Journal of Development Economics 2023年第4期

Journal of Development Economics2023年第4期

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Irrigation and gender roles

灌溉与性别角色

Per G. Fredriksson, Satyendra Kumar Gupta

This paper proposes that ancestral irrigation is associated with lower levels of contemporary female labor force participation. We test and provide support for this novel hypothesis using an exogenous measure of irrigation and cross-country data, data from the World Values Survey, the Afrobarometer, and the Asian Barometer. To explore a possible mechanism and cultural persistence, we use the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample, the European Social Survey, and the American Community Survey. The gender-based division of labor in pre-modern agriculture appears to be a possible channel between irrigation and contemporary female labor force participation rates. Evidence from second-generation immigrants suggests cultural transmission across generations, especially via males.

本文提出，祖传灌溉与当代女性劳动力参与率较低有关。我们使用来自世界价值观调查、非洲晴雨表和亚洲晴雨表的外生测量数据，测试并支持这一新的假设。为了探索可能的机制和文化持久性，我们使用标准的跨文化样本、欧洲社会调查和美国社区调查。前现代农业中基于性别的劳动分工似乎是灌溉和当代女性劳动力参与率之间的一个可能渠道。来自第二代移民的证据表明，文化传播是跨代的，特别是通过男性。

Public governance versus corporate governance: Evidence from oil drilling in forests

公共治理与公司治理:来自森林石油钻探的证据

James Cust, Torfinn Harding, Hanna Krings, Alexis Rivera-Ballesteros

Petroleum companies look for oil and gas in some of the most remote and biodiverse forested areas on the planet. To study how local environmental footprints vary across countries and companies, we combine global company-level geo-coded data on oil drilling with high resolution data on forest loss. We find that oil wells drilled in countries with better public governance, measured by democracy scores, are associated with substantially lower forest loss in the period after drilling. In contrast, we do not find evidence of less forest clearance among companies with presumptively ‘better’ corporate governance practices, such as major international companies, publicly listed companies, or members of an industry association committed to high environmental standards. These results do not support a “pollution halo” effect, whereby companies might bring better environmental practices with them, exceeding domestic environmental standards.

石油公司在地球上一些最偏远、生物多样性最丰富的森林地区寻找石油和天然气。为了研究不同国家和公司对当地环境的影响如何不同，我们将全球公司层面的石油钻探地理编码数据与森林损失的高分辨率数据结合起来。我们发现，在以民主得分衡量的公共治理较好的国家，钻井后的一段时间内森林损失明显较低。相比之下，我们没有在那些假定公司治理实践“较好”的公司中发现森林砍伐较少的证据，比如大型国际公司、上市公司或致力于高环境标准的行业协会成员。这些结果不支持“污染光环”效应，即企业可能带来更好的环境实践，超过国内环境标准。

Assessors influence results: Evidence on enumerator effects and educational impact evaluations

评估者影响结果:枚举者效应和教育影响评估的证据

Daniel Rodriguez-Segura, Beth E. Schueler

A significant share of education research uses data collected by “enumerators.” It is well-documented that “enumerator effects”—or inconsistent practices among the people who administer measurement tools—can be a key source of error in survey data collection. However, it is less understood whether this is a problem for academic assessments. We leverage a remote phone-based mathematics assessment of primary school students and survey of their parents in Kenya. Enumerators, who were teachers in our partner's network, were randomized to students to study the presence of enumerator effects. We find that both the academic assessment and survey were prone to enumerator effects and use simulation to show that these effects were large enough to lead to spurious results at a troubling rate in impact evaluations. We therefore recommend assessment administrators randomize enumerators at the student level, orthogonal to categories being compared (e.g., treatment/control groups), and train enumerators to minimize bias.

很大一部分教育研究使用了由“枚举者”收集的数据。有充分的证据表明，“枚举者效应”(即管理测量工具的人员之间不一致的做法)可能是调查数据收集错误的一个关键来源。然而，对于学术评估来说，这是否是一个问题，人们还不太了解。我们利用远程电话对肯尼亚的小学生进行数学评估，并对他们的父母进行调查。在我们合作伙伴的网络中，枚举员是教师，他们被随机分配到学生中，以研究枚举员效应的存在。我们发现，学术评估和调查都容易产生枚举效应，并使用模拟来表明这些效应足以在影响评估中导致令人不安的虚假结果。因此，我们建议评估管理员在学生水平上随机筛选人员，与被比较的类别(例如，治疗/对照组)正交，并培训筛选人员以尽量减少偏见。

