Doctoral Workshop Sept 18, 20

Doctoral Workshop of the Research Group on Development Economics of the German Economic Association (Verein für Socialpolitik)

On 18 Sept 2020 six doctoral students from University of Konstanz, University of Zurich, ETH Zurich, Graduate Institute of Geneva, Leibnitz University of Hannover and University of Goettingen presented their ongoing work.

Due to the Corona Pandemic this year’s doctoral workshop was organised in a hybrid format, half the students were present at the University of Konstanz while the others participated online. Although not quite the ‘real thing’ we all benefitted from lively and rich discussions. Unfortunately, most supervisors were unable to attend, making Prof Katja Michaelowa’s effort to attend even more remarkable. She and her advisee, Philip Kerler, cycled from Zurich to Konstanz (80km) to join the workshop.

Participation was diverse: Three female students, three male, three from German universities and three from Swiss universities. We now just have to work on cross-cuttingness: All of the female students are based at German universities while all the males are at Swiss universities. I would like to thank all doctoral student for their participation (Philip Kerler, Yuanwei Xu, Alina Greiner, Enrico Nano, Bartlomiej Kudrzycki and Anna Reuter) as well as Petra Rietzler for the organisation and Otto Meyer zu Schwabedissen for his technical support during the day. Jule Beck and Viola Asri provided additional comments. A big thank you also to the Excellence Cluster The Politics of Inequality for letting us use their video conference facilities and Isabelle Wolf for her technical support.

German Economic Association (Verein für Socialpolitik)

Research Group on Development Economics

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Alina Greiner (Universität Konstanz): Women's (Dis-)Empowerment Post-Civil War: The Impact of Conflict on Female Labour Force Participation in Côte d'Ivoire

In her study on women’s empowerment Alina Greiner focuses on the impact of a recent civil war on women’s work outside the household. She argues that armed conflict creates an increasing demand for female labour participation and thus disrupts traditional gender hierarchies. Civil war may therefore have a positive effect through improving female empowerment and more gender equality. She examines this possible war-induced effect by comparing female labour participation rates across the border of Burkina Faso and Cote d’Ivoire border before and after the Ivorian civil war. She estimates the effect of the war by applying a regression discontinuity estimator and alternatively a difference-in-differences estimator. Alina Greiner finds that Ivoirian women are 25 percentage points less likely to work outside the home post-civil war. Thus, the war disempowered women for which three potential mechanisms are investigated. The author argues that a shift towards more traditional gender norms as well as a reduction in bargaining power may help explain the decline in female labour force participation post-war. 

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Yuanwei Xu (Leibniz University Hannover): Paying for the selected son? Sex Imbalance and Marriage Payments in China

China has a well-documented surplus of men. In her paper Yuanwei Xu examines the effect of the high male to female ratios on the payments in the marriage markets. Interestingly, two different payments occur: Dowry (from the bride’s family to the groom’s family) and a bride price (from the groom’s family to the bride’s family). As expected, the number of families that pay a bride price increased over time, while dowry payments did not. However, the author then examines heterogeneity in the results by individual characteristics, including birth cohort, location and socio-economic status. Combining these results with a number of theoretical explanations she argues that payments in the marriage market do not only contribute to a clearing of this market but that they also serve as an implicit intergenerational contract for transfers. 

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Philip Kerler (University of Zürich): The effect of terrorism on preference for democracy: Evidence from Africa

Africa has experienced a high number of terrorist attacks and in his paper Philip Kerler examines the impact of terror on attitudes towards democracy. For his analysis he combines terror event data from the Global Terrorism Database and Afrobarometer surveys. He focuses on responses to the questions on attitudes towards democracy and the judgements respondents make with regard to their own country’s democracy. Comparing answers to these Afrobarometer questions before and after the terrorist event suggests that stated preferences for democracy increase. This finding is robust to spatial confounding and different time frames. Philip Kerler interprets these results as support for social identity theory, where traumatic events increase the sense of a common identity through intrinsic preference formation. The results provide no support for an instrumentalist mechanism of preference formation where citizens prefer democracy because they expect positive outcomes, such as security. The analysis presented in this paper helps us to gain a more detailed understanding of how African citizens form their attitudes towards democracy. 

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Anna Reuter (Universität Göttingen): Did you know? The effect SMS reminders on health screening uptake in Indonesia

In her co-authored study (with Maja Marcus, Lisa Rogge and Sebastian Vollmer) Anna Reuter examines the effect of SMS reminders on the uptake of health screenings. The focus is on noncommunicable disesases (NDCs) in Indonesia, more specifically on diabetes and hypertension.  According to the health literature about 79 per cent of all diabetics and about 60 per cent of all individuals with hypertension remain undiagnosed in Indonesia. The research team studies an intervention that consisted of sending SMS messages to 40 to 70 year olds, informing them about the diseases and reminding them of free monthly clinics in their communities. In comparison with the control group (business as usual), individuals in the treatment group were now significantly more likely to take up a screening appointment. Screening rates were approximately 7 percentage points higher in the treatment group. However, individuals were no more informed by the messages than the control group. The increase in the screening rate were thus most likely due to the reminder function and did not work through an improved information channel. However, evidence based on interventions to increase screening for these ‘invisible’ diseases are most welcome, since SMS messages represent a low-cost, easily scalable intervention.  

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Bartlomiej Kudrzycki (ETH Zürich): The Working Lives of 1050 Youth in Urban Benin

Using the ILO’s School-to-Work Transition Surveys (SWTS) Bartlomiej Kudrzycki collected baseline data for 1,029 youths in the city of Cotonou, Benin.  As follow up to the baseline, short phone based interviews provide additional information. So far not all the rounds of phone surveys have been conducted, therefore the presentation focused on describing the baseline results. A high proportion of 20- to 29-year olds are enrolled in education (31 per cent), this excludes apprenticeships. Formal employment is rare, only about six per cent of all youth interviewed had a written employment contract. Depending on age the proportion of youth ‘Not in Education, Employment or Training’ (NEET) is between 10 and 20 per cent.  Generally, the transition from school to work appears to be slow. However, urban youths (including NEETs) are generally satisfied with their current situation and optimistic when asked about their future employment prospects.

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Enrico Nano (Graduate Institute of Geneva): The Impact of Services Sectors Liberalization on Education: Evidence from India

This co-authored paper (with Gaurav Nayyar, Stela Rubinova and Victor Stolzenburg) studies the impact of the liberalization of the services sector on education. In the 1990s India’s banking, insurance and telecommunications sectors were liberalized and services in aggregate have become the dominant sector in the economy. Using district level data and controlling for unobserved time-invariant heterogeneity and endogeneity, Enrico Nano and co-authors find that the share of workers in the three key service sectors increases the district’s average years of schooling by about one sixth of a standard deviation. Furthermore, the gender education gap is reduced by about one fifth of a standard deviation. These results hold both in the medium (12 years) and longer term (18 years). These effects are comparable in size to those due to merchandise trade liberalization, which has been studies elsewhere. Further research aims to investigate the possible transmission channels in more detail, i.e. the higher returns to education and growing household incomes.