Community-Based Well Maintenance in Rural Haiti

Under the Haiti Outreach (HO) model, HO asks communities for proposals to drill or refurbish a well. Then, they will only do so if the community agrees to form a maintenance committee; deposit a set amount per month for operation and maintence (committees decide who forms the community and how to set user fees); hire a guard (to enforce hours of operation, set by committees); and disseminate information through public meetings. These researchers found a unique opportunity to test the effectiveness of this community-based model as compared to standard well maintenance: following the earthquake in 2010, HO was asked to repair 158 wells and then turn them over to other groups. These wells did not receive the community-based management training, and thus serve as a comparison group. Although there are some weakness to this methodology, the author notes that it is difficult to imagine better data becoming available for evaluating alternative well maintenance approaches in rural Haiti. This paper also presents a model to quantify the tradeoff between equity and sustainabilty that characterizes the choice of whether or not to charge user fees

A Note on Why Quarter of Birth is Not a Valid Instrument for Educational Attainment

In their justification for using entrance cutoff dates and compulsory education laws as a natural experiment, the authors of Angrist and Krueger (1991) rightly give much attention to the effectiveness of compulsory attendance laws. However, the authors do not give proper attention to the decisions made by parents. If redshirting is commonplace and nonrandom, as it is in the ECLS-K data set, then the identifying assumption of monotonicity does not hold, and their identification scheme does not work. This problem is distinct from those discussed in Bound and Jaeger (2000).

Assessing the evidence on neighborhood effects from moving to opportunity

This paper presents a new perspective on results from the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) housing mobility program. Building on recent developments in the program evaluation literature, this paper defines several treatment effect parameters and then estimates and interprets these parameters using data from MTO. The evaluation framework is used to make a clear distinction between the interpretation of Intent to Treat (ITT) and Treatment on the Treated (TOT) parameters as program effects and Local Average Treatment Effect (LATE) parameters as neighborhood effects. This distinction helps to clarify that results from MTO are only informative about a small subset of neighborhood effects of interest. Tests for instrument strength show that MTO induced large changes in neighborhood poverty rates. However, it is also shown that MTO induced remarkably little variation in many of the other neighborhood and school characteristics believed to influence outcomes and that much of this variation was confined to the tails of these characteristics' national distributions. Consistent with prevailing theories of neighborhood effects, labor market and health outcomes improved when households moved to neighborhoods with characteristics at or above the national median. The evidence suggests housing mobility programs designed to induce moves to neighborhoods with characteristics in addition to or in lieu of low poverty might induce larger effects than MTO, and results point to the investigation of heterogeneity in program effects from MTO as a fruitful direction for future research.Housing policy ; Poverty

Redshirting, compulsory schooling laws, and educational attainment

A wide literature uses date of birth as an instrument to study the causal effects of educational attainment. This paper shows how parents delaying their children’s initial enrollment in kindergarten, a practice known as redshirting, can make estimates obtained through this identification framework all but impossible to interpret. A latent index model is used to illustrate how the monotonicity assumption in this framework is violated if redshirting decisions are made in a setting of essential heterogeneity. Empirical evidence is presented from the ECLS-K data set that favors this scenario; redshirting is common and heterogeneity in the treatment effect of educational attainment is likely a factor in parents’ redshirting decisions.Education

Community-based well maintenance in rural Haiti

The international community has pledged $11 billion to Haiti, a country where nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) provide nearly all public goods and services. This raises at least two questions: How can NGOs most effectively perform their own work, and how can NGOs integrate their programs into broader efforts organized by public institutions? This paper addresses these questions by evaluating the community-based model of Haiti Outreach (HO) that focuses on training communities to manage wells after they have been constructed. The effect of this management training is identified by comparing the outcomes of HO’s wells with a control group of wells that were refurbished by HO in the aftermath of the January 12, 2010, earthquake but then subsequently managed by other groups. Wells managed under the community-based approach are 8.7 percentage points more likely to be functioning after only one year. We also propose a social planner’s problem to quantify the tradeoff between equity and efficiency created by user fees that may be applied to many development programs. A social planner indifferent between standard and community-based interventions has strong preferences for sporadically providing water to the poorest members of a community at the expense of sustainably providing water to the majority of community members. Policy-makers deciding between alternative interventions should also give consideration to the community-based approach for its ability to build political institutions.Water-supply ; Rural development