Circle of fortune: The long-term impact of Western customs institution in China

财富圈:西方海关制度对中国的长期影响

Gan Jin

This paper examines the long-run effect of the customs institution founded by the Chinese Maritime Customs (CMC), a foreign-run customs agency established in the mid-19th century in China. A historical natural experiment is exploited to identify a causal effect: in 1902, the CMC took over a number of Chinese Native Customs stations, for which it established clear procedural guidelines and improved transparency and efficiency, while the other Native Customs stations remained under Chinese authority. Using the historical criterion that determined which Native Customs stations were taken over – those located within a 25 km radius of a CMC customs station – as a source of exogenous variation in the quality of the local customs institution, I show that counties historically affected by the CMC institution are more developed today relative to nearby but unaffected areas. Moreover, today’s business and bureaucracy in the affected counties suffer less from corruption, suggesting that the long-run effect of institutions can be explained by the cultural norms it fostered in the local society.

Information, migration, and the value of clean air

信息、移民和清洁空气的价值

Xuwen Gao, Ran Song, Christopher Timmins

Using a variant of the Rosen-Roback model of inter-city migration that incorporates public access to air quality information, we demonstrate that information constraints create a wedge between revealed and true hedonic prices for pollution that depends upon individuals’ perception biases. We empirically test our theoretical predictions by leveraging the unexpected disclosure of PM2.5 data in China. We find that migration decisions become much more responsive to pollution and that the hedonic price of avoiding PM2.5 exposure nearly doubles – from 171 to 336 Chinese Yuan – in response to the information shock. Our results highlight the role of imperfect information in migration decisions and its impact on non-market valuation in countries where public access to information is restricted.

Competition and corruption: Highway corruption in West Africa

竞争与腐败:西非高速公路的腐败

Jeremy Foltz, Kangli Li

Petty corruption in the developing world impedes citizens from receiving public services and operating their businesses. In this paper, we show the importance of market structure in determining a corruption equilibrium. We do this in the context of highway merchandise transportation in West Africa, where checkpoint officials frequently stop truck drivers for petty bribes. We exploit a road system with two alternative corridors to develop a model which predicts that checkpoints in the two competing corridors follow a Bertrand game as they set price equal to the marginal cost. Moreover, when costs to pass through one corridor increase due to road construction, checkpoints in the other corridor raise prices and keep drivers waiting for longer. We estimate a difference-in-differences model to confirm that road construction did increase both bribes and enforced delays for stops in the unaffected corridor. This work demonstrates the importance of competition among corrupted officials to facilitate public services for drivers and suggests that the effectiveness of a local intervention can be offset by reallocating customers towards officials who are not affected by it.

Pumps, prosperity and household power: Experimental evidence on irrigation pumps and smallholder farmers in Kenya

水泵、繁荣与家庭力量:肯尼亚灌溉水泵与小农的实验证据

Julian Dyer, Jeremy Shapiro

Irrigation is a potentially effective technology to improve agricultural incomes in Sub-Saharan Africa, and hand powered irrigation pumps have received significant interest and investment as a solution appropriate to small-scale farmers in this context. This paper describes the results of an RCT impact evaluation of household irrigation pumps in Kenya, where we randomly allocated free pumps to the female head of household via public lotteries. After two years farmers are still making significant use of their pumps and allocating increased time to irrigated agriculture. We find that pumps increase net farm revenue by approximately 13% of the control mean, and pay for themselves within three years. In addition, we find that farmers with irrigation pumps spent less time on off-farm economic activity. Finally, we find that female decisionmaking power increased and domestic violence decreased among treatment households.

灌溉是撒哈拉以南非洲提高农业收入的潜在有效技术，作为适合小规模农民的解决方案，手动灌溉泵获得了巨大的兴趣和投资。本文描述了肯尼亚家庭灌溉水泵随机对照试验影响评估的结果，我们通过公开抽签的方式将免费水泵随机分配给家庭的女户主。两年后，农民仍在大量使用他们的水泵，并将更多的时间分配给灌溉农业。我们发现，抽水机使农业净收益增加了约13%的控制平均值，并在三年内收回成本。此外，我们发现，拥有灌溉水泵的农民花在非农经济活动上的时间更少。最后，我们发现在治疗家庭中，女性决策权增加而家庭暴力减少。

