Essays in Personnel and Development Economics

Abstract

The state plays an important role in economic development, and there is growing interest in understanding how government employees, their characteristics, and the institutional context they operate in, affect public goods provision and public service delivery. Governments are also among the largest employers, and their personnel decisions are complex, as they are not directly guided by market forces. Additionally, the diversity of the government workforce itself may influence policy outcomes. U.S. history offers an ideal setting to explore these topics, given its rich historical panel data on government personnel and significant policy variation.In Chapter 1, Socorro Martinez and I study the impact of pay standardization in the US Civil Service on gender equity. Pay standardization schemes are commonly implemented in organizations to address pay gaps based on gender, race, or ethnicity. These schemes limit managerial discretion to determine wages, thereby limiting gender inequality within job titles. However, this may shift inequality to other margins, such as position quality or promotions. This study examines the effects of the Classification Act of 1923, which standardized pay grades and position categories and required "equal pay for equal work" in the US Civil Service, on women's earnings relative to men's. Using a triple difference approach, we exploit the fact that the policy applied to civil servants working in Washington, D.C., but not to those working in federal field offices, and allow for differential effects of the policy by gender. We find that the law did not improve women's relative pay within job titles. Further, the law lowered women's relative compensation without controlling for job titles, suggesting changes in women's positions. We indeed find large negative effects on the position margin. In response to the law, departments downgraded women to lower-quality positions. These negative consequences predominantly affected newly hired women. Our findings underscore the importance of unintended margins of adjustment for policies related to gender equity.Data collection in development economics research is rapidly evolving, driven by new technologies that enable researchers to survey households in different ways and by the increasing availability of administrative data from sources such as satellites and smartphones. Researchers face numerous design decisions when planning data collection for impact evaluations, including sampling strategies, sample size, and questionnaire design. Importantly, the choice of data collection mode may meaningfully influence findings in impact evaluations.In Chapter 2, co-authored with Travis Lybbert, Ashish Shenoy, Rupika Singh, and Daniel Stein and published in the Journal of Development Economics, we measure differences in responses between phone and in-person household agricultural surveys and test for differences in randomized control trial treatment effects by mode of data collection. Ubiquitous mobile phone ownership makes phone surveying an attractive method of low-cost data collection. We explore differences between in-person and phone survey measures of agricultural production collected for an impact evaluation in India. Phone responses have greater mean and variance, a difference that persists even within a subset of respondents that answered the same question over both modes. Treatment effect estimation remains stable across survey mode, but estimates are less precise when using phone data. These patterns are informative for cost and sample size considerations in study design and for aggregating evidence across study sites or time periods.Multi-intervention agricultural development programs are often expensive to implement at scale and sustain over the long term. Therefore, identifying the most cost-effective combination of interventions to achieve program goals is particularly important. This task becomes especially relevant given that policymakers must frequently make decisions under resource constraints, prioritizing interventions that deliver the greatest impact at the lowest cost. In Chapter 3, co-authored with Rupika Singh, Daniel Stein, and Kate Sturla, we measure the cost-effectiveness of different packages of input subsidies and extension interventions, designed to encourage the adoption of modern pulse cultivation. India is the largest producer and consumer of pulses, but in recent years has needed to import pulses to meet domestic demand. In order to keep prices stable and control the balance of trade, increasing domestic pulse production has become a national policy priority. However, farmers face multiple constraints to pulse cultivation.We design an experiment to measure the relative importance of these constraints to design an optimal short-term policy for pulse promotion. We conduct an RCT testing three different implementation models designed to ease different constraints: the "high intensity" provides seed distribution, extension services, and demonstration plots, the "medium intensity" provides seed distribution and extension services, and the "low intensity" only provides seed distribution via a voucher system. Overall, we find that all three models are effective in promoting pulse cultivation, with no statistically significant differences between the models. Treatment increased farmers’ propensity to grow pulses over two seasons by 12 and 15 percentage points, respectively. These results suggest that, at least for the initial phase of pulse adoption, access to quality seeds is the key constraint, as opposed to information. Therefore, seed distribution is likely a cost effective way to quickly increase the adoption and production of pulse crops