A Theoretical Foundation for Bilateral Matching Mechanisms

This work introduces a rigorous set-theoretic foundation of bilateral matching mechanisms and studies their properties in a systematic manner. By providing a unified framework to study ilateral matching mechanisms, we formalize how different spatial/informational constraints can be implemented via a careful selection of matching mechanisms. In particular, this paper explains why and how various matching mechanisms generate different degrees of information isolation in the economyspatial interactions, matching, information frictions

Continuity and Equilibrium Stability

This paper discusses the problem of stability of equilibrium points in normal form games in the tremling-hand framework. An equilibrium point is called perffect if it is stable against at least one seqence of trembles approaching zero. A strictly perfect equilibrium point is stable against every such sequence. We give a sufficient condition for a Nash equilibrium point to be strictly perfect in terms of the primitive characteristics of the game (payoffs and strategies), which is new and not known in the literature. In particular, we show that continuity of the best response correspondence (which can be stated in terms of the primitives of the game) implies strict perfectness; we prove a number of other useful theorems regarding the structure of best responce correspondence in normal form games.Strictly perfect equilibrium, best responce correspondence, unit simplex, face of a unit simplex

A Refinement of Perfect Equilibria Based On Substitute Sequences

We propose an equilibrium refinement of strict perfect equilibrium for the finite normal form games, which is not known in the literature. Okada came up with the idea of strict perfect equilibrium by strengthening the main definition of a perfect equilibrium, due to Selten [14]. We consider the alternative (and equivalent) definition of perfect equilibrium, based on the substitute sequences, as appeared in Selten [14]. We show that by strengthening and modifiyng this definition slightly, one can obtain a refinement stronger than strict perfectness. We call the new refinement strict substitute perfect equilibrium. The main advantage of this solution concept is that it reflects the local dominance of an equilibrium point. An example is provided to show that a strict perfect equilibrium may fail to be strict substitute perfect.Perfect equilibrium, strictly perfect equilibrium, substitute sequence, substitute perfect equilibrium, unit simplex

Production equilibria

This paper studies production economies in a commodity space that is an ordered locally convex space. We establish a general theorem on the existence of equilibrium without requiring that the commodity space or its dual be a vector lattice. Such commodity spaces arise in models of portfolio trading where the absence of some option usually means the absence of a vector lattice structure. The conditions on preferences and production sets are at least as general as those imposed in the literature dealing with vector lattice commodity spaces. The main assumption on the order structure is that the Riesz-Kantorovich functionals satisfy a uniform properness condition that can be formulated in terms of a duality property that is readily checked. This condition is satisfied in a vector lattice commodity space but there are many examples of other commodity spaces that satisfy the condition, which are not vector lattices, have no order unit, and do not have either the decomposition property or its approximate versions.Production economies; Equilibrium; Edgeworth equilibrium; Properness; Riesz-Kantorovich functional; Sup-convolution

General equilibrium analysis in ordered topological vector spaces

The second welfare theorem and the core-equivalence theorem have been proved to be fundamental tools for obtaining equilibrium existence theorems, especially in an infinite dimensional setting. For well-behaved exchange economies that we call proper economies, this paper gives (minimal) conditions for supporting with prices Pareto optimal allocations and decentralizing Edgeworth equilibrium allocations as non-trivial equilibria. As we assume neither transitivity nor monotonicity on the preferences of consumers, most of the existing equilibrium existence results are a consequence of our results. A natural application is in Finance, where our conditions lead to new equilibrium existence results, and also explain why some financial economies fail to have equilibrium.Equilibrium; Valuation equilibrium; Pareto-optimum; Edgeworth equilibrium; Properness; ordered topological vector spaces; Riesz-Kantorovich formula; sup-convolution