{"title":"Forced migration and local economic development: Evidence from postwar Hungary","authors":"Daniel Borbely , Ross Mckenzie","doi":"10.1016/j.jdeveco.2024.103355","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jdeveco.2024.103355","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>We investigate the effects of forced migration on sending economies using the post-WW2 expulsion of German minorities from Hungary as a natural experiment. We combine historical and contemporary data sources to show that the forced migrations led to lasting reductions in economic activity. Plausible mechanisms driving this result appear to be sectoral change (shift towards agriculture) and skills differences between Germans and the settlers that replaced them. Our analysis reveals that forced migration can cause lasting regional inequalities in sending economies.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":48418,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Development Economics","volume":"171 ","pages":"Article 103355"},"PeriodicalIF":5.1,"publicationDate":"2024-08-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304387824001044/pdfft?md5=e7d17100c79c3788e45e0a2b3ec26260&pid=1-s2.0-S0304387824001044-main.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142049951","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":"The enduring trauma: How officials' childhood famine experiences affect year-end spending surge","authors":"Xing Chen , Peng Zhang , Ping Zhang , Andong Zhuge","doi":"10.1016/j.jdeveco.2024.103356","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jdeveco.2024.103356","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>This study investigates the impact of government officials’ childhood famine experiences on year-end spending surges (YESS), a phenomenon where organizations rush to spend unspent funds at fiscal year-end. We propose that early-life famine trauma fosters fiscal conservatism, leading to underutilized budgets, but the “use it or lose it” rule forces spending by the fiscal deadline. Analyzing data from Chinese cities (2008–2018), we find that officials who experienced famine in childhood significantly increased YESS, reducing fiscal efficiency and hindering local economic development. The effect is most pronounced among those who experienced famine in early childhood and is amplified in financially autonomous cities governed by officials with extensive local networks. Additionally, the observed correlation between mild depression and famine trauma suggests psychological mechanisms underlying the persistent effects of early trauma on fiscal behavior.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":48418,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Development Economics","volume":"171 ","pages":"Article 103356"},"PeriodicalIF":5.1,"publicationDate":"2024-08-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142087041","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":"Trade liberalization, labor market power, and misallocation across firms: Evidence from China's WTO accession","authors":"Enze Xie , Mingzhi Xu , Miaojie Yu","doi":"10.1016/j.jdeveco.2024.103353","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jdeveco.2024.103353","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>This paper studies the impact of trade liberalization on the heterogeneity of labor market power among manufacturing firms, which is a potential source of misallocation. The model shows that heterogeneity of labor market power distorts the allocation of the factors of production, and the variance in the natural log of the markdown serves as a sufficient statistic to infer its negative impact on overall production efficiency. Using China's accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) as a natural experiment, the empirical results suggest that lower input tariffs decrease the variance in the natural log of the markdown, which reflects the improvement in misallocation. In contrast, reductions in output tariffs have no significant effects.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":48418,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Development Economics","volume":"171 ","pages":"Article 103353"},"PeriodicalIF":5.1,"publicationDate":"2024-08-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142049976","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":"Social ties at work and effort choice: Experimental evidence from Tanzania","authors":"Martin J. Chegere , Paolo Falco , Andreas Menzel","doi":"10.1016/j.jdeveco.2024.103354","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jdeveco.2024.103354","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Many firms hire workers via social networks. Whether workers who are socially connected to their employers exert more effort on the job is an unsettled debate. We address this question through a novel experiment with small-business owners in Tanzania. Participants are paired with a worker who conducts a real-effort task, and receive a payoff that depends on the worker’s effort. Some business owners are randomly paired with workers they know, while others are paired with strangers. We find that being connected to one’s employer does not affect workers’ effort on average, but increases the effort of workers without children. Our results are consistent with workers having an altruistic drive in exerting effort when they work for someone they know, which fades away when their valuation of private income becomes stronger.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":48418,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Development Economics","volume":"171 ","pages":"Article 103354"},"PeriodicalIF":5.1,"publicationDate":"2024-08-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304387824001032/pdfft?md5=41136c935ee9f00f8947e32d2eb2a5f7&pid=1-s2.0-S0304387824001032-main.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142087605","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}
Roy van der Weide , Brian Blankespoor , Chris Elbers , Peter Lanjouw
{"title":"How accurate is a poverty map based on remote sensing data? An application to Malawi","authors":"Roy van der Weide , Brian Blankespoor , Chris Elbers , Peter Lanjouw","doi":"10.1016/j.jdeveco.2024.103352","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jdeveco.2024.103352","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>This paper assesses the reliability of poverty maps derived from off-the-shelf remote-sensing data. Employing data for Malawi, it first obtains small area estimates of poverty by combining household expenditure survey data with population census data. It then ignores the population census and obtains a second poverty map by combining the survey with predictors of poverty derived from remote sensing data. The two approaches reveal the same patterns in the geography of poverty. However, there are instances where the two approaches obtain markedly different estimates of poverty. Poverty maps obtained using remote sensing data may do well when the decision maker is interested in comparisons of poverty between assemblies of areas yet may be less reliable when the focus is on estimates for specific small areas.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":48418,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Development Economics","volume":"171 ","pages":"Article 103352"},"PeriodicalIF":5.1,"publicationDate":"2024-08-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142097399","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}
Sanghamitra Warrier Mukherjee , Lauren Falcao Bergquist , Marshall Burke , Edward Miguel
