{"title":"Corrigendum to ‘Place-based affirmative action in college admission and educational attainment’ [J. Develop. Econ. 179, February 2026, 103624]","authors":"Liqiu Zhao , Yongming Luo , Li Li","doi":"10.1016/j.jdeveco.2026.103779","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jdeveco.2026.103779","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48418,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Development Economics","volume":"182 ","pages":"Article 103779"},"PeriodicalIF":4.6,"publicationDate":"2026-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148246734","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Improving childhood immunization through maternal support: Evidence from a randomized intervention in Pakistan","authors":"Adeline Delavande , Areeba Shahab , Javed Younas , Basit Zafar","doi":"10.1016/j.jdeveco.2026.103808","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jdeveco.2026.103808","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We evaluate the effectiveness of randomized interventions aimed at alleviating behavioral barriers — such as maternal stress and psychological strain, limited future-oriented thinking, and information frictions — for early childhood immunization uptake in a sample of Pakistani mothers with infants. A phone-delivered intervention providing light psychological support as well as visualization and planning techniques increases the total number of vaccines received by young children by 0.3, or 7% of the control mean, one year after baseline. We also find that the intervention improves maternal knowledge, attitudes, and perceived returns to vaccination. However, supplementing this intervention with vaccination-related information from influencers does not yield additional benefits in this context.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48418,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Development Economics","volume":"182 ","pages":"Article 103808"},"PeriodicalIF":4.6,"publicationDate":"2026-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148184088","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Adjustment without accumulation: Evidence on capital formation from IMF programs","authors":"Daniel Rinner , Kevin P. Gallagher , Rebecca Ray","doi":"10.1016/j.jdeveco.2026.103825","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jdeveco.2026.103825","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>A central mandate of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is to provide liquidity support to countries facing balance of payment difficulties. Lending programs aim to bridge financing gaps and restore trajectories for growth and stability. The IMF's core programs condition fiscal and other policy measures in return for such support, in hopes that reforms and new financing will catalyze new (especially private) investment into the economy. There is now a deep academic literature assessing the economic and social outcomes of IMF lending programs. This study adds to this literature by evaluating the extent to which IMF programs catalyze gross fixed capital formation (GFCF) in general and private capital formation in particular. An analysis of GFCF provides insight into investment channels of growth and the productivity of IMF-catalyzed capital. We leverage a novel empirical strategy, local projections difference-in-difference. Results indicate that IMF program participation typically has ambiguous or negative impacts on capital formation. These findings add to prior work on growth and investment within IMF programs. Results also support recent calls to rethink the value of fiscal consolidation for balance of payments problems.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48418,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Development Economics","volume":"182 ","pages":"Article 103825"},"PeriodicalIF":4.6,"publicationDate":"2026-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148184079","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Melissa Hidrobo , Harold Alderman , Negussie Deyessa , Daniel O. Gilligan , Parthu Kalva , Jessica Leight , Michael Mulford , Heleene Tambet
{"title":"The effects of cash and group therapy in the context of conflict: Evidence from a randomized evaluation in Ethiopia","authors":"Melissa Hidrobo , Harold Alderman , Negussie Deyessa , Daniel O. Gilligan , Parthu Kalva , Jessica Leight , Michael Mulford , Heleene Tambet","doi":"10.1016/j.jdeveco.2026.103724","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jdeveco.2026.103724","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The prevalence of depression remains high in low-income contexts, particularly those affected by conflict. This paper reports on a randomized controlled trial conducted in rural Ethiopia assessing the effects of a psychological (group therapy) intervention delivered by non-specialist health staff, as well as a large one-time cash transfer delivered post-therapy. The trial includes three arms comparing group therapy, cash, and both jointly to a status quo control within a sample of individuals reporting some depressive symptoms or functional impairment at baseline. The study occurred between 2022 and 2024, during a period of active armed conflict. Findings show that sixteen months post-baseline, there are no persistent positive effects of group therapy alone; cash alone improves time use and economic outcomes. Group therapy and cash jointly improve psychosocial skills, time use, and economic outcomes, and in areas not affected by conflict, the joint intervention also improves mental health.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48418,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Development Economics","volume":"181 ","pages":"Article 103724"},"PeriodicalIF":4.6,"publicationDate":"2026-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146039645","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Higher education expansion and the rural–urban gap in secondary schooling and labor outcomes: Evidence from China’s 1999 reform","authors":"Ruoming Zhang","doi":"10.1016/j.jdeveco.2026.103721","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jdeveco.2026.103721","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This study examines how China’s 1999 expansion of university admissions reshaped rural and urban students’ academic high-school choices and, in turn, rural–urban gaps in schooling and employment. Treating the nationwide expansion of tertiary capacity as an exogenous shock, we use microdata from the 2015 1% Population Sample Survey of China to estimate difference-in-differences models with county and cohort fixed effects. Relative to comparable urban cohorts, rural students exposed to the reform were 2.9 percentage points more likely to complete the academic high school track and accumulated an additional 0.26 years of schooling. The expansion also reallocated rural workers away from low-skill employment by 5.1 percentage points. These findings indicate a strong indirect channel operating through upper-secondary choices, while underscoring the need for complementary investments in rural upper-secondary schools and local non-farm labor markets. The evidence is consistent with changes in expectations and application behavior at the upper-secondary transition: national tertiary expansion increased the perceived attainability of the academic track for rural cohorts, inducing adjustments in continuation decisions.