Curriculum and national identity: Evidence from the 1997 curriculum reform in Taiwan

课程与民族认同:以1997年台湾课程改革为例

Wei-Lin Chen, Ming-Jen Lin, Tzu-Ting Yang

This paper examines the causal effects of textbook content on individuals’ national identity, by exploiting a curriculum reform that introduced a new perspective on Taiwan’s history for students entering junior high school after September 1997. Using a repeated nationally representative survey and a regression discontinuity design, we show that students exposed to the new textbooks were more likely to hold exclusive Taiwanese identity rather than dual identity (i.e. Taiwanese and Chinese). The effect was greater for academic track students and those living in neighborhoods where fewer people identify as Taiwanese. In addition, our results suggest that the new curriculum had little impact on people’s political preferences related to Taiwan independence. Finally, we find that the probability of reporting as Taiwanese among old textbook readers converges with that of people reading new textbooks in the long run since the perspectives of old textbooks are in conflict with the recent social trends.

Trade policy uncertainty and new firm entry: Evidence from China

贸易政策不确定性与新企业进入:来自中国的证据

Chuantao Cui, Leona Shao-Zhi Li

This study offers novel evidence that reduced trade policy uncertainty (TPU) in the destination market promotes domestic entrepreneurial activities in a large developing economy. Exploiting China’s WTO accession as a quasi-natural experiment, we find that Chinese manufacturing industries with greater TPU reduction are associated with relative increases in the new firm entry rate. The TPU effect is more pronounced in industries with lower entry barriers or larger irreversible investments. In addition, TPU reduction fosters new entrants through both the exporting and non-exporting margins and contributes to strengthening regional agglomeration forces. Heterogeneity across regions with varying exporting costs and entry barriers is also identified, illustrating the important synchronization between external openness and internal reform for developing economies. Last, we show that reduction in TPU intensifies industry-level competition, induces better-quality entrants, and that new firm entry plays a non-negligible role in linking TPU reduction to improved economic performance.

本研究提供了新的证据，表明在大型发展中经济体中，目的地市场贸易政策不确定性(TPU)的降低会促进国内创业活动。利用中国加入WTO这一准自然实验，我们发现，TPU降低程度越高的中国制造业，新企业进入率相对越高。TPU效应在进入壁垒较低或不可逆投资较大的行业中更为明显。此外，降低TPU通过出口和非出口利润率促进新进入者，有助于增强区域集聚力量。研究还发现，在出口成本和进入壁垒不同的地区之间存在异质性，这说明了对外开放和内部改革对发展中经济体来说具有重要的同步作用。最后，我们发现，技术能力的降低加剧了行业层面的竞争，促进了更高质量的进入，而新企业进入在技术能力的降低与经济绩效的提高之间发挥着不可忽视的作用。

Sanitation and marriage markets in India: Evidence from the Total Sanitation Campaign

印度的卫生和婚姻市场:来自全面卫生运动的证据

Britta Augsburg, Juan P. Baquero, Sanghmitra Gautam, Paul Rodriguez-Lesmes

This paper measures the additional value of sanitation within the marriage arrangement. We use data from the Indian human development household survey (IHDS) to model the marital decisions of men and women in rural India and to estimate the marital surplus (the gains from being married). We use the model to demonstrate that the government’s Total Sanitation Campaign (TSC) increased marital surplus and changed marriage market outcomes for men and women. Decomposition reveals (i) that sanitation makes it more attractive to be in a marriage for both gender, and (ii) that TSC exposure led to a decrease in the wife’s surplus share, implying a redistribution of gains within the marriage.

The lesser shades of labor coercion: The impact of seigneurial tenure in nineteenth-century Quebec

劳工胁迫的阴影:19世纪魁北克领主任期的影响

Vincent Geloso, Vadim Kufenko, Alex P. Arsenault-Morin

Can mild forms of labor coercion generate welfare effects as large as more extreme forms? Do these effects persist over time? To answer both questions, we use Quebec’s system of seigneurial tenure (in effect until 1854) that granted landlords market power in the establishment of factories, and restricted worker mobility. This created a mild form of labor coercion as landlords had incentives to reduce employment and wage rates. To measure these effects, we rely on the Constitutional Act of 1791 which stated that all new lands had to be settled under a different tenure system. Using a regression discontinuity design, we find that seigneurial tenure significantly depressed wages. The effect on wages is as large, or larger than, causal estimates of significantly more coercive labor regimes. We also find that by 1871, seventeen years after the institution’s abolition, these effects had fully dissipated, suggesting that persistence is not an issue.

