Poverty alleviation and welfare improvement of the poor have been the primary goals of policy makers in the developing world. Governments and international development agencies have regularly allocated a wide range of resources in attempts to improve socio-economic indicators of well-being amongst the poor. Careful analysis backed by rigorous evaluation of these efforts is of utmost importance in order to ascertain whether these goals are being met. My work focuses on some of the development goals and the role of policy efforts in addressing these.
1. Measuring the Achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (with Jorge Agüero)
With less than five years to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) in 2015, there is a need to evaluate the progress towards the goals. In this paper, we first use a welfare-based approach to evaluate such progress by building a social welfare function that satisfies the main assumptions in the social choice literature. Our general approach includes, as a special case, the current evaluation methods of the MDG by international organizations. Secondly, we consider alternative designs for some of the goals to examine whether our evaluation is robust to alternative targets. Our findings show that there are significant gains in worldwide welfare. The gains are even higher when considering the improvements of the poorest countries. While the gains are higher for Asia, a welfare evaluation for Sub-Saharan Africa shows significant improvements in well-being contradicting the common view of the region as a “failure”. Our results are robust to changes in the design of the MDG.
2. Measuring the Impact of the Education Guarantee Scheme on Schooling Outcomes for Women in India – Job Market Paper
In 1997, the state government of Madhya Pradesh (MP), India, launched the Education Guarantee Scheme to provide access to primary schools in the state's rural areas with the help of community participation. The scheme led to the rapid set up of over 25 thousand schools in a span of 5 years - an average of over 2 schools per 1000 rural children in MP between the ages of 6 to 15 in 1997. Exposure of an individual to the scheme was jointly determined by her state of residence as well as her age at the time of the intervention. Using the 2005-2006 round of the National Family Health Survey, this paper combines the two sources of exogeneity to estimate the impact of this unusual policy experiment on educational outcomes of women using a difference-in-differences estimation strategy. My findings reveal substantial and robust effects of the program on rural women's completed years of schooling and their probability of attending secondary school. Further, this increase in educational attainment is largely driven by the youngest cohorts of women in my sample, implying that the scheme was most effective in reducing the private costs of schooling for women who were just young enough to start primary school.
3. Do Children Reduce Women's Earnings? Evidence from Developing Countries (with Jorge Agüero and Mindy Marks)
Using the Demographic and Health Surveys from 21 developing countries, we document a negative relationship between family size and earnings for women. The family penalty observed in the data is around 12% - comparable to the estimates for women in the developed countries. We instrument for the number of children using infertility shocks to address endogeneity of family size and establish that the negative relationship is causal. We find that the presence of the younger children negatively affects earnings, but that older children, especially older girls, increase earnings. Finally, we document that some of the difference in earnings between mothers and non-mothers can be explained by the type of job and intensity of work.
4. Impact of Schooling on Measures of Women’s Welfare: Spillover Effects of the Education Guarantee Scheme
As an extension of the previous essay, this chapter examines the spillover effects of increased educational attainment on various measures of female autonomy. Low levels of female education have strong implications on a wide range of outcomes related to women’s health, fertility, inter-generational transmission of education and health, and intra-household allocation of resources. In this paper I explore the causal relationship between educational attainment and various measures of women’s well-being such as use of contraceptives, age at first marriage, and age at first intercourse that are relevant to young women who were benefited by the “natural experiment” in the form of an educational intervention called the Education Guarantee Scheme (EGS) launched in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. This paper employs an Instrumental Variable (IV) approach by using exposure to the EGS as an instrument for educational attainment to investigate the differential impact of schooling on these measures.
1. Measuring the Achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (with Jorge Agüero)
With less than five years to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) in 2015, there is a need to evaluate the progress towards the goals. In this paper, we first use a welfare-based approach to evaluate such progress by building a social welfare function that satisfies the main assumptions in the social choice literature. Our general approach includes, as a special case, the current evaluation methods of the MDG by international organizations. Secondly, we consider alternative designs for some of the goals to examine whether our evaluation is robust to alternative targets. Our findings show that there are significant gains in worldwide welfare. The gains are even higher when considering the improvements of the poorest countries. While the gains are higher for Asia, a welfare evaluation for Sub-Saharan Africa shows significant improvements in well-being contradicting the common view of the region as a “failure”. Our results are robust to changes in the design of the MDG.
2. Measuring the Impact of the Education Guarantee Scheme on Schooling Outcomes for Women in India – Job Market Paper
In 1997, the state government of Madhya Pradesh (MP), India, launched the Education Guarantee Scheme to provide access to primary schools in the state's rural areas with the help of community participation. The scheme led to the rapid set up of over 25 thousand schools in a span of 5 years - an average of over 2 schools per 1000 rural children in MP between the ages of 6 to 15 in 1997. Exposure of an individual to the scheme was jointly determined by her state of residence as well as her age at the time of the intervention. Using the 2005-2006 round of the National Family Health Survey, this paper combines the two sources of exogeneity to estimate the impact of this unusual policy experiment on educational outcomes of women using a difference-in-differences estimation strategy. My findings reveal substantial and robust effects of the program on rural women's completed years of schooling and their probability of attending secondary school. Further, this increase in educational attainment is largely driven by the youngest cohorts of women in my sample, implying that the scheme was most effective in reducing the private costs of schooling for women who were just young enough to start primary school.
3. Do Children Reduce Women's Earnings? Evidence from Developing Countries (with Jorge Agüero and Mindy Marks)
Using the Demographic and Health Surveys from 21 developing countries, we document a negative relationship between family size and earnings for women. The family penalty observed in the data is around 12% - comparable to the estimates for women in the developed countries. We instrument for the number of children using infertility shocks to address endogeneity of family size and establish that the negative relationship is causal. We find that the presence of the younger children negatively affects earnings, but that older children, especially older girls, increase earnings. Finally, we document that some of the difference in earnings between mothers and non-mothers can be explained by the type of job and intensity of work.
4. Impact of Schooling on Measures of Women’s Welfare: Spillover Effects of the Education Guarantee Scheme
As an extension of the previous essay, this chapter examines the spillover effects of increased educational attainment on various measures of female autonomy. Low levels of female education have strong implications on a wide range of outcomes related to women’s health, fertility, inter-generational transmission of education and health, and intra-household allocation of resources. In this paper I explore the causal relationship between educational attainment and various measures of women’s well-being such as use of contraceptives, age at first marriage, and age at first intercourse that are relevant to young women who were benefited by the “natural experiment” in the form of an educational intervention called the Education Guarantee Scheme (EGS) launched in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. This paper employs an Instrumental Variable (IV) approach by using exposure to the EGS as an instrument for educational attainment to investigate the differential impact of schooling on these measures.