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- Ahlerup, Pelle, 1977, et al.
(författare)
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Social Capital vs Institutions in the Growth Process
- 2007
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Rapport (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Is social capital always important for economic growth? A number of recent micro studies suggest that interpersonal trust and social capital will have its greatest impact on economic performance when court institutions are relatively weak. The conventional wisdom from macro studies, however, is that social capital is unconditionally good for growth. On the basis of the micro evidence, we outline an investment game between a producer and a lender in an incomplete-contracts setting. A key insight is that social capital will have the greatest e¤ect on the total surplus from the game at lower levels of institutional strength and that the effect of social capital vanishes when institutions are very strong. When we bring this prediction to an empirical cross-country growth regression, it is shown that the marginal e¤ect of social capital (in the form of inter- personal trust) decreases with institutional strength. Our results imply that a one standard deviation rise in social capital in weakly institutionalized Nigeria should increase economic growth by 1.8 percentage points, whereas the same increase in social capital only increases growth by 0.3 percentage points in strongly institutionalized Canada.
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| 2. |
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| 3. |
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| 4. |
- Björkman Nyqvist, Martina, et al.
(författare)
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Reducing Child Mortality in the Last Mile : Experimental Evidence on Community Health Promoters in Uganda
- 2019
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Ingår i: American Economic Journal. - : American Economic Association. - 1945-7782 .- 1945-7790. ; 11:3, s. 155-192
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The delivery of basic health products and services remains abysmal in many parts of the world where child mortality is high. This paper shows the results from a large-scale randomized evaluation of a novel approach to health care delivery In randomly selected villages, a sales agent was locally recruited and incentivized to conduct home visits, educate households on essential health behaviors, provide medical advice and referrals, and sell preventive and curative health products. Results after 3 years show substantial health impact: under 5-years child mortality was reduced by 27 percent at an estimated average cost of $68 per life-year saved.
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| 5. |
- Björkman Nyqvist, Martina, et al.
(författare)
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Reducing Child Mortality in the Last Mile: A Randomized Social Entrepreneurship Intervention in Uganda
- 2017
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Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The delivery of basic health products and services remains abysmal in many parts of the world where child mortality is high. This paper shows the results from a largescale randomized evaluation of a novel “social entrepreneurship” approach to health care delivery. In randomly selected villages a sales agent was locally recruited and incentivized to conduct home visits, educate households on essential health behaviors, provide medical advice and referrals, and sell preventive and curative health products. Results after three years show substantial health impact: under-5 child mortality was reduced by 27% at an estimated cost of $71 per life-year saved.
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| 6. |
- Björkman Nyqvist, Martina, et al.
(författare)
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Replication data for: Reducing Child Mortality in the Last Mile: Experimental Evidence on Community Health Promoters in Uganda
- 2019
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Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The delivery of basic health products and services remains abysmal in many parts of the world where child mortality is high. This paper shows the results from a large-scale randomized evaluation of a novel approach to health care delivery. In randomly selected villages, a sales agent was locally recruited and incentivized to conduct home visits, educate households on essential health behaviors, provide medical advice and referrals, and sell preventive and curative health products. Results after 3 years show substantial health impact: under 5-years child mortality was reduced by 27 percent at an estimated average cost of $68 per life-year saved.
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| 7. |
- Bold, Tessa, et al.
(författare)
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LEMON TECHNOLOGIES AND ADOPTION : MEASUREMENT, THEORY, AND EVIDENCE FROM AGRICULTURAL MARKETS IN UGANDA
- 2017
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Ingår i: Quarterly Journal of Economics. - : Oxford University Press (OUP). - 0033-5533 .- 1531-4650. ; 132:3, s. 1055-1100
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- To reduce poverty and food insecurity in Africa requires raising productivity in agriculture. Systematic use of fertilizer and hybrid seed is a pathway to increased productivity, but adoption of these technologies remains low. We investigate whether the quality of agricultural inputs can help explain low take-up. Testing modern products purchased in local markets, we find that 30% of nutrient is missing in fertilizer, and hybrid maize seed is estimated to contain less than 50% authentic seeds. We document that such low quality results in low average returns. If authentic technologies replaced these low-quality products, however, average returns are high. To rationalize the findings, we calibrate a learning model using data from our agricultural trials. Because agricultural yields are noisy, farmers' ability to learn about quality is limited and this can help explain the low quality equilibrium we observe, but also why the market has not fully collapsed.
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| 8. |
- Bold, Tessa, et al.