Uptake, use, and impact of Islamic savings: Evidence from a field experiment in Pakistan

伊斯兰储蓄的吸收、使用和影响:来自巴基斯坦实地实验的证据

Syedah Ahmad, Robert Lensink, Annika Mueller

We implement a randomized field experiment in Pakistan to evaluate three interventions designed to encourage poor Muslim women to open and use Islamic savings accounts. First, an intervention that increases religious salience by using a religious speech that highlights the purposes, benefits, and desirability of savings and dispels the misconception that all formal saving is impermissible in Islam, mainly by quoting directly from the Quran; in contrast to a conventional speech conveying the same information without quoting from the Quran. Second, a subsidy that covers the account opening fee; compared to no subsidy. Third, assistance with completing the account opening form; compared to no such assistance. We find that the subsidy and assistance encourage greater uptake, and that adding religious salience induced by the religious speech to these efforts prompts even greater uptake — far greater, in fact, than the combination of the conventional speech with subsidy or assistance. The most effective intervention, comprising a religious speech in combination with a subsidy and assistance, increases uptake by approximately 60 percentage points, compared to an approximate increase of 5 percentage points for either subsidy or assistance in combination with the conventional speech. On its own, however, the religious speech does not significantly enhance uptake compared to the conventional speech, indicating that financial as well as educational/administrative constraints, and high cognitive load, present insurmountable barriers to uptake in our context. Therefore, holistic strategies to increase savings account uptake, that recognize and engage with the religious context while at the same time addressing practical barriers, should be prioritized.

Impact of self- or social-regarding health messages: Experimental evidence based on antibiotics purchases

关于自我或社会的健康信息的影响:基于抗生素购买的实验证据

Daixin He, Fangwen Lu, Jianan Yang

We study two interventions in Beijing, China, that provide patients with information on antibiotic resistance via text message to discourage the overuse of antibiotics. The messages were sent once a month for five months. One intervention emphasizes the threat to the recipient's own health and is found to have negligible effects. The other intervention, which highlights the overall threat to society, reduces antibiotics purchases by 17% in dosage without discouraging healthcare visits and other medicine purchases. The results demonstrate that prosocial messaging can have the potential to address public health issues that require collective action.

我们在中国北京研究了两种干预措施，通过短信向患者提供抗生素耐药性信息，以阻止过度使用抗生素。这些信息每月发送一次，持续了五个月。一种干预强调对受援者自身健康的威胁，结果发现其影响微不足道。另一项干预措施强调了对社会的整体威胁，将抗生素的用量减少了17%，但没有阻碍医疗服务和其他药品的购买。结果表明，亲社会信息传递有可能解决需要集体行动的公共卫生问题。

Transparency, governance, and water and sanitation: Experimental evidence from schools in rural Bangladesh

透明度、治理、水和卫生设施:来自孟加拉国农村学校的实验证据

Umrbek Allakulov, Serena Cocciolo, Binayak Das, Md. Ahasan Habib, ... Anna Tompsett

Can transparency interventions improve WASH service provision? We use a randomized experiment to evaluate the impacts of a transparency intervention, a deliberative multi-stakeholder workshop initiated with a community scorecard exercise, in schools in rural Bangladesh. To measure impacts, we combine survey data, direct observations, and administrative data. The intervention leads to moderate but consistent improvements in knowledge of WASH standards and practices, and institutions for WASH service management, but does not improve school WASH service provision or change WASH facility use patterns. Drawing on rich descriptive data, we suggest several reasons why the intervention we evaluate did not improve WASH service outcomes and propose ways to improve the design of future interventions.

Motivating volunteer health workers in an African capital city

激励非洲首都的志愿卫生工作者

Mattia Fracchia, Teresa Molina-Millán, Pedro C. Vicente

Community Health Workers (CHWs) are central to health systems. Still, they are typically unpaid volunteers in Sub-Saharan Africa. This paper follows all the CHWs in the capital city of Guinea-Bissau, who are non-salaried, and tests the impact of non-financial incentives on health indicators. We analyze two randomized interventions for CHWs: (i) an honorific award aimed at raising their social status; (ii) a video treatment aimed at increasing their perceived task significance. While employing administrative and survey data, we find that the social status intervention, differently from the task significance one, causes clear improvements in household health, particularly for young children.

