Jeffrey Bloem, Khandker Wahedur Rahman, and Harshada Karnik are PhD students in Applied Economics at the University of Minnesota
In this series of posts we provide brief summaries of many papers presented at the 2018 Midwest International Economic Development Conference (MIEDC). Unfortunately, we were unable to attend every session. Apologies to the presenters we missed.
Education
Tools for Teaching: Leveraging Technology to Improve Classroom Content Delivery [Sabrin Beg]
Can improvements to technology within classrooms improve learning in math and science? Previous evaluations of programs that aimed to improve educational inputs show mixed results. The authors answer this question by using a randomized control trial evaluating a program that provided technology and video-based educational lessons in Pakistan. The study finds positive impacts that are both time and cost effective. The program is also quite saleable with a large share of the costs coming from a fixed component of producing the video-based curriculum. Future work should focus on testing the specific mechanisms driving this result.
Do Early-life Shocks Interact with Subsequent Human Capital Investments? Evidence from Administrative Data [Valentina Duque]
Previous research convincingly shows how early-life conditions affect future life outcomes. How do these early-life conditions interact with subsequent human capital investments? To answer this question the authors exploit two sources of exogenous variation. The first is the effects of El Nino/La Nina on early-life conditions. The second is a conditional cash transfer (CCT) targeted at a specific set of poor households in Colombia. Using a huge amount of administrative data the authors find that the overall effect of the CCT program is large enough to overcome the negative impact of the extreme weather shocks. These findings suggest important policy implications on the role of social protection programs in reducing economic inequalities caused by early-life conditions.
Scaling up Children’s Readiness in The Gambia: Lessons from an Experimental Study [Todd Pugatch]
A large proportion of children around the world enter formal education without any prior structured school readiness program. This raises the question, what is the impact of school readiness programs on educational outcomes? To answer this question, the authors evaluate two school readiness programs in The Gambia, a community-based program and a kindergarten program. Using a randomized control trial the authors find significant heterogeneous impacts, but no overall average effects. Children from wealthier households improved less when exposed to the community-based program. These results suggest that the expansion of public kindergarten may be more effective than community-based approaches.
The Impact of Teacher Effectiveness on Student Learning in Africa [Jason Kerwin]
How does the quality of teachers affect student learning in Africa? In developed countries, teaching quality is considered as an important ingredient for education and life outcomes. Less is known about how much teaching quality affects student learning in developing countries. Using data from a randomized control trial in Uganda that randomly assigned students to classrooms, the authors estimate teacher value-added effects. They find that a one standard deviation increase in teacher quality leads to a lower-bound estimate of a 0.14 standard deviation increase in student performance on a reading test. Additionally, changing the quality of the teacher from being in the 10th to the 90th percentile has impacts comparable to the most effective education intervention ever evaluated in Africa.
Safety First: Perceived Risk of Street Harassment and Educational Choice of Women [Girija Borker]
Gender gaps in education and economic outcomes persist all around the world. At the same time women are often subjected to harassment and violence on a regular basis. Does perceived risk of harassment adversely affect human capital formation? The author collects information on 4,000 students from the University of Delhi in India. By mapping all the potential travel routes to all colleges in the students’ choice set, the author finds that women choose relatively low ranked colleges in order to secure safety when traveling from home to school. In monetary terms, women are willing to spend INR 18,800 (USD $290) more per year than men for a one standard deviation safer route. Findings can also help explain lower labor force participation by females in India.
Health
Transportation and Health in a Developing Country [Ariell Zimran]
It is commonly thought that economic growth and health outcomes progress together or at least trend in the same direction. In the early 1800s US, however, as economic output grew rapidly, the health outcomes plummeted. The author aims to explain this ‘Antebellum Puzzle’, that is, rapid economic growth in the face of reductions in average health measures by analyzing the effect of railroad network growth on height. The results show that in the early 1800s market access in the US had a negative effect on height. This finding adds to the literature on the impacts of economic growth in a developing country. Although the net effects are surely positive, there may be important negative consequences.
Intergenerational Transmission of Mother-to-Child: Evidence from Cebu, the Philippines [Leah Bevis]
What is the causal effect of a mother’s health on their children’s health? To answer this question, the authors use longitudinal data from the Philippines and obtain exogenous variation in maternal health from temperature, precipitation, and cyclone events. The results show that the effect of a mother’s health on her child increases with the child’s age, suggesting persistent intergenerational health effects. Additionally, this paper makes a neat methodological innovation of dealing with lots of valid but weak instrumental variables. The authors develop a machine learning method for choosing the optimal set of instruments. Performing this method increases the F-statistic on the first stage from around one to close to 50.
Does Maternal Schooling Lead to Improvements to Child Health? Evidence from Ethiopia [Maria Natalia Cantet]
What is the causal effect of a mother’s education on their children’s health? Any evidence of intergenerational effects of education has important implications for assessing the benefits policy reforms that improve education systems. To answer this question the author exploits an education reform in Ethiopia and finds that child chronic health outcomes are reduced by mother’s education attainment. This finding suggests that there are important intergenerational effects of education.
