C
Volume 156, March 2022
Site-specific agronomic information and technology adoption: A field experiment from Ethiopia
Hailemariam Ayalew, Jordan Chamberlin, Carol Newman
Intranational trade costs, product scope and productivity: Evidence from India's Golden Quadrilateral project
Ama Baafra Abeberese, Mary Chen
Identifying psychological trauma among Syrian refugee children for early intervention: Analyzing digitized drawings using machine learning
Sarah Baird, Raphael Panlilio, Jennifer Seager, Stephanie Smith, Bruce Wydick
Impacts of industrial and entrepreneurial jobs on youth: 5-year experimental evidence on factory job offers and cash grants in Ethiopia
Christopher Blattman, Stefan Dercon, Simon Franklin
Trade, productivity, and the spatial organization of agriculture: Evidence from Brazil
Heitor S. Pellegrina
Linguistic diversity, official language choice and human capital
David D. Laitin, Rajesh Ramachandran
The effect of air pollution on migration: Evidence from China
Shuai Chen, Paulina Oliva, Peng Zhang
Measuring honesty and explaining adulteration in naturally occurring markets
Devesh Rustagi, Markus Kroell
Disrupted academic careers: The returns to time off after high school
Nicolás de Roux, Evan Riehl
Large multiproduct exporters across rich and poor countries: Theory and evidence
Luca Macedoni
Disbursing emergency relief through utilities: Evidence from Ghana
Susanna B. Berkouwer, Pierre E. Biscaye, Steven Puller, Catherine D. Wolfram
Refugees and foreign direct investment: Quasi-experimental evidence from US resettlements
Anna-Maria Mayda, Christopher Parsons, Han Pham, Pierre-Louis Vézina
Heterogenous teacher effects of two incentive schemes: Evidence from a low-income country
Felipe Barrera-Osorio, Jacobus Cilliers, Marie-Hélène Cloutier, Deon Filmer
Agricultural trade and depletion of groundwater
Sheetal Sekhri
Women’s well-being during a pandemic and its containment
Natalie Bau, Gaurav Khanna, Corinne Low, Manisha Shah, Sreyashi Sharmin, Alessandra Voena
Aspirations and financial decisions: Experimental evidence from the Philippines
David McKenzie, Aakash Mohpal, Dean Yang
Pay for performance schemes and manufacturing worker productivity: Evidence from a kinked design in China
Xiqian Cai, Wei Jiang, Hong Song, Huihua Xie
Persuasive agenda-setting: Rodrigo Duterte’s inauguration speech and drugs in the Philippines
Michael Jetter, Teresa Molina
Car restriction policies and housing markets
Xueying Lyu
Site-specific agronomic information and technology adoption: A field experiment from Ethiopia
Hailemariam Ayalew Jordan Chamberlin Carol Newman
Abstract：Smallholder farmers in Africa typically only have access to blanket fertilizer recommendations which are defined over very broad areas and may not be optimal for local production conditions. The response to such recommendations has generally been poor. Using a randomized control trial in Ethiopia, we explore whether targeted extension advice leads farmers to align fertilizer usage to the recommended levels and whether this impacts productivity. We also consider whether coupling the targeted information with agricultural insurance encourages fertilizer investment. Results show that targeted recommendations closed the gap between the amount of fertilizer used and the recommended amounts and this in turn increased productivity and profits. We found no differential effect of the targeted recommendation when coupled with agricultural insurance, suggesting that the risk of crop failure is not a binding constraint to fertilizer adoption in this context, or that farmers do not consider agricultural insurance a useful risk-mitigating mechanism.
Intranational trade costs, product scope and productivity: Evidence from India's Golden Quadrilateral project
Ama Baafra Abeberese Mary Chen
Abstract：We examine the potential for a reduction in intranational trade costs to increase firm pro-ductivity. Recent trade theories highlight a channel through which this increase may occur – a reduction in trade costs increases competition and leads firms to drop the products in which they are least efficient. We provide empirical evidence for this prediction in the context of an exogenous reduction in intranational trade costs induced by a highway construction project in India. We find that product scope falls and firm productivity rises in response to the construction of the highway. We also find that the products dropped are those that account for the lowest shares of the firm's output.
Identifying psychological trauma among Syrian refugee children for early intervention: Analyzing digitized drawings using machine learning
Sarah Baird Raphael Panlilio Jennifer Seager Stephanie Smith Bruce Wydick
Abstract：Nearly 5.6 million Syrian refugees have been displaced by the country's civil war, of which roughly half are children. A digital analysis of features in children's drawings potentially represents a rapid, cost-effective, and non-invasive method for collecting information about children's mental health. Using data collected from free drawings and self-portraits from 2480 Syrian refugee children in Jordan across two distinct datasets, we use LASSO machine-learning techniques to understand the relationship between psychological trauma among refugee children and digitally coded features of their drawings. We find that children's drawing features retained using LASSO are consistent with historical correlations found between specific drawing features and psychological distress in clinical settings. We then use drawing features within LASSO to predict exposure to violence and refugee integration into host countries, with findings consistent with anticipated associations. Results serve as a proof-of-concept for the potential use of children's drawings as a diagnostic tool in human crisis settings.