The macroeconomics of pandemics around the world: Lives versus livelihoods revisited

全球大流行病的宏观经济学:重新审视生命与生计

Ingvild Almås, Tessa Bold, Tillmann von Carnap, Selene Ghisolfi, Justin Sandefur

The COVID-19 pandemic led governments around the world to impose unprecedented restrictions on economic activity. Were these restrictions equally justified in poorer countries with fewer demographic risk factors and less ability to weather economic shocks? We develop and estimate a fully specified model of the macroeconomy with epidemiological dynamics, incorporating subsistence constraints in consumption and allowing preferences over “lives versus livelihoods” to vary with income. Poorer countries’ demography pushes them unambiguously toward laxer policies. But because both infected and susceptible agents near the subsistence constraint will remain economically active in the face of infection risk and even to some extent under government containment policies, optimal policy in poorer countries pushes in the opposite direction. Moreover, for reasonable income-elasticities of the value of a statistical life, the model can fully rationalize equally strict or stricter policies in poorer countries.

COVID-19大流行导致世界各国政府对经济活动实施了前所未有的限制。在人口风险因素较少、抵御经济冲击能力较弱的较贫穷国家，这些限制同样合理吗?我们开发和估计了一个具有流行病学动态的宏观经济的完全指定模型，将生存限制纳入消费，并允许对”生命与生计”的偏好随着收入的变化而变化。较贫穷国家的人口结构无疑会促使它们采取更宽松的政策。但是，由于在面临感染风险时，甚至在某种程度上在政府的遏制政策下，接近生存限制的受感染和易感病原体在经济上都将保持活跃，较贫穷国家的最优政策将朝着相反的方向推动。此外，由于统计生命价值的合理收入弹性，该模型可以充分合理化较贫穷国家同样严格或更严格的政策。

Tradition and mortality: Evidence from twin infanticide in Africa

传统与死亡率:非洲双胎杀婴的证据

James Fenske, Shizhuo Wang

Traditions can limit investment in early life health, even if they have been abandoned. We introduce data on historic twin infanticide and merge it with recent birth records from 23 African countries. We use the full sample and a border sample of adjacent societies with and without past twin infanticide. Both samples provide no evidence that past twin infanticide predicts greater differential twin mortality today. This null result is likely a consequence of suppression efforts by Africans, missionaries, and colonial governments. Where these channels were weak, we find evidence of greater twin mortality today.

传统可能会限制对生命早期健康的投资，即使它们已经被抛弃。我们引入了历史上杀害双胞胎婴儿的数据，并将其与23个非洲国家最近的出生记录合并。我们使用了全样本和相邻社会的边界样本，这些社会过去有或没有杀害双胞胎婴儿的行为。两个样本都没有提供任何证据表明，过去的杀婴行为预示着今天双胞胎差异死亡率更高。这种无效的结果很可能是非洲人、传教士和殖民政府镇压的结果。在这些渠道薄弱的地方，我们发现了今天双胞胎死亡率更高的证据。

Evolution of risk aversion over five years after a major natural disaster

重大自然灾害后五年的风险规避演变

Nicholas Ingwersen, Elizabeth Frankenberg, Duncan Thomas

The impact of exposure to a major unanticipated natural disaster on the evolution of survivors’ attitudes toward risk is examined, exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in exposure to the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami in combination with rich population-representative longitudinal survey data spanning the five years after the tsunami. Respondents chose among pairs of hypothetical income streams. Those directly exposed to the tsunami made choices consistent with greater willingness to take on risk relative to those not directly exposed to the tsunami. These differences are short-lived: starting a year later, there is no evidence of differences in willingness to take on risk between the two groups. These conclusions hold for tsunami-related exposures measured at the individual and community level. Apparently, tsunami survivors were inclined to assume greater financial risk in the short-term while rebuilding their lives after the disaster.

The women-empowering effect of higher education

高等教育赋予女性权力的效果

Ahmed Elsayed, Alina Shirshikova

We examine the effects of the large-scale construction of public universities in Egypt during the 1960s and 1970s. We found that opening a local university increased the likelihood of obtaining higher education degrees and had long-lasting positive effects on labor market and marriage outcomes, particularly for women. We give insights on internal migration as a channel and show that migration prior to university enrollment age decreased while migration after that age increased as an outcome of university construction. Local universities reduced men’s migration for study and women’s migration for early marriage. The paper highlights the importance of increasing access to higher education for positive social and labor outcomes, particularly for women.

