EDCC 2022年第70卷第3期目录及摘要
全文链接：
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/edcc/2022/70/3
A Structural Model of Informality with Constrained Entrepreneurship
Pierre Nguimkeu
The Scarring Effects of College Education Deprivation during China’s Cultural Revolution
Hongbin Li and Lingsheng Meng
Fertility Responses to Schooling Costs: Evidence from Uganda’s Universal Primary Education Policy
Alfredo Burlando and Edward Bbaale
Here Comes the Rain Again: Productivity Shocks, Educational Investments, and Child Work
Christophe J. Nordman, Smriti Sharma, and Naveen Sunder
Overconfidence and Risk Taking in the Field: Evidence from Ethiopian Farmers
Toman Barsbai, Ulrich Schmidt, and Ulrike Zirpel
The Puzzle of Falling Happiness despite Rising Income in Rural China: Eleven Hypotheses
John Knight, Bianjing Ma, and Ramani Gunatilaka
Cross-Age Tutoring: Experimental Evidence from Kenya
Mauricio Romero, Lisa Chen, and Noriko Magari
After the Flood: Migration and Remittances as Coping Strategies of Rural Bangladeshi Households
Gianna Claudia Giannelli and Eugenia Canessa
The Effect of Personalized Feedback on Small Enterprises’ Finances in Uganda
Antonia Grohmann, Lukas Menkhoff, and Helke Seitz
Moving toward a Better Future? Migration and Children’s Health and Education
Lara Cockx
Inequality in the Quality of Health Services: Wealth, Content of Care, and the Price of Antenatal Consultations in the Democratic Republic of Congo
Günther Fink, Eeshani Kandpal, and Gil Shapira
A Structural Model of Informality with Constrained Entrepreneurship
Pierre Nguimkeu
Abstarct：This paper presents and estimates a partial equilibrium model of informality and entrepreneurship using data from Cameroon. The model accounts for institutional factors such as registration costs, probability of detection of informal activity, credit constraints, and taxes in the formal sector. I show that the propensity to formalize increases with skills only after a critical threshold corresponding to secondary school completion in the data. This is because high formalization costs are affordable only to the most productive entrepreneurs, who are typically those with higher skills. The estimated model is used to simulate the counterfactual impact of changes in registration costs, taxation, and enforcement, which are found to substantially affect formalization, aggregate income, and government revenues. However, none of these policies is able to reduce the size of informality to less than 20%–30%. This suggests that alternative policies beyond these standard formalization schemes should be considered to address informality in Africa.
The Scarring Effects of College Education Deprivation during China’s Cultural Revolution
Hongbin Li Lingsheng Meng
Abstarct：China’s college enrollment system came to a sudden halt as the Cultural Revolution started. Virtually no students were admitted to colleges from 1966 to 1969. We estimate a marked downward shift in college completion rates for the affected cohorts. Using a regression discontinuity approach, we show that these individuals experienced a sizable reduction in labor supply, earnings, and wealth after some 30 years, which can be attributed to the loss of access to college education. Our results also suggest that the affected generation had made efforts to make up for their loss of education later in life.
Fertility Responses to Schooling Costs: Evidence from Uganda’s Universal Primary Education Policy
Alfredo Burlando Edward Bbaale
Abstarct：There is some evidence that access to schooling reduces fertility along the intensive margin in developing countries, but the transmission channels are not well understood; most education interventions impact financial costs, access, and school quality. We isolate the specific effect of child school fees on maternal fertility by studying a 1997 schooling reform in Uganda, in which the government abolished elementary school fees for up to four children per household. Families with more school-aged children were required to pay fees for the additional ones. We demonstrate that eligibility limits reduced births: women with more than four children in 1997 were 4.2 percentage points less likely to give birth to an additional child in the subsequent 2 years. We provide evidence that this result is driven by universal primary education eligibility limits, not by other factors associated with the policy or other secular changes. Fertility effects are persistent over time and survive the lifting of the eligibility limit in 2003. The policy is also associated with a temporary reduction in the desired fertility, with mothers preferring to have four children or fewer during the policy period than before.