Impacts of industrial and entrepreneurial jobs on youth: 5-year experimental evidence on factory job offers and cash grants in Ethiopia
Christopher Blattman Stefan Dercon Simon Franklin
Abstract：We study two interventions for poor and underemployed Ethiopian youth: a $300 grant to spur self-employment, and a job offer to an industrial firm. Each one is designed to help overcome two common barriers to employment: financial market imperfections and matching frictions. We find significant impacts on occupational choice, income, and health in the first year. After five years, however, we see no evidence of long run effects of either intervention. The grant led short-run increases in self-employment, productivity and earnings, but these appear to dissipate over time as recipients exit their businesses. Worrisomely, offers of factory work had no effect on employment or earnings, but led to serious adverse effects on health after one year. Evidence of these effects is gone after five years as well, however. These results point to convergence in most outcomes, and suggest that one-time and one-dimensional interventions may struggle to overcome barriers to wage- or self-employment.
Trade, productivity, and the spatial organization of agriculture: Evidence from Brazil
Heitor S. Pellegrina
Abstract：This paper studies how regional productivity shocks in agriculture propagate to the rest of the economy via trade and migration linkages, shaping their aggregate effects on GDP, welfare, and agricultural employment. Using comprehensive agricultural data from Brazil, I estimate a general equilibrium model with a rich spatial structure to evaluate the effects of a critical shock in modern agriculture: the adaptation of soybeans to tropical regions. Results show that this shock increased Brazil’s agricultural GDP by 4%–6%, with the bulk of this impact coming from international trade. Because soybeans are land-intensive relative to other agricultural sectors, agricultural employment fell in tropical regions to which soybeans expanded. In other parts of the economy, however, agricultural employment rose substantially. Additionally, I show that general equilibrium effects have important implications for the analysis of the returns to agricultural research and the evaluation of the reduced-form effects of productivity shocks on agricultural employment.
Linguistic diversity, official language choice and human capital
David D. Laitin Rajesh Ramachandran
Abstract：The mechanisms linking high ethnic fractionalization (ELF) to poor economic outcomes in sub-Saharan Africa remain obscure. This paper proposes that high ELF raises the costs of implementing indigenous language education policies, and that the concomitant reliance on colonial languages as media of instruction lowers human capital development, our measure for economic failure. Exploiting the fact that 101 linguistic groups in sub-Saharan Africa cross country borders that have different language-use-in-education systems, we are able to include ethnicity fixed effects in our regression estimates. This allows us to control for a large set of cultural, geographical, and environmental factors that could confound the estimates. Our within-ethnicity estimates show that even the partial use of indigenous languages in schools is associated with an economically meaningful increase in the probability of reading for individuals with seven or fewer years of schooling. Once including language-use-in education as a regressor, the coefficient for ELF in explaining lower human capital turns insignificant. Our results suggest that retention of colonial languages is an important factor in explaining economic failures in postcolonial Africa.
The effect of air pollution on migration: Evidence from China
Shuai Chen Paulina Oliva Peng Zhang
Abstract：This paper looks at the effects of air pollution on migration in China using changes in the average strength of thermal inversions over five-year periods as a source of exogenous variation for medium-run air pollution levels. Our findings suggest that air pollution is responsible for large changes in inflows and outflows of migration in China. Specifically, we find that a 10 percent increase in air pollution, holding everything else constant, is capable of reducing population through net outmigration by about 2.8 percent in a given county. We find that these inflows are primarily driven by well-educated people at the beginning of their professional careers. We also find a strong gender asymmetry in the response of mid-age adults that suggests families are splitting across counties to protect vulnerable members of the household. Our results are robust to different specifications, including a spatial lag model that accounts for localized migration spillovers and spatially correlated pollution shocks.
Measuring honesty and explaining adulteration in naturally occurring markets
Devesh Rustagi Markus Kroell
Abstract：There is astounding variation in product quality sold in markets even when quality is difficult to ascertain and rules are poorly enforced. We investigate whether sellers differ in innate honesty (incur private cost to provide good quality) and whether this explains the variation in quality. Our study takes place in milk markets in India, where milkmen collude on price, customer rarely switch, and it is difficult to establish reputation. We invite milkmen to take part in a novel behavioral experiment to measure dishonesty. We then measure quality objectively as the percentage of water added to a liter of milk sold to customers. Our results show that dishonest milkmen add significantly more water to milk. Evidence from milk-testing tournament confirms that milk quality is difficult to verify. These results suggest that some sellers are willing to forego monetary gains to provide good quality in return for utility from being honest, even in an environment that encourages cheating.
