Editor's Note: The Northeastern Universities Development Consortium (NEUDC) conference was hosted at MIT this weekend. Over two days you get to see an enormous amount of new development research by mostly younger researchers. I held back on faiV this past week, to bring you this special edition--featuring the five papers I found most interesting (of those that are shareable) and since there are far more papers presented than any one person can take in, I recruited Jessica Goldberg, a development economist at Maryland (responsible for interesting papers like this); she in turn recruited Emily Breza (responsible for interesting papers like this) of Columbia GSB and soon of Harvard to contribute; and Lee Crawfurd (also known as Roving Bandit in the glory days of the development blogosphere) of CGD and a PhD candidate at Sussex to weigh in with their own favorites.
Here's my list of the 5 most interesting papers from the weekend:
1. Mentors for Microenterprises in Kenya: Brooks, Donovan and Johnson assign high profit microentrepreneurs to mentor newer entrants. That's a particularly interesting way to potentially change the trajectories of microfirms. The mentored firms see a significant jump in profits driven by learning how to cut costs but don't maintain the gains once mentorship stops.
2. Grants and Plans for Senegalese Farmers: Ambler, de Brauw and Godlonton give $200 grants and develop a farm management plan for smallholders. The grants boost production (by more than $200), but the gains seem to fade out, though higher stock of assets remains. Farm management plans don't have a measurable impact. I find this interesting for many of the same reasons as #1: figuring out how to boost profits of small enterprises is near the top of my list of urgent program/policy questions.
3. Seasonal Migration in India: Imbert and Papp use NREGA and choices about short-term migration to better understand why the large gap in earnings between rural and urban migration doesn't lead to more seasonal migration. They estimate that more than half of the income gap is consumed with higher living costs in urban areas, with the rest due to non-economic costs--like being away from home and "hard-living", (e.g. sleeping on the street). There are some interesting policy applications for the design of rural public works/income programs and the development of migration finance and support programs.
4. Crop insurance contracts in Kenya: There's a general consensus that insurance is one of the most promising margins to help poor households, but we're a long way from figuring out to efficiently and effectively deliver an insurance product that people will take up. Casaburi and Willis study an insurance program in Kenya where farmers can delay the premium payment--noting that premia are usually due at the point where farmers are most liquidity constrained (they can delay payments because the crop is sugarcane farmed under contract so premia can be collected from harvest proceeds). They find a 67 percentage point boost in take-up, with take-up highest among poorest farmers.
5. Saving and Smoothing: One of the ways that financial services should help poor households the most is by boosting their ability to smooth consumption and to absorb shocks. But access alone isn't enough if other constraints prevent households from using the tools like savings and insurance effectively. Aker et al. look at savings nudges to help Senegalese households save and budget. They find that lockboxes and reminders don't influence spending (particularly spending on festivals) but do seem to help households plan ahead and therefore be less susceptible to other shocks. There is a lot of heterogeneity in results though.
Jessica Goldberg's, with an assist from Emily Breza, list of 5 most interesting papers:
1. Gambling and Saving in Uganda: Betting on sports events is common among urban Ugandan men and, for those who partake, a substantial expenditure. This paper by Sylvan Herskowitz uses variation in bet outcomes and lab-in-the-field experiments to build a case that betting is a rational strategy for asset management in an environment with low perceived returns to savings. It’s a novel topic — while we are learning a lot about savings, credit, and even mobile money, I haven’t read anything else about sports betting in developing countries. But neither the topic nor the approach are trivial, and taking seriously the model that would rationalize the bets is commendable.
2. Workfare and Welfare: This paper from Bhanot, Han, and Jang uses a lab-in-the-field experiment in Kenya to test various attributes of common cash transfer or public works programs, and therefore contributes to the design of such programs. While many evaluations of cash transfer or public works programs focus on outcomes like employment, income, or consumption, this paper also measures subjective wellbeing, which is improved by requiring participants to exert effort in exchange for payment. This adds an additional justification for work requirements rather than cash transfer schemes, which is important since public works can be more expensive to administer and do not always achieve self-targeting.
3. Seasonal Migration in India: [Ed. Note: same paper as above] There’s a lot written about NREGA, but it’s a massive program that not only shares features with workfare programs in many other countries, but also operates at a scale that lets us understand what might happen programs that were rationed were instead made available to more people or for longer durations. Clement and John already have one really important paper about the equilibrium effects of NREGA on private sector wages. Now, they show that NREGA reduces seasonal migration from rural areas to the cities.
4. Crop insurance contracts in Kenya: [Ed Note: same paper as above]: This paper is a nice insight into understanding the demand for insurance, even though the specific pricing structure may be hard to implement outside of a closed marketing chain. It’s also a contribution to the literature about how the timing of financial access affects outcomes.
5. Economics of Foot Binding: Fan and Wu look at the rise and fall of foot binding in China from an economic lens, particularly noting how the practice interacted with a gender-biased meritocracy and the physical demands of women's labor.
Lee Crawfurd's list of 5 most interesting papers:
1. Football and ethnicity in Africa: When their national football teams win, Chauvin and Durante find, Africans report weaker ethnic identity. [Ed. note: I'm sure Sepp Blatter is emailing this to the Nobel committee as I write]
2. Teaching at the right level in India: Second coolest paper--Muralidharan, Singh, and Ganimian find huge effect sizes from a computer system that gives kids tests, adapts to their level, and gives feedback.
3. Vote-buying in India: Green and Vasudevan are pretty modest about reducing vote-buying by 2 *million* votes with a radio campaign.
4. Aid, hospitals, schools and violence in Afghanistan: Child finds that US health projects reduced conflict, but education projects increased conflict.
5. Trader costs in Nigeria: Startz documents and explains trade costs for market traders in Lagos. We usually focus on how developing countries can export more, but there are also big welfare gains to be had from making importing easier so consumers get cheaper and better goods.
Andreyanov, Davidson and Korovkin find suspicious bidding patterns in Russian sealed-bid electronic procurement auctions, estimating that up to 10% are affected by corruption and up to 30% by collusion among bidders. According to Jessica Goldberg, their presentation has an even more striking chart showing winning bids occurring in the last minute. Source.