Here Comes the Rain Again: Productivity Shocks, Educational Investments, and Child Work
Christophe J. Nordman Smriti Sharma Naveen Sunder
Abstarct：This study uses household-level panel data from a nationally representative survey to estimate the effect of agricultural productivity shocks—as proxied by exogenous annual rainfall deviations—on education expenditures and children’s work status in rural India. We find that a transitory increase in rainfall significantly reduces education expenditures and increases the likelihood of child labor across multiple work activities. Additionally, households owning land and those with better credit access increase the use of child labor as rainfall increases because labor (and land) markets are incomplete. The effects of productivity shocks are reinforced for marginalized castes and for less educated households, thereby exacerbating inequalities in education.
Overconfidence and Risk Taking in the Field: Evidence from Ethiopian Farmers
Toman Barsbai Ulrich Schmidt Ulrike Zirpel
Abstarct：We argue that overconfidence wrongly inflates the expected returns to a risky income-generating activity. Overconfidence thus increases the willingness to take risks. We test this prediction using a sample of smallholder farmers from Ethiopia who face a risk-return trade-off in their crop cultivation choices. To meet their subsistence needs, these risk-averse farmers arguably have large incentives to wisely manage their risks. We find that overconfident farmers cultivate riskier crop portfolios. The relationship between overconfidence and risk taking is more pronounced for farmers who live near markets or are net sellers. Our results are robust to the inclusion of a wide range of controls (including local fixed effects, use of risk-managing measures, experience of idiosyncratic shocks, socioeconomic characteristics, measures of risk aversion, and personality traits) and instrumental variable estimation. The high volatility of agricultural income may thus not only be the result of a risky environment but also of farmers’ individual psychological biases.
The Puzzle of Falling Happiness despite Rising Income in Rural China: Eleven Hypotheses
John Knight Bianjing Ma Ramani Gunatilaka
Abstarct：With economic development can come social and cultural change, for good or ill or both. We pose an unexplored question: why has happiness fallen in rural China whereas rural income has risen rapidly? Two rich data sets are analyzed. Our main methods are happiness regressions and decomposition methodology. Several approaches are adopted, and no fewer than 11 hypotheses are tested. One approach is to examine the variables that are found to be important in happiness functions and to consider their contributions to the fall in the mean happiness score of rural people. Four variables stand out and together can explain three times over the fall in happiness: reduced sensitivity of happiness to income, increased sensitivity of happiness to relative income position in the village, a sharper U shape of happiness in response to aging, and relative changes in the returns to education. Another approach is to analyze the effect on rural happiness of the vast rural-urban migration that took place over this period, in particular, the effect of temporary migration on information flows to the village, thus broadening reference groups and changing attitudes, and its effect on the lives of those left behind in unbalanced households. This is followed by tests of the role that changing attitudes—toward sense of community, degree of materialism, and aspirations for income—might have played. The analysis is illuminating both substantively and methodologically, but a puzzle remains. A general conclusion is that the effects of development-driven social change on happiness, both directly and indirectly through changing attitudes, are good candidates for further research.
Cross-Age Tutoring: Experimental Evidence from Kenya
Mauricio Romero Lisa Chen Noriko Magari
Abstarct：Tailoring teaching to students’ learning levels can improve learning outcomes in low-income countries. Cross-age tutoring, where older students tutor younger students, is a potential alternative for providing personalized instruction to younger students, though it comes at the cost of the older students’ time. We present results from a large experiment in Kenya in which schools were randomly assigned to implement either an English or a math tutoring program. Students in grades 3–7 tutored students in grades 1 and 2 and preschool. Math tutoring relative to English tutoring had a small positive effect (.063σ; p-value of .068) on math test scores. These results do not hold for English tutoring: relative to math tutoring, it had no positive effect on English test scores (we can rule out an effect greater than .074σ with 95% confidence). There is heterogeneity by students’ baseline learning levels: the effect was largest for students in the middle of the ability distribution (.13σ for students in the third quintile; p-value of .042), while the effect was close to zero for students with either very low or very high baseline learning levels. We do not find any effect (positive or negative) on tutors.
