Secondary School Enrolment and Teenage Childbearing: Evidence from Brazilian Municipalities

This article investigates whether increasing secondary education opportunities influences childbearing among young women in Brazil. We examine a novel dataset reflecting the vast expansion of secondary education in Brazil between 1997 and 2009 and exploit variation in the introduction of schools across 4,884 municipalities to instrument for school enrolment. Our most conservative estimate suggests that for every 9.7 students enrolled there is one fewer teenage births. These findings are robust to a number of specifications and sensitivity tests. Our estimates imply that Brazil’s secondary school expansion accounts for 34% of the substantial decline in teenage childbearing observed over the same period. We further look at heterogeneous effects across a number of municipal characteristics and discuss what these results suggest about the mechanisms underlying the school-childbearing relationship

Understanding access barriers to public services : lessons from a randomized domestic violence intervention

We study the effect of decreasing barriers to accessing non-police services on the demand for police services in cases of police-reported domestic violence. Variation comes from a large case-level randomised control trial designed to assist victims in accessing non-police services. Our data link information from local and national police administrative records, and a survey of victims. The intervention led to a robust 21% decrease in the demand for police services, as measured by the provision of a statement by victims. Despite a strong correlation between statements and criminal sanctions against perpetrators, we do not find a corresponding effect of the intervention on perpetrator arrest, charges or sentencing. This suggests that the victims who do not provide a statement because of treatment had a relatively low statement effectiveness. Consistent with this result, we find treatment group statements are significantly less likely to be withdrawn than are control group statements

Financial Inclusion, Shocks and Welfare: Evidence from the Expansion of the Mobile Money Agent Network in Tanzania

We estimate the effect of mobile money adoption on consumption smoothing, poverty, and human capital investments in Tanzania. We exploit the rapid expansion of the mobile money agent network between 2010 and 2012 and use this together with idiosyncratic shocks from variation in rainfall over time and across space in a difference-in-difference framework. We find that adopter households are able to smooth consumption during periods of shocks and maintain their investments in human capital. Results on time use of children and labor force participation complement the findings on the important role of mobile money for the intergenerational transmission of poverty

The Effect of Violence on Birth Outcomes: Evidence from Homicides in Brazil

This paper uses microdata from Brazilian vital statistics on births and deaths between 2000 and 2010 to estimate the impact of in-utero exposure to local violence – measured by homicide rates – on birth outcomes. The estimates show that exposure to violence during the first trimester of pregnancy leads to a small but precisely estimated increase in the risk of low birthweight and prematurity. Effects are found both in small municipalities, where homicides are rare, and in large municipalities, where violence is endemic, and are particularly pronounced among children of poorly educated mothers, implying that violence compounds the disadvantage that these children already suffer as a result of their households' lower socioeconomic status