我们考察了20世纪60年代和70年代埃及公立大学大规模建设的影响。我们发现，在当地开设大学增加了获得高等教育学位的可能性，并对劳动力市场和婚姻结果产生了长期的积极影响，特别是对女性来说。我们研究了内部迁移作为一种渠道，并表明大学入学年龄之前的迁移减少，而入学年龄之后的迁移增加，这是大学建设的结果。地方大学减少了男性为学习而迁移和女性为早婚而迁移。该报告强调了增加接受高等教育的机会对积极的社会和劳动成果的重要性，特别是对妇女来说。

Financial market imperfections, informality and government spending multipliers

金融市场不完善、非正规性和政府支出乘数

Alok Kumar

Developing countries are characterized by underdeveloped financial markets and a large share of informal sector in economic activity. Evidence suggests that countries with less developed financial sector have lower government spending multipliers. This paper quantifies government spending multipliers in India using an estimated new-Keynesian DSGE model with two types of entrepreneurs: formal and informal and imperfect financial market. In the model, informal entrepreneurs are financially-excluded and the banking sector is monopolistically competitive featuring collateral constraint and sticky interest rates. Results show that the government consumption multiplier is significantly less than one at all horizons. The government investment multiplier is also significantly less than one at shorter horizons, but becomes approximately one at longer horizons.

发展中国家的特点是金融市场不发达，非正规部门在经济活动中占很大份额。有证据表明，金融部门欠发达的国家政府支出乘数更低。本文利用估计的新凯恩斯主义DSGE模型对印度的政府支出乘数进行了量化，该模型包含正式、非正式和不完全金融市场两种类型的企业家。在模型中，非正规企业家被金融排斥，银行部门具有担保约束和粘性利率的垄断竞争。结果表明，政府消费乘数在所有层面均显著小于1。政府投资乘数在短期内也显著小于1，但在长期内约为1。

The nutritional cost of beef bans in India

印度牛肉禁令的营养成本

Aparajita Dasgupta, Farhan Majid, Wafa Hakim Orman

We study the impact of beef sale and possession bans in India on women's anemia by leveraging a natural experiment arising from the state-level rollout of beef bans. We hypothesize that these bans differentially affect groups that traditionally eat beef - Muslims, Christians, and Scheduled-Caste Hindus. We compile rich data on beef-ban legislation by states over time and harmonize them with household and individual level data on biomarkers and consumption. Estimating a triple difference-in-differences model, we find that bans reduce women's hemoglobin levels in beef-eating communities by 1.2g/L and increase severe anemia by 27 percent of the mean level.

我们研究了印度牛肉销售和拥有禁令对妇女贫血的影响，利用了国家一级推出牛肉禁令所产生的自然实验。我们假设这些禁令对传统上吃牛肉的群体有不同的影响——穆斯林、基督徒和固定种姓的印度教徒。我们汇编了各州在一段时间内对牛肉禁令立法的丰富数据，并将其与家庭和个人层面的生物标志物和消费数据协调起来。通过对三差对差模型的估计，我们发现，在吃牛肉的社区，禁令使女性的血红蛋白水平降低了1.2克/升，严重贫血增加了平均水平的27%。

Endogenous labor migration and remittances: Macroeconomic and welfare consequences

内生劳动力迁移与侨汇:宏观经济与福利后果

Sokchea Lim, A.K.M. Mahbub Morshed, Stephen J. Turnovsky

This paper develops a macrodynamic model of two small economies – a host country and a labor-exporting developing country – to address the impact of migrant workers and remittances on the two economies. It endogenizes the migration decision as part of the intertemporal utility maximization of households in the developing economy. This setup captures the dynamic process of migration, in which evolving circumstances may lead to fundamental differences from those based on treating remittances as exogenous. Extensive numerical simulations consider two diverse sources of structural change that impinge directly on the migration-remittance relationship. In both cases the long-run impact on the remittance-GDP ratio differs markedly from the immediate response, primarily as a consequence of the impact on the evolving migration during the transition. The welfare consequences of the different constituents – domestic residents, migrant workers, and host economy native workers – are considered. Alternative tax policies to offset effects, deemed adverse, are also discussed.