After the Flood: Migration and Remittances as Coping Strategies of Rural Bangladeshi Households
Gianna Claudia Giannelli Eugenia Canessa
Abstarct：Using georeferenced data to map the dramatic flood that hit Bangladesh in August–September 2014, we evaluate how rural households coped with this natural shock. Employing survey data on panel households for the period before and after the shock, we estimate a difference-in-difference model with fixed effects of the impact of flooding on income, expenditure, nutrition, and migration outcomes along the wealth distribution. Our results show that the most affected households experienced significant drops in income and expenditure and an increase in the probability of migrating as a coping strategy to compensate for this loss. Internal migration increased by 7 percentage points for low-wealth households, while international migration increased by 3 percentage points for high-wealth households. Remittances received by poorer households from established international migrants represented significant monetary support after the shock, amounting to approximately 40% of the decline in income from self-employment in farm activities and half the decline in food expenditure.
The Effect of Personalized Feedback on Small Enterprises’ Finances in Uganda
Antonia Grohmann Lukas Menkhoff Helke Seitz
Abstarct：This randomized controlled trial examines the effect of a new finance training style during which participants are given personalized feedback on their financial business outcomes in addition to a rule-of-thumb training approach. We compare this with the effects of a rule-of-thumb training by itself and a control group. Targeting about 500 small entrepreneurs in Uganda, we find that the personalized feedback training significantly improves outcomes at the 6-month horizon. The index of primary outcomes increases by 0.258 SD units, and overall savings improve by 0.257 SD units. Survey results suggest that feedback partly works by increasing motivation, in line with feedback intervention theory.
Moving toward a Better Future? Migration and Children’s Health and Education
Lara Cockx
Abstarct：Do the returns to migration extend beyond migrants themselves and accrue to the children of migrants? Drawing on data from a unique 19-year longitudinal survey from Tanzania, this paper empirically investigates this question by exploiting the variation in the outcomes of the children of migrants and the children of the migrants’ siblings who stayed behind, conditional on a range of individual characteristics of their parents. Parental migration has important implications for child development, and this relation depends on the destination and the timing of the move. More specifically, children whose parents migrated from rural areas to cities are heavier, taller, and more educated for their age. The effects on height and schooling are strongest for children who were exposed to the city environment during their early childhood. In contrast, children whose parents moved to a different rural village do not appear to experience any health advantage, and those moving alongside their parents even start schooling at a later age. In addition to conferring a broader view of the returns to physical mobility, this analysis contributes to the debate on the origin of spatial inequalities in developing countries.
Inequality in the Quality of Health Services: Wealth, Content of Care, and the Price of Antenatal Consultations in the Democratic Republic of Congo
Günther Fink Eeshani Kandpal Gil Shapira
Abstarct：We use unique data on direct observations of patient-provider interactions linked to detailed patient exit interviews and household surveys to study the relationship between patients’ socioeconomic status and the quality of antenatal care in the Democratic Republic of Congo. We find a significant wealth-quality gradient: a 1 standard deviation in household wealth is associated with a 1.6–3.2 percentage point increase in protocol compliance, depending on the data source and the definition of the compliance index. A large part of the overall wealth-quality gradient is driven by generally lower facility quality in poorer areas. However, we also find a statistically significant within-village wealth-quality relationship that is primarily driven by wealthier women seeking care at higher-quality facilities even if they are more distant. Finally, we find some evidence that even within the same facilities, poorer women tend to receive worse care but, on average, also pay less for care of a given quality.
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