Noam Angrist , David K. Evans , Deon Filmer , Rachel Glennerster , Halsey Rogers , Shwetlena Sabarwal
{"title":"How to improve education outcomes most efficiently? A review of the evidence using a unified metric","authors":"Noam Angrist , David K. Evans , Deon Filmer , Rachel Glennerster , Halsey Rogers , Shwetlena Sabarwal","doi":"10.1016/j.jdeveco.2024.103382","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jdeveco.2024.103382","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Many low- and middle-income countries lag far behind high-income countries in educational access and student learning. Policymakers must make tough choices about which investments to make to improve education with limited resources. Although hundreds of education interventions have been rigorously evaluated, making comparisons between the results is challenging. This paper provides the most recent and comprehensive review of the literature on effective education programs, with a novel emphasis on cost-effectiveness. We analyze the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of interventions from over 200 impact evaluations across 52 countries. We use a unified measure — learning-adjusted years of schooling (LAYS) — that combines access and quality and compares gains to an absolute, cross-country standard. The results identify programs and policies that can be up to an order of magnitude more cost-effective than business-as-usual approaches. Examples of some of the most cost-effective approaches include targeting instruction to students’ learning level rather than grade as well as structured pedagogy approaches. These results can enable policymakers to improve education outcomes substantially more efficiently.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48418,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Development Economics","volume":"172 ","pages":"Article 103382"},"PeriodicalIF":5.1,"publicationDate":"2024-10-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142586027","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Damien Echevin , Guy Fotso , Yacine Bouroubi , Harold Coulombe , Qing Li
{"title":"Combining survey and census data for improved poverty prediction using semi-supervised deep learning","authors":"Damien Echevin , Guy Fotso , Yacine Bouroubi , Harold Coulombe , Qing Li","doi":"10.1016/j.jdeveco.2024.103385","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jdeveco.2024.103385","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper presents a methodology for predicting poverty using semi-supervised learning techniques, specifically pseudo-labeling, and deep learning algorithms. Standard poverty prediction models rely on limited household survey data, whereas our approach exploits large amounts of unlabeled census data to improve prediction accuracy. By applying pseudo-labeling, we improve key performance metrics across various African regions, where our models outperform conventional approaches to identifying poor individuals. Deep neural networks (DNNs) trained on pseudo-labeled data exhibited area under the curve (AUC) scores ranging from 0.8 to over 0.9, a notable improvement over previous machine learning survey-based methods. Furthermore, random undersampling was key to refining model performance, balancing higher coverage with some reduction in precision. These findings have significant implications for poverty targeting, enabling more accurate identification of poor individuals and supporting better resource allocation.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48418,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Development Economics","volume":"172 ","pages":"Article 103385"},"PeriodicalIF":5.1,"publicationDate":"2024-10-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142440901","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Does social capital positively influence loan performance even during a crisis?","authors":"Sumit Agarwal , Prasanna Tantri , Nitin Vishen","doi":"10.1016/j.jdeveco.2024.103384","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jdeveco.2024.103384","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Theoretically, it is unclear whether group loans outperform individual loans in terms of delinquency, especially during a crisis. It is difficult to test the hypothesis due to differences in the types of borrowers of the group and individual loans and likely differences in their behavior between crises and normal times. We overcome the challenge by comparing simultaneous group and individual loans of the same individual before and during the Covid-19 crisis in India. We find that the delinquency rate of group loans is significantly lower. Further tests suggestively indicate that the outperformance is due to the “peer pressure” channel.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48418,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Development Economics","volume":"172 ","pages":"Article 103384"},"PeriodicalIF":5.1,"publicationDate":"2024-10-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142593699","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}
Yumi Koh , Jing Li , Yifan Wu , Junjian Yi , Hanzhe Zhang
{"title":"Young women in cities: Urbanization and gender-biased migration","authors":"Yumi Koh , Jing Li , Yifan Wu , Junjian Yi , Hanzhe Zhang","doi":"10.1016/j.jdeveco.2024.103378","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jdeveco.2024.103378","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Young women outnumber young men in cities in many countries during periods of economic growth and urbanization. This gender imbalance among young urbanites is more pronounced in larger cities. We use the gradual rollout of Special Economic Zones across China as a quasi-experiment to establish the causal impact of urbanization on gender-differentiated incentives to migrate. We highlight the role of the marriage market in increasing rural women’s chance of marrying and marrying up in urban areas during rapid urbanization.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48418,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Development Economics","volume":"172 ","pages":"Article 103378"},"PeriodicalIF":5.1,"publicationDate":"2024-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142328091","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 persistence of trade relocation from civil conflict","authors":"Tobias Korn , Henry Stemmler","doi":"10.1016/j.jdeveco.2024.103376","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jdeveco.2024.103376","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper examines the lasting impact of civil conflicts on bilateral trade flows and the subsequent implications for economic recovery. Utilizing a novel estimation approach based on the structural gravity model of international trade, we demonstrate that importers shift their trade preferences away from exporters involved in civil conflicts. This effect persists even after the conflict has been resolved, as countries solidify their relocation decisions by reducing bilateral trade costs with alternative trading partners through Preferential Trade Agreements. Notably, the persistent trade relocation is more pronounced in the manufacturing sector, while it does not occur in the fuels sector. Our findings underscore the significance of supportive trade policies as effective tools for assisting nations in recovering from episodes of political violence. Furthermore, our estimation approach can be adapted to investigate the impacts of other unilateral shocks, such as natural disasters, or to analyze various bilateral dependent variables, including migration.