Seminar Series – Fall 2024

A weekly seminar featuring guest speakers presenting cutting-edge research in development economics.

Please note that the series this semester will be in person. All seminars will take place from 1:00-2:15 on Thursdays in ICC 550.

Sule Alan, Cornell University

September 12, 2024

Managing Adolescent Behavior in the Classroom to Improve Learning

We evaluate a classroom management program designed to foster a positive learning environment in disadvantaged middle schools. The program encourages teachers to shift the responsibility of establishing positive behavioral standards and eliminating disruptive behavior to students. Covering over 7,500 students from 127 middle schools in Bangladesh, we find that the program significantly improves classroom social climate, measured as enhanced cooperation, positive behavioral norms, a higher sense of belonging, and strengthened social support ties. We show that high-ability students are the primary beneficiaries of this improved social climate. This subgroup exhibits a significant improvement in academic performance, achieving higher scores than their untreated counterparts in math and language tests. Our study highlights the vital role of effective classroom behavior management in achieving high academic performance.

Muhammad Meki, University of Oxford

September 19, 2024

Microfinance and Mutuality: Experimental Evidence on Credit with Performance-Contingent Repayment (with Francesco Cordaro, Marcel Fafchamps, Colin Mayer, Simon Quinn, and Kate Roll)

A large food multinational wishes to help micro-distributors in its supply chain with the financing of a productive asset. Collaborating with the firm in Kenya, we conduct a field experiment to compare asset financing under a traditional debt contract to three alternatives that provide a greater sharing of risk and reward. We find the largest impacts from a novel hybrid contract that combines both debt- and equity-like features. The results suggest substantial mutual benefits for the multinational, its micro-distributors, and stock-points within its supply chain. These findings demonstrate the economic appeal of financing contracts that harness the improved observability of performance data in many low- and middle-income settings.

Guo Xu, University of California, Berkeley

September 26, 2024

Farzana Afridi, Indian Statistical Institute (Delhi), Visiting Professor at the Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto

October 3, 2024

Social Networks, Gender Norms and Labor Supply: Experimental Evidence Using a Job Search Platform

This paper studies the role of job search frictions and gender norms in shaping intrahousehold labor market outcomes in developing countries. We conduct a field experiment in Delhi, India where we randomly offer access to a hyper-local digital job search and matching platform either to married couples only (non-network treatment), or together with the wife’s peer network (network treatment), or not at all. Approximately one year later, we find that couples in the non-network treatment group exhibit a degree of substitution in labor supply – wives reduce their intensive margin of work, driven by withdrawal from casual labor, while husbands increase theirs. In contrast, husbands in the network treatment group increase their labor supply on both extensive and intensive margins but with no impact on their wives’ labor supply on either margin. Instead, wives’ occupational structure shifts towards self-employment in the network treatment group. Our findings can be explained by a simple conceptual framework that incorporates gender-differentiated job search frictions, conservative social norms against (married) women’s market work and home-production constraints.