Empirically probing the quantity-quality model

This paper tests whether family size has a causal effect on girls' education in Mexico. It exploits son preference as the main source of random variation in the propensity to have more children, and estimates causal effects using instrumental variables. Overall, it finds no evidence of family size having an adverse effect on education, once the endogeneity of family size is accounted for. Results are robust to another commonly used instrument in this literature, the occurrence of twin births. A divisive concern throughout this literature is that the instruments are invalid, so that inferences including policy recommendations may be misleading. An important contribution of this paper is to allow for the possibility that the instruments are invalid and to provide an answer to the question of just how much the assumption of instrument exogeneity drives findings. It concludes that the assumption of exogeneity does not affect the results that much, and the effects of family size on girls' schooling remain extremely modest at most.

Identifying social effects from policy experiments

The presentation was delivered at the 2014 Research Methods Festival

Can Micro-Credit Support Public Health Subsidy Programs?

The low take-up of cost-effective and highly subsidised preventive health technologies in low-income countries remains a puzzle. One under-studied reason is that the design of subsidy schemes is such that households remain financially constrained. In this paper we analyse whether, and how, micro-finance supports a large public health subsidy program in the developing world - the Swachh Bharat Mission - in achieving its aim of increasing uptake of individual household latrines. Exploiting a cluster randomised controlled experiment of a sanitation micro-finance program that coincided with the launch of the SBM program, and unique survey data matched to administrative data, we find that the complementarity runs on two levels: First, micro-credit allows households officially ineligible for the subsidy to invest in sanitation by alleviating credit constraints. Second, micro-credit also helps subsidy eligible households to overcome short-term liquidity constraints induced by the remuneration-post-verification subsidy design to invest in sanitation. Subsidy eligible households living in areas experiencing large delays in subsidy disbursement, or high toilet costs, are more likely to take a sanitation loan, but less likely to use the loan to construct a toilet

Spillovers of Community-Based Health Interventions on Consumption Smoothing

Community-based interventions, particularly group-based ones, are considered to be a cost-effective way of delivering interventions in low-income settings. However, design features of these programs could also influence dimensions of household and community behaviour beyond those targeted by the intervention. This paper studies spillover effects of a participatory community health intervention in rural Malawi, implemented through a cluster randomised control trial, on an outcome not directly targeted by the intervention: household consumption smoothing after crop losses. Wefind that while crop losses reduce consumption growth in the absence of the intervention, households in treated areas are able to compensate for this loss and perfectly insure their consumption. Asset decumulation also falls in treated areas. We provide suggestive evidence that these effects are driven by increased social interactions, which could have alleviated contracting frictions; and rule out that they are driven by improved health or reductions in the incidence of crop losses

Group Size and the Efficiency of Informal Risk Sharing

This paper seeks to understand and test empirically the relationship between group size and informal risk sharing. Models of informal risk sharing with limited commitment and grim-trigger punishments upon deviation imply that larger groups provide better insurance. However when subgroups of households can credibly deviate, so that sustainable informal arrangements oughtto be coalition-proof, the relationship between group size and the amount of insurance is unclear. Building on Genicot and Ray (2003), we show that this relationship is theoretically ambiguous. We then investigate it empirically using data on the size of the sibships of the household head and spouse in rural Malawi. To identify the relevant potential risk sharing group, we exploit a social norm among the main ethnic group in our sample - that the wife’s brothers play a key role in ensuring her household’s wellbeing. We find that households where the wife has many brothers are poorly insured against crop loss events. We fail to uncover a similar relationship for the wife’s sisters, ruling out that our findings are driven by wives with many siblings (e.g. brothers) simply having poorer extended family networks. A simple calibration exercise indicates that the threat of coalitional deviations can explain our empirical findings