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48418,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Development Economics","volume":"172 ","pages":"Article 103376"},"PeriodicalIF":5.1,"publicationDate":"2024-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142535236","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Robots as guardians: Industrial automation and workplace safety in China","authors":"Wei Luo , Lixin Tang , Yaxin Yang , Xianqiang Zou","doi":"10.1016/j.jdeveco.2024.103381","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jdeveco.2024.103381","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Industrial robots can improve workplace safety by performing hazardous tasks on behalf of workers. This paper examines the impact of industrial robots on workplace safety in China. We find that a one-standard-deviation increase in robot exposure reduces annual workplace accidents and fatalities by 0.100 and 0.0133 cases per thousand population, compared to sample averages of 0.122 accidents and 0.0351 fatalities. These findings are robust to an instrumental variable strategy and various robustness checks. Our analysis of injuries in household surveys and Baidu search activities reinforces these results. Using an accounting framework, we show that the safety improvement is not driven by the mechanical effects of robot-induced employment reduction. Instead, within-occupation improvement in workplace safety plays a more crucial role.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48418,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Development Economics","volume":"172 ","pages":"Article 103381"},"PeriodicalIF":5.1,"publicationDate":"2024-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142328300","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":"Poverty mapping in the age of machine learning","authors":"Paul Corral , Heath Henderson , Sandra Segovia","doi":"10.1016/j.jdeveco.2024.103377","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jdeveco.2024.103377","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Recent years have witnessed considerable methodological advances in poverty mapping, much of which has focused on the application of modern machine-learning approaches to remotely-sensed data. Poverty maps produced with these methods generally share a common validation procedure, which assesses model performance by comparing sub-national poverty estimates with survey-based, direct estimates. While unbiased, direct estimates can be imprecise measures of true poverty rates, meaning that it is unclear whether these validation procedures are informative of actual model performance. In this paper, we use a rich dataset from Mexico to provide a more rigorous assessment of the modern approach to poverty mapping by evaluating its performance against a credible ground truth. We find that the modern method under-performs relative to benchmark traditional methods, largely because of the limited predictive capacity of remotely-sensed covariates. For a given covariate set, we also find that machine learning produces more biased poverty estimates than the traditional procedures, particularly for the poorest geographic areas.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48418,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Development Economics","volume":"172 ","pages":"Article 103377"},"PeriodicalIF":5.1,"publicationDate":"2024-09-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142322089","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 quiet revolution: Send-down movement and female empowerment in China","authors":"Chong Liu , Wenyi Lu , Ye Yuan","doi":"10.1016/j.jdeveco.2024.103379","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jdeveco.2024.103379","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>What promotes female empowerment and gender equality? We investigate how internal population mobility and social interaction foster the advancement of female empowerment and gender equality across diverse subpopulations. Using the urban-to-rural youth resettlement program in China during the 1970s — the Send-down Movement — as our empirical context, we find that rural females with greater exposure to urban youths have achieved higher levels of education, increased labor force participation, greater financial independence, enhanced autonomy in marital and fertility decisions, increased political engagement, heightened self-confidence, reduced risk aversion, and a stronger belief in gender-equal ideologies and social values. Our findings underscore the role of population mobility in disseminating gender-equal ideologies and practices, both through human capital formation and social interactions, leading to lasting impacts on female empowerment in traditional societies.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48418,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Development Economics","volume":"172 ","pages":"Article 103379"},"PeriodicalIF":5.1,"publicationDate":"2024-09-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142319531","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 abolition of People’s Communes and fertility decline in rural China","authors":"Shuo Chen , Bin Xie","doi":"10.1016/j.jdeveco.2024.103375","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jdeveco.2024.103375","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This study investigates the impact of the abolition of People’s Communes in the early 1980s on rural fertility in China. Exploiting the staggered implementation of agricultural decollectivization, we show that decollectivization led to a significant decline in rural fertility, independent of the impact of family planning policies. Counties with higher levels of egalitarianism during the commune period experienced a sharper fertility decline following decollectivization, indicating that the elimination of egalitarian income distribution is the key mechanism behind this fertility decline. We find no evidence supporting the alternative hypothesis that the fertility decline was primarily due to increased opportunity costs of childbearing associated with higher agricultural productivity after decollectivization.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48418,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Development Economics","volume":"172 ","pages":"Article 103375"},"PeriodicalIF":5.1,"publicationDate":"2024-09-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142322088","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 transition to direct mayoral elections in clientelistic environments: Causal public spending and service delivery effects","authors":"Blane D. Lewis, Sarah Dong","doi":"10.1016/j.jdeveco.2024.103380","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jdeveco.2024.103380","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We examine the impact of the transition to direct mayoral elections on district spending and household public service access in Indonesia during a period of momentous national democratic reform. We leverage the arguably exogenous timing of direct local elections to specify a staggered difference-in-differences model, which we estimate using the latest methods to plausibly identify causal effects. We find that the transition to direct elections led to a consistent and large decline in capital spending in both pre- and post-election years. We also determine that the transition resulted in a moderate decrease in household service access in the post-election period. Pre-election capital spending impacts are a function of both general disruptions associated with the transition and emerging clientelism. Service access effects are completely explained by the relative extent of clientelism across districts. We conclude that the local democratic transition in Indonesia had a mostly negative impact on key spending and service outcomes, at least in the short-run and for those districts in which clientelistic practices were especially pronounced.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48418,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Development Economics","volume":"172 ","pages":"Article 103380"},"PeriodicalIF":5.1,"publicationDate":"2024-09-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142425861","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}