本文建立了两个小型经济体(东道国和劳动力输出的发展中国家)的宏观动态模型，以解决移民工人和汇款对两个经济体的影响。它将迁移决策内化为发展中经济体家庭跨期效用最大化的一部分。这种设置捕捉了移民的动态过程，在这个过程中，不断变化的环境可能会导致与那些将汇款视为外生汇款的人的根本区别。大量的数值模拟考虑了两个不同的结构变化来源，这些变化直接影响迁移-汇款关系。在这两种情况下，对汇款- gdp比率的长期影响与直接反应有显著差异，主要是由于在转型过程中对不断变化的移民的影响。考虑了不同组成部分-国内居民、移徙工人和东道国经济本国工人-的福利后果。还讨论了抵消负面影响的替代税收政策。

The fruits (and vegetables) of crime: Protection from theft and agricultural development

犯罪的水果(和蔬菜):防止盗窃和农业发展

Julian Dyer

Fear of crime is a concern in developing countries where rule of law is imperfectly enforced. I use a cluster-randomized field experiment in Kenya to show that reducing fear of theft allows small-scale farmers to adjust their planting and time use decisions, as well as increasing crop yields. I randomly allocated subsidized watchmen to farmers in Kenya, reducing their perceived risk of theft. Farmers offered watchmen were 14 p.p. more likely to have crops they grew for the first time or grew on more land as a result of improved security, sold more crops off-farm, and their farm output per acre was larger by 15% of the control mean. The intervention had positive security spillovers, and led to fewer angry disputes among neighbours. Despite these benefits, this intervention is not profitable for an individual farmer, suggesting a potential role for collective security interventions.

在法治执行不完善的发展中国家，对犯罪的恐惧是一个问题。我在肯尼亚进行了一项随机聚类试验，结果表明，减少对盗窃的恐惧可以让小规模农民调整他们的种植和时间使用决策，同时提高作物产量。我给肯尼亚的农民随机分配了补贴的守望者，减少了他们认为的盗窃风险。提供守望者的农民有14个百分点，他们更有可能第一次种植庄稼，或由于安全改善而在更多的土地上种植庄稼，出售更多的作物，他们每英亩的农场产量比控制平均值高出15%。这种干预具有积极的安全溢出效应，并减少了邻国之间的愤怒争端。尽管有这些好处，但这种干预对个体农民来说是无利可图的，这表明集体安全干预可能发挥作用。

Multi-product firms and misallocation

多产品公司和错配

Wenya Wang, Ei Yang

This paper studies how distortions alter firms’ product decisions. Using two firm-level datasets in China, we find (i) that multi-product (MP) firms are fewer and smaller in China than in the United States and (ii) that the MP probability of a firm is negatively associated with the level of distortion. We build discrete product choices into a heterogeneous firm model à la Melitz (2003) with entry and exit. Firms are subject to a size-dependent distortion that increases in firm-level productivities and product-level tastes. Calibrated to firm-level data moments in the United States and China, the model generates a welfare loss of 30% compared to the distortion-free economy. 24% of the overall loss is from the distorted product margin, while most of the rest is from the static misallocation as in Hsieh and Klenow (2009).

本文研究了市场扭曲对企业产品决策的影响。我们将离散的产品选择构建为一个具有进入和退出的异质性企业模型à la Melitz(2003)。企业受到一种依赖于规模的扭曲，这种扭曲增加了企业层面的生产率和产品层面的品味。该模型根据美国和中国的公司级数据时刻校准，与没有扭曲的经济相比，产生了30%的福利损失。24%的总损失来自扭曲的产品利润率，其余大部分来自静态的错配，如Hsieh and Klenow(2009)。

Which price is right? A comparison of three standard approaches to measuring prices

哪个价格是正确的?衡量价格的三种标准方法的比较

Anne Fitzpatrick

Prices are fundamental to economists, but there is little guidance on how to collect accurate data on prices in developing countries. I compare antimalarial drug prices collected using three different approaches at outlets in Uganda: vendor inventory listings, prices reported by real customers, and standardized patient (“mystery shopper”, or SP) purchases. I find that prices collected from SPs and real customers are the same after accounting for the composition of drugs purchased, but prices reported by vendors are $0.29-$0.34 (17 percent) lower than the other two approaches. Price disagreement is correlated with vendors reporting fewer drugs on the inventory. The analysis suggests vendors adjust list prices based upon transaction-specific characteristics, but much price disagreement is unexplained. I conclude SP purchases are a preferred approach to price measurement: they accurately capture mean prices paid by customers, and other important transaction characteristics.