Disrupted academic careers: The returns to time off after high school
Nicolás de Roux Evan Riehl
Abstract：This paper asks how academic breaks after high school affect individuals’ college and labor market outcomes. We exploit a policy that altered academic calendars in two regions of Colombia, which caused thousands of high school graduates to have to wait an extra semester to start college. Using administrative data and a synthetic control design, we show that the academic break caused many students to forgo enrolling in college at all. The academic break reduced the early-career earnings of students with high levels of academic preparation, but it had little impact on earnings for less-prepared students.
Large multiproduct exporters across rich and poor countries: Theory and evidence
Luca Macedoni
Abstract：I study the welfare effects of trade in the presence of large firms producing multiple varieties. Large multiproduct exporters dominate trade flows and their scope decisions have new implications for the welfare gains from trade. Using exporter-level data from 11 source countries, I document two stylized facts for large multiproduct exporters. First, the product scope increases with the level of development of the destination proxied by per capita income. Second, as evidence of cannibalization effects, a non-monotone, hump-shaped relationship exists between the product scope and market share of a firm. Guided by the evidence, I build a model in which income and cannibalization effects drive the scope decisions of large firms, and I derive a new formula for the welfare gains from trade. Ignoring income or cannibalization effects causes mismeasurement of the welfare gains. The sign and size of the mismeasurement are highly heterogeneous across countries.
Disbursing emergency relief through utilities: Evidence from Ghana
Susanna B. Berkouwer Pierre E. Biscaye Steven Puller Catherine D. Wolfram
Abstract：We provide descriptive evidence on the challenges in efficiently, effectively, and fairly distributing in-kind electricity transfers to households. We collect panel data from 1200 households eligible for Ghana’s COVID-19 electricity relief program. Distributing relief through electricity transfers enabled an immediate response to the crisis. Theoretical efficiency concerns are mitigated because transfers were inframarginal and storable for most households. Transfer receipt may have increased support for the governing party, possibly due to obfuscation of the program’s financial burden. However, the program was regressive in design, and implementation challenges – delays, technological hurdles, information constraints, and the targeting of meters rather than households – add to inefficiency and regressivity. Households receiving the least average relief are those who use less electricity, pay a landlord or other intermediary for electricity, or share an electricity meter—characteristics of low-income households. Program implementation challenges were just as important as design features in determining program costs and benefits.
Refugees and foreign direct investment: Quasi-experimental evidence from US resettlements
Anna-Maria Mayda Christopher Parsons Han Pham Pierre-Louis Vézina
Abstract：We exploit the designs of two separate US refugee dispersal policies to provide causal evidence that refugees foster outward FDI to their countries and regions of origin. Drawing upon aggregated individual-level refugee and project-level FDI data, we show this effect holds in terms of new FDI projects, as well as capital invested and jobs created. Focusing on the specific case of Vietnam, we provide evidence that national domestic reforms amplified the positive FDI-creating effects of the overseas Vietnamese diaspora. Overall, our results highlight a new mechanism through which refugees foster development at their origins.
Heterogenous teacher effects of two incentive schemes: Evidence from a low-income country
Felipe Barrera-Osorio Jacobus Cilliers Marie-Hélène Cloutier Deon Filmer
Abstract：A randomized evaluation of two teacher incentive programs was conducted in a nationally representative sample of 420 public primary schools in Guinea. In 140 schools, high-performing teachers were rewarded in-kind, with the value of goods increasing with level of performance. In another 140 schools, high-performing teachers received a certificate and public recognition from the government. After one year, the in-kind program improved learning by 0.24 standard deviations, while the recognition treatment had a smaller and statistically insignificant impact. After two years, the effect from the in-kind program was smaller (0.16 standard deviations), and not significant: we provide evidence that the reduction was likely due to the onset of an Ebola outbreak. The effects of the recognition program remained small and insignificant. The effects differed by teacher gender: for female teachers, both programs were equally effective, while for male teachers, only the in-kind program led to statistically significant effects.
Agricultural trade and depletion of groundwater
Sheetal Sekhri
Abstract：Globalization can lead to either conservation or depletion of natural resources that are used in the production of traded goods. Rising prices may lead to better resource management. Alternatively, stronger incentives to extract these resources may exacerbate their decline. I examine the impact of agricultural trade promotion on the groundwater extraction in India using nationally representative data from 1996–2005. I find evidence that trade promotion led to increased extraction of the reserves. In areas deemed over-exploited by the government, groundwater depleted by an additional 0.6 of a within district standard deviation. This large decline had economically significant distributive consequences. While large and marginal farmers did not experience any real welfare changes, we detect a 1 standard deviation decline in the real mean-per-capita expenditure for small farmers. I also quantify the social cost of groundwater depletion due to increased agricultural trade. My findings indicate that the monetized value of depleted groundwater net of imported water in agricultural commodities could be at least as high as 0.3 billion US dollars in 1991 dollar terms.