{"title":"Unlocking the benefits of credit through saving","authors":"Sanghamitra Warrier Mukherjee , Lauren Falcao Bergquist , Marshall Burke , Edward Miguel","doi":"10.1016/j.jdeveco.2024.103346","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jdeveco.2024.103346","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Access to microcredit has been shown to generate only modest average benefits for recipient households. We study whether other financial market frictions – in particular, lack of access to a safe place to save – might limit credit’s benefits. Working with Kenyan farmers, we cross-randomize access to a simple savings product with a harvest-time loan. Among loan offer recipients, the additional offer of a savings lockbox increased farm investment by 11% and household consumption by 7%. Results suggest that financial market frictions can interact in important ways and that multifaceted financial access programs might unlock dynamic household gains.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":48418,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Development Economics","volume":"171 ","pages":"Article 103346"},"PeriodicalIF":5.1,"publicationDate":"2024-08-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142020427","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":"A Farewell to Arms: Paramilitaries Demobilization, Political Competition and Public Goods in Colombia","authors":"Felipe Coy","doi":"10.1016/j.jdeveco.2024.103350","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jdeveco.2024.103350","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Scholars have highlighted how local elites can use their <em>de facto</em> power to capture democracy. This makes electoral competition particularly vulnerable in armed conflicts driven by politics. Would a reduction in politically motivated violence perpetrated by local elites promote electoral competition? To investigate this, I employ a synthetic difference-in-differences strategy within the setting of Colombia’s demobilization of paramilitaries, who were heavily connected with local elites across the country. Following demobilization, I observe an increase in competition. I show that this improvement in competition is consistent with a decrease in repressive violence, leading to an increased likelihood of electoral candidacy for parties that would have potentially been victims of violence in the absence of demobilization. However, I also find that parties associated with elites increased their electoral presence, showing an effort to compensate for the loss produced by demobilization. Finally, I present evidence that public goods investment in territories previously controlled by paramilitaries undergoes a transformation, now benefiting a broader sector of the population, which I argue is partly explained by the increased competition.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":48418,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Development Economics","volume":"171 ","pages":"Article 103350"},"PeriodicalIF":5.1,"publicationDate":"2024-08-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141935449","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}
Nils Bohr , Tim Deisemann , Douglas Gollin , Frédéric Kosmowski , Travis J. Lybbert
{"title":"The seeds of misallocation: Fertilizer use and maize varietal misidentification in Ethiopia","authors":"Nils Bohr , Tim Deisemann , Douglas Gollin , Frédéric Kosmowski , Travis J. Lybbert","doi":"10.1016/j.jdeveco.2024.103349","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jdeveco.2024.103349","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Optimal input allocation in agriculture leverages production complementarities. For example, improved seeds are generally more responsive to fertilizer than traditional seeds. Thus, inaccurate beliefs about whether seeds are improved may result in sub-optimal fertilizer application. We document precisely this pattern using data from Ethiopia that allows us to compare farmer beliefs about their maize seeds with genotyping data that identify the true genetics of these seeds. We find that 15 percent of farmers believe incorrectly that they are using improved varieties and use far more fertilizer than farmers who correctly believe that they sowed traditional varieties. Conversely, we find that about 15 percent of farmers believe incorrectly that they are growing traditional material and use far less fertilizer than those farmers who correctly believe that they are growing improved material. We extrapolate from our nationally representative sample to estimate the national-level magnitude of fertilizer misallocation due to incorrect seed beliefs.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":48418,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Development Economics","volume":"171 ","pages":"Article 103349"},"PeriodicalIF":5.1,"publicationDate":"2024-08-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304387824000981/pdfft?md5=a2be69cd14b469f37230ccf7e299f45b&pid=1-s2.0-S0304387824000981-main.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142040103","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":"Energy policies and pollution in two developing country cities: A quantitative model","authors":"Rainald Borck , Peter Mulder","doi":"10.1016/j.jdeveco.2024.103348","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jdeveco.2024.103348","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>We study the effect of energy and transport policies on pollution in two developing country cities. We use a quantitative equilibrium model with choice of housing, energy use, residential location, transport mode, and energy technology. Pollution comes from commuting and residential energy use. The model parameters are calibrated to replicate key variables for two developing country cities, Maputo, Mozambique, and Yogyakarta, Indonesia. In the counterfactual simulations, we study how various transport and energy policies affect equilibrium pollution. Policies may induce rebound effects from increasing residential energy use or switching to high emission modes or locations. In general, these rebound effects tend to be largest for subsidies to public transport or modern residential energy technology.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":48418,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Development Economics","volume":"171 ","pages":"Article 103348"},"PeriodicalIF":5.1,"publicationDate":"2024-08-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141962487","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}
Morgan Hardy , Seongyoon Kim , Jamie McCasland , Andreas Menzel , Marc Witte
{"title":"Allocating labor across small firms: Experimental evidence on information constraints","authors":"Morgan Hardy , Seongyoon Kim , Jamie McCasland , Andreas Menzel , Marc Witte","doi":"10.1016/j.jdeveco.2024.103345","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jdeveco.2024.103345","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>We document interest in labor reallocation among small firm owners in Ghana; 60% and 41%, respectively, self-report willingness to hire or work for the average local firm owner. Firm owners also exhibit high willingness-to-pay for information on a random subset of hiring firms and jobseeking firm owners during a Becker–Degroot–Marschak exercise. Conditionally random variation in access to this information generates immediate labor adjustments within and between firms, though rarely of firm owners themselves, and impacts firm closure 5-months post-intervention. Our findings suggest that labor market information of this kind is both valuable and actionable in our context.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":48418,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Development Economics","volume":"171 ","pages":"Article 103345"},"PeriodicalIF":5.1,"publicationDate":"2024-07-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142040483","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}