Pre-results Review at the Journal of Development Economics: Lessons Learned
A discussion of the 2018-19 JDE Pre-results Review Pilot.
Oxfam Professor in Environmental and Resource Economics, Dept. of Economics & Faculty co-Director of the Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA)
A discussion of the 2018-19 JDE Pre-results Review Pilot.
Egger, Dennis, Johannes Haushofer, Edward Miguel, Paul Niehaus, and Michael Walker. (2021). “General Equilibrium Effects of Cash Transfers: Experimental Evidence from Kenya”, forthcoming Econometrica.
How large economic stimuli generate individual and aggregate responses is a central question in economics, but has not been studied experimentally. We provided one-time cash transfers of about USD 1000 to over 10,500 poor households across 653 randomized villages in rural Kenya. The implied fiscal shock was over 15 percent of local GDP. We find large impacts on consumption and assets for recipients. Importantly, we document large positive spillovers on non-recipient households and firms, and minimal price inflation. We estimate a local transfer multiplier of 2.4. We interpret welfare
implications through the lens of a simple household optimization framework.
Theisen (JPR, 2012) recently constructed a novel high-resolution data set of intergroup and political conflict in Kenya (1989-2004) and examined whether the risk of conflict onset and incidence responds to annual pixel-level variations in temperature and precipitation. Thiesen concluded that only extreme precipitation is associated with conflict incidence and that temperature is unrelated to conflict, seemingly at odds with recent studies that found a positive association at the pixel scale (O'laughlin et al., PNAS 2012), at the country scale (Burke et al., PNAS 2009), and at the continental scale (Hsiang et al., Nature 2011) in Africa. Here we show these ndings can be reconciled when we correct the erroneous coding of temperature-squared in Thiesen. In contrast to the original conclusions presented in Theisen, both conflict onset and conflict incidence are significantly and positively associated with local temperature in this new and independently assembled data set.
Kremer, Michael, Edward Miguel, Sendhil Mullainathan, Clair Null, and Alix Peterson Zwane. 2011. "Social Engineering: Evidence from a Suite of Take-up Experiments in Kenya." Unpublished Working Paper.
Many effective health products and behaviors available through the private market are not widely adopted in less developed countries. For example, fewer than 10% of households in our Kenyan study area treat their water with dilute chlorine. Using a suite of randomized evaluations, we find that information and marketing interventions do little to boost use of chlorine. However, chlorine take-up is highly sensitive to price, convenience and social context, with more than half of households using chlorine when an individually-packaged supply is delivered free to the home. The highest sustained take-up is achieved by combining free, convenient, salient, and public access through a point-of-collection chlorine dispenser system and a local promoter. More than half of households treat their water and this use continues 30 months later even though promoters are paid only for the first six months. The estimated long-run costs of this intervention at scale, including administrative costs, are between $0.25 and $0.50 per person per year.
This study exploits a new longitudinal dataset to examine selective migration among 1,500 Kenyan youth originally living in rural areas. We examine whether migration rates are related to individual "ability", broadly defined to include cognitive aptitude as well as health, and then use these estimates to determine how much of the urban-rural wage gap in Kenya is due to selection versus actual productivity differences. Whereas previous empirical work has focused on schooling attainment as a proxy for cognitive ability, we employ an arguably preferable measure, a pre-migration primary school academic test score. Pre-migration randomized assignment to a deworming treatment program provides variation in health status. We find a positive relationship between both measures of human capital (cognitive ability and deworming) and subsequent migration, though only the former is robust at standard statistical significance levels. Specifically, an increase of two standard deviations in academic test score increases the likelihood of rural-urban migration by 17%. Accounting for migration selection due to both cognitive ability and schooling attainment does not explain more than a small fraction of the sizeable urban-rural wage gap in Kenya, suggesting that productivity differences across sectors remain large.