Women’s well-being during a pandemic and its containment
Natalie Bau Gaurav Khanna Corinne Low Manisha Shah Sreyashi Sharmin Alessandra Voena
Abstract：The COVID-19 pandemic brought the dual crises of disease and the containment policies designed to mitigate it. Yet, there is little evidence on the impacts of these policies on women in lower-income countries, where there may be limited social safety nets to absorb these shocks. We conduct a large phone survey and leverage India’s geographically varied containment policies to estimate the association between the pandemic and containment policies and measures of women’s well-being, including mental health and food security. On aggregate, the pandemic resulted in dramatic income losses, increases in food insecurity, and declines in female mental health. While potentially crucial to stem the spread of COVID-19, the greater prevalence of containment policies is associated with increased food insecurity, particularly for women, and reduced female mental health. For surveyed women, moving from zero to average containment levels is associated with a 38% increase in the likelihood of reporting more depression, a 73% increase in reporting more exhaustion, and a 44% increase in reporting more anxiety. Women whose social position may make them more vulnerable – those with daughters and those living in female-headed households – experience even larger declines in mental health.
Aspirations and financial decisions: Experimental evidence from the Philippines
David McKenzie, Aakash Mohpal, Dean Yang
Abstract：A randomized experiment among poor entrepreneurs tested the impact of exogenously inducing higher financial aspirations. In theory, raising aspirations could have positive effects by inducing higher effort, but could also reduce effort if unmet aspirations lead to frustration. Treatment resulted in more ambitious savings goals, but nearly all individuals fell far short of reaching these goals. Two years later, treated individuals had not saved more, and actually had lower borrowing and business investments. Treatment also reduced belief in the amount of control over one's life. Setting aspirations too high can lead to frustration, leading individuals to reduce their economic investments.
Pay for performance schemes and manufacturing worker productivity: Evidence from a kinked design in China
Xiqian Cai, Wei Jiang, Hong Song, Huihua Xie
Abstract：This paper examines workers’ response to a nonlinear payment system with a penalty and a reward design in a manufacturing firm in China. Using bunching methods, our estimates show that about 31% of workers make decisions with errors, and the structural elasticity of output response to the piece rate is 0.28. The focal nonlinear payment scheme generates 4% output gains compared with a linear payment scheme given the same total wage costs. Further decomposition analysis shows that the reward aspect of the nonlinear scheme mainly contributes to total output gains. Counterfactual analyses show that total output generated by the nonlinear payment system falls with the reduced worker heterogeneity. Our results illustrate the role of worker heterogeneity in designing compensation schemes and provide new insights into the increasing adoption of nonlinear payment systems in modern manufacturing production.
Persuasive agenda-setting: Rodrigo Duterte’s inauguration speech and drugs in the Philippines
Michael Jetter, Teresa Molina
Abstract：Exploring the elusive agenda-setting hypothesis pertaining to democratically-elected leaders, we test whether Duterte’s 2016 inauguration speech systematically shifted Filipinos’ policy agenda towards prioritizing illegal drugs. To do this, we examine daily Google searches (in a country that tops internet usage worldwide) and identify a large increase in drug-related searches right after the speech, both in absolute terms and relative to other prominent policy topics. We find no similar increase in neighboring countries, for potentially confounding topics, or after other key events (like his declaration of candidacy). Complementing this analysis, individual-level surveys reveal an increase in the share of respondents considering crime reduction the top national priority. To better identify causality, we exploit the historical timing of local festivals, which left some provinces less exposed to the speech. Results show less-exposed provinces exhibit smaller increases in drug-related Google searches and survey-elicited crime prioritization.
Car restriction policies and housing markets
Xueying Lyu
Abstract：This paper investigates the differential impacts of a unique car restriction policy – the car purchase lottery in Beijing – on the housing markets across locations within the city. I use a difference-in-differences approach to compare heterogeneous neighborhoods before and after the implementation of the policy. Housing prices experience a relative increase at locations closer to common destinations (employment centers: 0.7% per kilometer; primary schools: 3.3% per kilometer) and with better access to public transit (subways: 1.2% per kilometer; buses: 0.08% per line). These changes reflect capitalization of the car restriction policy and imply a large wealth redistribution as large as 6 years of average disposable income across homeowners. The results are relevant to policy, both in the context of unintended consequences and for efforts to develop offsetting measures.
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编辑：代安澜
审核：龙文进