Bride & prejudice: the price of education

Leveraging the cultural practice of bride price could help amplify investments in female education and improve effects of large-scale school-building programmes. Without other subsidies, well-intentioned activism against bride-price may cause more harm than good for investing in girls’ education

Negotiating a Better Future: How Interpersonal Skills Facilitate Inter-generational Investment

Using a randomized control trial, we examine whether offering adolescent girls non-material resources -- specifically, negotiation skills -- can improve educational outcomes in a low-income country. In so doing, we provide the first evidence on the effects of an intervention that increased non-cognitive, interpersonal skills during adolescence. Long-run administrative data shows that negotiation training significantly improved educational outcomes over the next three years. The training had greater effects than two alternative treatments (offering girls a safe physical space with female mentors and offering girls information about the returns to education), suggesting that negotiation skills themselves drive the effect. Further evidence from a lab-in-the-field experiment, which simulates parents\u27 educational investment decisions, and a midline survey suggests that negotiation skills improved girls\u27 outcomes by moving households\u27 human capital investments closer to the efficient frontier. This is consistent with an incomplete contracting model, where negotiation allows daughters to strategically cooperate with parents

Cascading Failures in Production Networks *

Abstract I show how the extensive margin of firm entry and exit can greatly amplify idiosyncratic shocks in an economy with a production network. I show that input-output models with entry and exit behave very differently to models without this margin. In particular, in such models, sales provide a very poor measure of the systemic importance of firms or industries. I derive a new notion of systemic influence called exit centrality that captures how exits in one industry will affect equilibrium output. I show that exit centrality need not be monotonically related to an industry's sales, size, or prices. Unlike the relevant notions of centrality in standard input-output models, exit centrality depends on the industry's role as both a supplier and as a consumer of inputs. Furthermore, I show that granularities in systemically important industries can cause one failure to snowball into a large-scale avalanche of failures. In this sense, shocks can be amplified as they travel through the network, whereas in standard input-output models they cannot

Cascading Failures in Production Networks *

Abstract I show how the extensive margin of firm entry and exit can greatly amplify idiosyncratic shocks in an economy with a production network. I show that canonical input-output models, which lack the extensive margin of firm entry and exit, have some crucial limitations. In these models, the systemic importance of a firm does not respond to productivity shocks, depends only on the firm's role as a supplier, and is equal to or well-approximated by the firm's size. This means that for every canonical input-output model, there exists a non-interconnected model that has the same aggregate response to productivity shocks. I show that when we allow for entry and exit, the systemic importance of a firm responds endogenously to productivity shocks, depends on a firm's role not just as a supplier but also as a consumer, and a firm's systemic influence is no longer well-approximated by its size. Furthermore, I show that nondivisibilities in systemically important industries can cause one failure to snowball into a large-scale avalanche of failures. In this sense, shocks can be amplified as they travel through the network, whereas in canonical input-output models they cannot

The Seventeenth Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Surveys: Complete Release of MaNGA, MaStar and APOGEE-2 Data

This paper documents the seventeenth data release (DR17) from the Sloan Digital Sky Surveys; the fifth and final release from the fourth phase (SDSS-IV). DR17 contains the complete release of the Mapping Nearby Galaxies at Apache Point Observatory (MaNGA) survey, which reached its goal of surveying over 10,000 nearby galaxies. The complete release of the MaNGA Stellar Library (MaStar) accompanies this data, providing observations of almost 30,000 stars through the MaNGA instrument during bright time. DR17 also contains the complete release of the Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment 2 (APOGEE-2) survey which publicly releases infra-red spectra of over 650,000 stars. The main sample from the Extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (eBOSS), as well as the sub-survey Time Domain Spectroscopic Survey (TDSS) data were fully released in DR16. New single-fiber optical spectroscopy released in DR17 is from the SPectroscipic IDentification of ERosita Survey (SPIDERS) sub-survey and the eBOSS-RM program. Along with the primary data sets, DR17 includes 25 new or updated Value Added Catalogs (VACs). This paper concludes the release of SDSS-IV survey data. SDSS continues into its fifth phase with observations already underway for the Milky Way Mapper (MWM), Local Volume Mapper (LVM) and Black Hole Mapper (BHM) surveys

Essays at the Intersection of Development and Education Economics

This dissertation uses tools from economics to study three different aspects of educational markets in the developing world. In chapter 1, I analyze how competition among private schools in Pakistan affects student outcomes when (1) the match between a school and a student matters for learning, and (2) poorer students may be less informed about their match when they make enrollment decisions. I find that greater competition may lead schools to compete more intensively for wealthier, better-informed students, lowering learning for poorer students in the average private school and increasing learning for wealthier students. In chapter 2, I examine how cultural norms that encourage children to care for their parents when they reach adulthood affect human capital investment in children in Ghana, Indonesia, Rwanda, and Mexico. I find that children targeted by these norms receive more educational investments. Finally, in chapter 3, I study the labor market for public school teachers in Pakistan by analyzing the effect of a policy shock that changed both teacher salaries and accountability on student learning. I find that simultaneously lowering teacher salaries and increasing accountability lowered the cost of providing education and improved students’ learning.Public Polic

Negotiating a better future: how interpersonal skills facilitate intergenerational investment

Using a randomized controlled trial, we study whether a negotiation skills training can improve girls' educational outcomes in a low-resource environment. We find that a negotiation training given to eighth-grade Zambian girls significantly improved educational outcomes over the next three years, and these effects did not fade out. To better understand mechanisms, we estimate the effects of two alternative treatments. Negotiation had much stronger effects than an informational treatment, which had no effect. A treatment designed to have more traditional girls' empowerment effects had directionally positive but insignificant educational effects. Relative to this treatment, negotiation increased enrollment in higher-quality schooling and had larger effects for high-ability girls. These findings are consistent with a model in which negotiation allows girls to resolve incomplete contracting problems with their parents, yielding increased educational investment for those who experience sufficiently high returns. We provide evidence for this channel through a lab-in-the-field game and follow-up survey with girls and their guardians

Bride price and female education

We document an important consequence of bride price, a payment made by the groom to the bride’s family at marriage. Revisiting Indone-sia’s school construction program, we find that among ethnic groups without the custom, it had no effect on girls’ schooling. Among ethnic groups with the custom, it had large positive effects. We show (theoretically and empirically) that this is because a daughter’s education, by increasing the amount of money parents receive at marriage, generates an additional incentive for parents to educate their daughters. We replicate these findings in Zambia, a country that had a similar large-scale school construction program

Replication Data for: 'Negotiating a Better Future: How Interpersonal Skills Facilitate Intergenerational Investment'

The data and programs replicate tables and figures from "Negotiating a Better Future: How Interpersonal Skills Facilitate Intergenerational Investment", by Ashraf, Bau, Low and McGinn. Please see the Readme file for additional details