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48418,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Development Economics","volume":"181 ","pages":"Article 103721"},"PeriodicalIF":4.6,"publicationDate":"2026-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145993598","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The distribution game: Evidence from 200,000 campaign donors","authors":"Caíque Melo","doi":"10.1016/j.jdeveco.2026.103749","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jdeveco.2026.103749","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper examines how reduced individual influence leads politicians to use public-sector employment as a compensatory instrument. Identification exploits a Brazilian reform imposing population-based ceilings on municipal council size, generating quasi-experimental variation in political leverage. I combine electoral records for city councilors, campaign donation data on roughly 200,000 individuals, and matched administrative labor-market records. Reduced influence raises the likelihood that campaign supporters obtain public-sector jobs by about 26%. These gains concentrate in managerial and supervisory positions, include upward reallocation of already employed insiders, and are associated with lower education and greater skill and pay mismatch. The results show that public employment operates as a personnel-based distributive instrument, through which politicians offset diminished influence, with consequences for bureaucratic quality and governance.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48418,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Development Economics","volume":"181 ","pages":"Article 103749"},"PeriodicalIF":4.6,"publicationDate":"2026-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146189296","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Why railways fail: Colonial railways and economic development in Habsburg Bosnia–Herzegovina","authors":"Magnus Neubert , Stefan Nikolić","doi":"10.1016/j.jdeveco.2026.103747","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jdeveco.2026.103747","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Are railways always a harbinger of prosperity? We examine the economic effects of railways in Bosnia–Herzegovina under Habsburg colonial rule. Our novel dataset consistently tracks the non-agricultural population share of over 4500 settlements in Habsburg Bosnia in 1885, 1895, and 1910, based on census records. Applying the inconsequential units approach, with least-cost paths as our instrumental variable, we estimate the effect of railway access on occupational change. In settlements directly connected to imperial railways and competition, non-agricultural activity declined as craftsmen returned to agriculture. By contrast, the new railway network temporarily accelerated non-agricultural activity, primarily by attracting factories and foreign labor. Railway access generated more sustained non-agricultural employment growth in settlements with higher human capital and stronger law enforcement. Overall, our findings suggest that colonial railways did not uniformly promote economic development: while railway access reshaped local occupational structures, lasting positive effects depended on local development preconditions.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48418,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Development Economics","volume":"181 ","pages":"Article 103747"},"PeriodicalIF":4.6,"publicationDate":"2026-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146189302","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Rethinking fiscal rules in resource-rich economies","authors":"Salomon Garcia-Villegas , Rodrigo Heresi","doi":"10.1016/j.jdeveco.2026.103730","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jdeveco.2026.103730","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We study the welfare and macroeconomic implications of simple and implementable fiscal policy rules in commodity-dependent economies, where a large share of output, exports, and government revenues depends on exogenous and volatile commodity prices. Using a multi-sector New Keynesian model estimated for the Chilean economy, we find that the welfare-maximizing fiscal policy involves an actively countercyclical response to the tax revenue cycle and an acyclical response to the commodity revenue cycle. Compared to a benchmark acyclical policy, the optimized rule reduces macroeconomic (GDP growth) volatility while delivering welfare gains of 0.6% of lifetime consumption for the average household (1.2% for hand-to-mouth households). Government consumption and especially public investment are particularly helpful in stabilizing GDP, while targeted social transfers are essential to smooth the consumption of financially constrained households. Implementing the optimized rule requires moderate additional volatility (fiscal activism) in government spending and public debt.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48418,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Development Economics","volume":"181 ","pages":"Article 103730"},"PeriodicalIF":4.6,"publicationDate":"2026-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146189295","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Weapon supply shocks, violence, and migration","authors":"Julio Acuna","doi":"10.1016/j.jdeveco.2026.103728","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jdeveco.2026.103728","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>I use shocks to the world supply of weapons to identify the causal effect of violence as a driver of the U.S. migrant border crisis. The main finding is that weapon supply shocks increase violence, and violence increases migration. Migration is not monotonic after violence shocks, implying changes in migration timing that have neutral impacts over sixteen quarters. Critically, children and unaccompanied children react the least rapidly to violence.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48418,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Development Economics","volume":"181 ","pages":"Article 103728"},"PeriodicalIF":4.6,"publicationDate":"2026-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146189300","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Lisa Cameron , Diana Contreras Suárez , Diahhadi Setyonaluri
{"title":"Leveraging women’s views to influence gendered attitudes to women working: Evidence from an online intervention in Indonesia","authors":"Lisa Cameron , Diana Contreras Suárez , Diahhadi Setyonaluri","doi":"10.1016/j.jdeveco.2026.103722","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jdeveco.2026.103722","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>How to influence gendered attitudes that limit women’s participation in employment is not well understood. We provide randomly selected participants in Indonesia with information on the extent of (i) wives’ support for women with children working; (ii) husbands’ support for sharing day-to-day childcare; and (iii) mothers’ and mothers-in-law’s support for working women. As a result, the probability of participants choosing an online career mentoring course for women over a shopping voucher of equal value increased by 26%. Results appear to be driven by the demonstration of women’s support for women working. Additional information on men’s support for husbands sharing childcare and support among mothers and mothers-in-law for women working has limited additional impact.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48418,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Development Economics","volume":"181 ","pages":"Article 103722"},"PeriodicalIF":4.6,"publicationDate":"2026-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146189303","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}