Journal of Development Economics最新文献

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) are frequently viewed as a tool for democratizing education and job training. However, their effectiveness is largely untested. We report on the first randomized evaluation of a job training program offering cost-free access to curated, short Coursera MOOCs and certificates. We find low course completion rates (10%), with males and wealthier individuals more likely to complete a course. Personalized reminders did not increase treatment take-up over a simple, standardized email reminder. Treatment has no significant effect on labour market outcomes roughly two years after the program. However, we find marginally significant evidence that treatment increases post-secondary education enrolment by 11%. Evidence on mechanisms suggests that this may be operating partially through the program motivating individuals who lacked sufficient skills to pursue further specialization.

This paper examines the impacts of vocational training for persons with disabilities (PWDs). In heavily mined areas of rural Cambodia, adults with limb amputation or paralysis were randomly assigned to either a treatment group (invited to participate in an intensive training program in mechanics and services) or a control group (not invited to participate). Over 30% of PWDs in the treatment group participated in the program and none in the control group did so. Although being assigned to the treatment group greatly increased PWDs’ employment and earnings, experiences of discrimination reported by them and their disability stigma (self-stigmatization) also increased. The paper shows suggestive evidence for skill acquisition and networking for employment and negative self-stereotyping leading to stigma.

This paper investigates gender gaps in the gig economy of a developing country. Using novel data from a major Chinese online healthcare platform, I show that female physicians charge 2.3% lower prices and provide 11.0% fewer consultations than males. Patients appear to discriminate against female physicians despite them having identical observable productive characteristics to those of male physicians. The differential responses of patients to quality signals from female physicians suggest that a portion of this discrimination is statistical in nature. I further find that the platform’s design, particularly its ranking algorithm, plays an important role in enlarging gender gaps. The ranking algorithm amplifies and perpetuates the gaps by using past patient behavior (and thus pre-existing discrimination) as a key predictor of future patient behavior, thereby placing fewer females at the top of search results. Additionally, I cast doubt on several other alternative explanations and conducted a series of robustness checks.

This paper investigates whether experiences of living in a communist regime relate to low market earnings. We recruit North Korean refugees and measure their implicit bias against South Korea by using the Implicit Association Test. Conducting double auction and bilateral bargaining market experiments, we find that North Korean refugees with a larger bias against South Korea have lower expectations about their earning potential, exhibit trading behavior with lower target profits, and earn less profits. These associations are robust to conditioning on correlates of preferences, human capital, and assimilation experiences.

We use a randomized experiment to evaluate the impact of providing richer information about prospective jobs to vocational trainees on their employment outcomes. The setting of the study is the vocational training program DDU-GKY in India. We find that including in the training two information sessions about placement opportunities make trainees 18% more likely to stay in the jobs in which they are placed. We provide suggestive evidence that the effect is driven by improved selection into training: as a result of the intervention, trainees that are over-optimistic about placement jobs are more likely to drop out before placement.

Using unique information on firm level domestic outsourcing of manufacturing jobs by Indian firms, we propose two channels and their interaction as determinants of the fragmentation of production: import competition and labor market regulation. We find that greater import competition from China is associated with a significant increase in domestic outsourcing of manufacturing jobs — a 10-percentage point increase in the import penetration ratio leads to a 11%–14% increase in the ratio of outsourcing expenses to the wage bill of a firm. This effect is driven by multi-product firms operating in states with pro-worker labor laws. We find a corresponding increase in the likelihood of sub-contracting among informal sector firms. Our results are consistent with a model where forward-looking firms outsource more in response to an increase in import competition, when there are future firing costs that can be avoided through such outsourcing. We thus are the first to highlight that labor market regulation and its interaction with international trade can determine the organization of production. Our findings have significant development implications that take the form of movement of manufacturing production towards the informal sector (and possible subsequent impoverishment of workers) as a consequence of a major trade shock.

We use data on price expectations from a survey of randomly sampled smallholder farmers in Mozambique. Across all crops, farmers report selling on average within three weeks of harvest, at lower prices than expected later in the season. Liquidity constrained farmers sell their harvest 50% faster than unconstrained farmers, but they increase their storage time in response to higher expected future prices. We address causality using an instrumental variables approach exploiting abnormal rainfall from cyclones Idai and Kenneth. We develop a model on market timing and its relation to price expectations and liquidity constraints.

This paper studies the unintended effect of English language requirement on educational inequality by investigating how the staggered rollout of English listening tests in China’s high-stakes National College Entrance Exam (NCEE) affected the rural–urban gap in college access. Leveraging administrative data covering the universe of NCEE participants between 1999 and 2003, we find that the introduction of English listening tests significantly lowered rural students’ exam score percentile ranks relative to their urban counterparts, resulting in a 30% increase in the rural–urban gap in college access. Our back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that, as a result of this policy change, more than 54,000 rural students lost college seats to their urban peers between 1999 and 2003, and another 11,000 rural students who elite colleges could have admitted ended up in non-elite colleges, causing them significant future income losses.

Providing agricultural advice at scale poses operational challenges. Technology may help if repeating content reinforces learning for recipients and thus improves adoption, but risks reducing efficacy given limited customization and human interaction. We tested videos shared with female farmers in India as a supplement to standard human-provided extension services promoting a climate-smart practice, System Rice Intensification. The average treatment effects are large but imprecise because of non-normally distributed outcomes, specifically fat right tails. Weighted quantile regressions show that the imprecision in estimating an average treatment effect comes from farmers with output or yields in the upper quantiles. Both quantile regressions of the 25% and 50% quantiles and a Bayesian hierarchical model (robust to several priors) reveal positive treatment effects, and two subtreatments, one that reinforces information on labor costs from adoption and a second that presents role models to motivate adoption, lead to even higher estimated treatment effects on output.

We use unique data on daily labor-market outcomes for Indian casual workers to study labor reallocation between agricultural and non-agricultural activities within rural areas. Controlling for both individual time-invariant attributes and time-varying shocks, we find that workers who switch sectors across years or even within a week can obtain 23% higher wages by taking non-agricultural jobs. We then estimate a discrete choice model of daily labor allocation that decomposes preferences for jobs into two types of disamenities: (i) those associated with job characteristics and (ii) those associated with location. We find that the first type of disamenity is 23% of wages for men and 38% for women, and the second type is 36% of wages for men and 31% for women.