Working Papers

Adolescents in Sub-Saharan Africa have some of the highest rates of intimate partner violence across the globe. This paper evaluates the impact of a randomized controlled trial that offers females a goal setting activity to improve their sexual and reproductive health outcomes and offers their male partners a soccer intervention, which educates and inspires young men to make better sexual and reproductive health choices. Both interventions reduce female reports of intimate partner violence. Impacts are larger among females who were already sexually active at baseline. We develop a model to understand the mechanisms at play. The soccer intervention improves male attitudes around violence and risky sexual behaviors. Females in the goal setting arm take more control of their sexual and reproductive health by exiting violent relationships. Both of these mechanisms drive reductions in IPV.

Approximately 75% of children aged 2 to 4 worldwide are regularly subjected to violent discipline across the globe. We study the impact of a virtually-delivered intervention on positive parenting practices in Jamaica. We find the intervention improves caregiver knowledge (0.52 SD) and attitudes around violence (0.2 SD) and leads to meaningful changes in caregiver disciplining behaviors, with a 0.12 SD reduction in violence against children. Treatment children also experience fewer emotional problems (0.17 SD). When we return nine months later, we also find reductions in caregiver depression (0.12 SD), anxiety (0.16 SD), and parental stress (0.16 SD) for treatment caregivers. The virtual delivery has important scalable policy implications which could help decrease violence against children across the globe.

At the turn of the 20th century, most cities in America featured a patronage-based system of governance, but over the next few decades, patronage was replaced by civil service. Civil service restructured the relationship between elected officials and government employees, with employees benefiting from a variety of new protections.  Yet in studying this change, scholars have largely ignored the role local employees themselves might have played in the transformation.  We argue that city employees stood to benefit from civil service, and in places where they had agency and clout, they were important drivers of its adoption.  We collected a dataset for more than 1,000 municipal governments, determining whether and when they adopted civil service and whether their employees were organized in an occupational organization.  Our analysis of these new data shows the influence of city employees was an important contributor to the spread of civil service in American local government.

Bias among health care providers can lead to poor-quality care and poor health outcomes, and it can exacerbate disparities. We use a randomized controlled trial to evaluate an intervention to reduce family planning provider bias towards young women in 227 clinics in Tanzania, Burkina Faso, and Pakistan. The intervention educated providers about bias towards young women, facilitated communication about bias with other providers, and offered non-financial public awards to clinics with the least biased care. After 12 months, the intervention led to less-biased attitudes and beliefs among providers and more comprehensive counseling. Clients also perceived better treatment at intervention clinics compared to control clinics. Despite reductions in reported bias, we find mixed evidence regarding changes in method dispensing

Policies that improve early life human capital are a promising tool to alter disadvantaged children's lifelong trajectories. Yet, in many low-income countries, children and their parents face tradeoffs between schooling and productive work. If there are positive returns to human capital in child labor, then children who receive greater early life investments may attend less school. Exploiting early life rainfall shocks in India as a source of exogenous variation in early life investment, we show that increased early life investment reduces schooling in districts with high child labor. These effects persist and are intergenerational, affecting adult household consumption, and lead to a divergence in the next generations' educational outcomes. Our results are robust to instrumenting for child labor prevalence with crop-mix and to the inclusion of a rich set of district-level characteristics. We provide evidence that reductions in educational investment in response to positive early life shocks are total welfare-reducing.

This paper analyzes the effectiveness of a public agency’s managerial decision intended to promote biodiversity on the lands that it owns. The agency is the East Bay Municipal Utility District (EBMUD) that provides water to most of the eastern San Francisco Bay Area. In the 1940s, it planted non-native Monterey Pines on a 366 acre parcel by the San Pablo Reservoir referred to as the horse-logging area. Late in that century, it decided that the nonnative Monterey Pines were not consistent with its goal of promoting biodiversity on the lands that it stewards, and that these lands should be allowed to return gradually and naturally to their native oak woodland. By the turn of the century, many of the Monterey Pines were weak and dying. Starting in 2002, EBMUD allowed these lands to be regularly surveyed to assess the breeding bird population in them. This paper analyzes the survey data from 2002-2018 to consider how the bird population has changed and if the change is one that promotes biodiversity. The paper finds that biodiversity has increased significantly by multiple measures. The paper rejects two alternative hypotheses to explain the biodiversity increase: (1) that it could be part of a broader regional trend of avian biodiversity increase, and (2) that it could be an artifact of the survey methodology. EBMUD’s decision to allow these lands to return gradually to their native vegetation was effective; it has resulted in a significant increase in avian biodiversity. This increase includes the presence in 2010-2018 of important species that were not present in 2002-2009, including migratory species like the Olive-sided Flycatcher, Ash-throated Flycatcher, and Black-headed Grosbeak. More generally, the evidence in this study supports the idea that native vegetation promotes biodiversity.

We use novel, large-scale data on 43 million Americans from the 2000 Census and the 2001 to 2013 American Communities Survey linked to the Social Security Administration’s NUMIDENT to study how a policy-driven increase in economic resources for families affects children’s long-term outcomes. Using variation from the county-level roll-out of the Food Stamps program between 1961 and 1975, we find that children with access to greater economic resources before age five experience an increase of 6 percent of a standard deviation in their adult human capital, 3 percent of a standard deviation in their adult economic self-sufficiency, 8 percent of a standard deviation in the quality of their adult neighborhoods, 0.4 percentage-point increase in longevity, and a 0.5 percentage-point decrease in likelihood of being incarcerated. Based on these estimates, we conclude that Food Stamps’ transfer of resources to families is a highly cost-effective investment into young children, yielding a marginal value of public funds of approximately 56.