Labelled loans and human capital investments

Liquidity constraints are known to significantly impede human capital investment decisions in developing countries. However, it is not obvious whether, and the extent to which, labelled microcredit - linked with the investment by name only - will boost human capital investments, particularly since money is fungible and a label is not a strong commitment. Drawing on a cluster randomised controlled trial of a sanitation microloan intervention in rural India, we show that labelled microcredit is effective in increasing sanitation investments. However, not all loans are used for sanitation investments. Testing predictions from a theoretical model that integrates loan labels provides novel evidence that loan labels influence household borrowing and investment decisions. Labelling of loans - which to date has not received much attention in the literature - is a viable strategy to improve uptake of lumpy preventive health investments

Complementarities in the Production of Child Health

We estimate flexible child health production functions to investigate whether better water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) practices make nutrition intake more productive for children aged 6{24 months. Using Filipino cohort data and a control function approach, we show that WASH and nutrition are complements in the formation of child height and weight. The productivities of these inputs vary with child gender: nutritional intake is more productive for boys, while WASH investments are more productive for girls. Nutritional and WASH conditions faced by sample children are similar to those currently encountered by poor children in low-income settings

Labeled loans and human capital investments

Imperfect capital markets and commitment problems impede lumpy human capital investments. Labeled loans have been postulated as a potential solution to both constraints, but little is known about the role of the label in influencing investment choices in practice. We draw on a cluster randomized controlled trial in rural India to test predictions from a theoretical model, providing novel evidence that labeled microcredit is effective in influencing household borrowing and investment decisions and increasing take-up of a lumpy human capital investment, a toilet

Family networks and infant health promotion: a mixed-methods evaluation from a cluster randomised controlled trial in rural Malawi

Objective: Parents may rely on information provided by extended family members when making decisions concerning the health of their children. We evaluate whether extended family members affected the success of an information intervention promoting infant health. Methods: This is a secondary, sequential mixed-methods study based on a cluster randomised controlled trial of a peer-led home-education intervention conducted in Mchinji District, Malawi. We used linear multivariate regression to test whether the intervention impact on child height-for-age z-scores (HAZ) was influenced by extended family members. 12 of 24 clusters were assigned to the intervention, in which all pregnant women and new mothers were eligible to receive 5 home visits from a trained peer counsellor to discuss infant care and nutrition. We conducted focus group discussions with mothers, grandmothers and peer counsellors, and key-informant interviews with husbands, chiefs and community health workers to better understand the roles of extended family members in infant feeding. Results: Exposure to the intervention increased child HAZ scores by 0.296 SD (95% CI 0.116 to 0.484). However, this effect is smaller in the presence of paternal grandmothers. Compared with an effect size of 0.441 to 0.467 SD (95% CI −0.344 to 1.050) if neither grandmother is alive, the effect size was 0.235 (95% CI −0.493 to 0.039) to 0.253 (95% CI −0.529 to 0.029) SD lower if the paternal grandmother was alive. There was no evidence of an effect of parents’ siblings. Maternal grandmothers did not affect intervention impact, but were associated with a lower HAZ score in the control group. Qualitative analysis suggested that grandmothers, who act as secondary caregivers and provide resources for infants, were slower to dismiss traditionally held practices and adopt intervention messages. Conclusion: The results indicate that the intervention impacts are diminished by paternal grandmothers. Intervention success could be increased by integrating senior women

Nutrition, information and household behavior: Experimental evidence from Malawi

Incorrect knowledge of the health production function may lead to inefficient household choices and thereby to the production of suboptimal levels of health. This paper studies the effects of a randomized intervention in rural Malawi that, over a six-month period, provided mothers of young infants with information on child nutrition without supplying any monetary or in-kind resources. A simple model first investigates theoretically how nutrition and other household choices including labor supply may change in response to the improved nutrition knowledge observed in the intervention areas. We then show empirically that the intervention improved child nutrition, household food consumption and consequently health. We find evidence that labor supply increased, which might have contributed to partially fund the increase in food consumption. This paper is the first to study whether non-health choices, particularly parental labor supply, might be affected by parents' knowledge of the child health production function