对经济学家来说，价格是基础，但在如何收集发展中国家准确的价格数据方面，几乎没有指导意见。我比较了在乌干达门店使用三种不同方法收集的抗疟药物价格:供应商库存清单、真实客户报告的价格和标准化的患者(“神秘购物者”，或SP)购买。我发现，在考虑了所购药物的成分后，SPs和真实客户的价格是相同的，但供应商报告的价格比其他两种方法低0.29- 0.34美元(17%)。价格分歧与供应商在库存中报告的药物较少有关。分析表明，供应商根据特定交易的特征调整标价，但很多价格差异无法解释。我的结论是，SP购买是衡量价格的首选方法:它们准确地捕捉了客户支付的平均价格和其他重要的交易特征。

Countering misinformation on social media through educational interventions: Evidence from a randomized experiment in Pakistan

通过教育干预打击社交媒体上的错误信息:来自巴基斯坦随机实验的证据

Ayesha Ali, Ihsan Ayyub Qazi

Fake news is a growing problem in developing countries with potentially far-reaching consequences. This paper evaluates the effectiveness of two educational interventions to counter misinformation among low digital literacy populations in urban Pakistan using a randomized experiment. We find no evidence that video-based general educational messages about misinformation have any statistically significant impact on the ability to correctly identify news items as true or fake. However, when such messages are augmented with personalized feedback based on individuals’ past engagement with fake news, we find an improvement of 3.3 percentage points or 4.5 percent in correctly identifying news (true or fake) relative to the control group. Our results suggest that educational interventions can enable information discernment but their effectiveness depends on how well their features and delivery are customized for the population of interest.

Human capital investment under exit options: Evidence from a natural quasi-experiment

退出选择下的人力资本投资:来自自然准实验的证据

Satish Chand, Michael A. Clemens

Groups historically subject to discrimination, such as Jews, could exhibit high investment in education because discrimination spurred emigration—and emigration was facilitated by skill. If emigration is uncertain, the skill investment induced by discrimination could more-than-offset the mechanical reduction in skill stocks at the origin. That is, in theory, the exit option could raise skills at the origin net of departures. Tests of these theories are rare. We examine a natural quasi-experiment in the Republic of Fiji, where a sharp and unexpected rise in discriminatory policy by a dominant ethnic group caused both mass emigration and mass skill investment by the other major ethnic group. We find that the net effect on skills within Fiji was positive: the human capital of the discriminated group remaining in Fiji would have been lower if there had been no emigration option. We test a variety of alternative models for the net increase in skills and find that the emigration option was a necessary causal mechanism.

The effects of international scrutiny on manufacturing workers: Evidence from the Rana Plaza collapse in Bangladesh

国际监督对制造业工人的影响:孟加拉国拉纳广场(Rana Plaza)倒塌事件的证据

Laurent Bossavie, Yoonyoung Cho, Rachel Heath

After the tragic factory collapse of Rana Plaza in 2013, both the direct reforms and indirect responses of retailers have plausibly affected workers in the Ready Made Garment (RMG) sector in Bangladesh. These responses included a minimum wage increase, high profile but voluntary audits, and an increased reluctance to subcontract to smaller factories. This paper estimates the net impact of these responses using six rounds of the Labor Force Survey and a triple difference approach that compares garment workers to non-garment workers, in districts containing the vast majority of export garment factories versus other districts, pre versus post Rana Plaza. As intended by the reforms, we find that increased international scrutiny improved working conditions by 0.80 standard deviations. In contrast with what the theory of compensating differentials would suggest, we do not find that workers’ wages were negatively impacted: instead, the post-Rana Plaza responses increased wages by about 10%.

在2013年拉纳广场(Rana Plaza)工厂倒闭的悲剧发生后，零售商的直接改革和间接反应似乎都影响了孟加拉国成衣行业的工人。这些回应包括提高最低工资，高调但自愿的审计，以及越来越不愿分包给较小的工厂。本文使用六轮劳动力调查和三差法(将拥有绝大多数出口制衣工厂的地区与其他地区、拉纳广场前与拉纳广场后的地区的制衣工人与非制衣工人进行比较)来估计这些回答的净影响。正如改革所预期的那样，我们发现，加强国际监督使工作条件改善了0.80个标准差。与补偿差异理论所表明的相反，我们没有发现工人的工资受到负面影响:相反，拉纳广场事件后的反应使工资增加了约10%。