(författare)
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Low quality, low returns, low adoption : evidence from the market for fertilizer and hybrid seed in Uganda
- 2015
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Rapport (populärvet., debatt m.m.)abstract
- To reduce poverty and food insecurity in Africa requires raising productivity in agriculture. Systematic use of fertilizer and hybrid seed is a pathway to increased productivity, but adoption of these technologies remains low. We investigate whether the quality of agricultural inputs can help explain low take-up. Testing modern products purchased in local markets, we find that 30% of nutrient is missing in fertilizer, and hybrid maize seed contains less than 50% authentic seeds. We document that such low quality results in negative average returns. If authentic technologies replaced these low-quality products, average returns for smallholder farmers would be over 50%.
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| 9. |
- Iwanowsky, Mathias, 1987-
(författare)
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Essays in Development and Political Economics
- 2018
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis consists of three self-contained essays in economics.Property Rights, Resources, and Wealth: Evidence from a land reform in the United States: This paper compares the effectiveness of two alternative property rights regimes to overcome the Tragedy of the Commons. One regime is to distribute access rights under public ownership, as proposed by Samuelson, the other is to sell land to generate private ownership as proposed by Coase. However, as property rights are not randomly allocated, causal evidence on the relative effectiveness of these two regimes is scarce. I exploit a spatial discontinuity generated by the 1934 Taylor Grazing Act, which created 20,000 miles of plausibly exogenous boundaries that separated publicly owned rangeland from open-access rangeland. I combine these boundaries with data on the timing of private-property sales to jointly estimate the effects of public and private ownership on resource exploitation and income in a spatial regression discontinuity design. Using satellite-based vegetation data, I find that both property rights regimes increased vegetation by about 10%, relative to the open-access control. Census-block-level income data reveals that public ownership raised private household income by 13% and decreased poverty rates by 18%. To study mechanisms, I exploit variation in pre-reform police presence and panel data on farm values, and show that legal enforcement through police presence is a necessary condition for the positive and long-lasting effects of both regimes to arise.State Repression, Exit, and Voice: Living in the Shadow of Cambodia’s Killing Fields: This paper asks whether state repression is an effective strategy for silencing dissent and changing political beliefs. We use evidence from history’s most severe episode of state-led repression, the genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, to estimate the effects of political violence on political behavior four decades later. To establish causality, we rely on the Khmer Rouge’s desire to create an agrarian society, moving forced labor to areas experiencing higher agricultural productivity. Using historic rainfall to generate exogenous variation in productivity shows that more people died in productive communes. Higher productivity under the Khmer Rouge leads to more votes in favor of the opposition over the authoritarian incumbent and increased support for democratic principles. At the same time, citizens become more cautious in their interactions with the local community as captured by lower participation in community organizations and less trust. Our results suggest that state repression makes people more convinced about the need for opposing views but more careful in expressing them, making politics less personal and more competitive.The Effects of Migration and Ethnicity on African Economic Development: Migration between countries has been shown to have positive effects on economic outcomes such as trade by fostering economic and cultural integration. In Africa, where ethnic identification is reasonably strong, omitting ethnic links between countries likely introduces a considerable bias in the estimates. Following the literature, I use past migrant clusters as instruments to show that migration in 1990 led to more bilateral exports for neighboring countries in the period 1989-2014. To account for the ethnic heterogeneity of African countries, I generalize this approach and use pre-colonial ethnic linkages between of home- and foreign-countries as an instrument for migration. The results suggest a downward bias when not accounting for ethnic heterogeneity. I discuss potential concerns of pre-colonial ethnic linkages and find no evidence of omitted variable biases caused by similar languages, preferences, or conflict. Ethnic connections instead facilitate trade, especially for groups that are excluded from government coalitions. The results are consistent with a model of international trade where cross border connections decrease the fixed costs of exporting.
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| 10. |
- Madestam, Andreas, et al.
(författare)
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Do Political Protests Matter? : Evidence from the Tea Party Movement
- 2013
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Ingår i: Quarterly Journal of Economics. - : Oxford University Press (OUP). - 0033-5533 .- 1531-4650. ; 128:4, s. 1633-1685
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Can protests cause political change, or are they merely symptoms of underlying shifts in policy preferences? We address this question by studying the Tea Party movement in the United States, which rose to prominence through coordinated rallies across the country on Tax Day, April 15, 2009. We exploit variation in rainfall on the day of these rallies as an exogenous source of variation in attendance. We show that good weather at this initial, coordinating event had significant consequences for the subsequent local strength of the movement, increased public support for Tea Party positions, and led to more Republican votes in the 2010 midterm elections. Policy making was also affected, as incumbents responded to large protests in their district by voting more conservatively in Congress. Our estimates suggest significant multiplier effects: an additional protester increased the number of Republican votes by a factor well above 1. Together our results show that protests can build political movements that ultimately affect policy making and that they do so by influencing political views rather than solely through the revelation of existing political preferences.
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