cash transfers and management advice for agriculture evidence from senegal this study analyzes impacts of large one time cash transfers and farm management plans among farmers in senegal farmers were randomized into groups receiving advisory visits the visits and an in

cash transfer programs with income multipliers procampo in mexico abstract cash transfer programs create multiplier effects when recipients put the money they receive to work to generate further incomes when this is the case the ultimate income effects are multiples of the amounts transferred we analyze the procampo program in mexico that was introduced to compensate farmers for the anticipated negative effect of nafta on the prices of basic crops the transfer rules and the timing of the panel data collected allow unique control of biases in this impact analysis we find that the multiplier among ejido sector recipients is in the range 1 5 2 6 multipliers are higher for households with medium and large farms low numbers of adults in the household nonindigenous backgrounds and located in the center and gulf regions high multipliers reflect income opportunities that had remained unrealized due to liquidity constraints that are relaxed by the transfers opportunities come from the asset endowments that these households received through the land reform particularly irrigated land and they are enhanced by access to technical assistance

dynamics of output and employment in the u s economy this paper investigates the changing relationship between employment and real output in the u s economy from 1948 to 2010 both at the aggregate level and at some major industry grouping levels of disaggregation real output is conventionally measured as value added corrected for price ination but there are some industries in which no independent measure of value added is possible and existing statistics depend on imputing value added to equal income indexes of output that exclude these imputations are closely correlated with employment over the whole period and remain more closely correlated during the current business cycle this analysis oers insights into deeper

indirect effects of an aid program how do cash transfers affect ineligibles consumption cash transfers to eligible households indirectly increase the consumption of ineligible households living in the same villages this effect operates through insurance and credit markets ineligible households benefit from the transfers by receiving more gifts and loans and by reducing their savings thus the transfers benefit the local economy at large looking only at the effect on the treated underestimates the impact one should analyze the effects of this class of programs on the entire local economy rather than on the treated only and use a village level randomization rather than selecting treatment and control subjects from the same community

the effects of oil price shocks in a new keynesian framework with capital accumulation the economic implications of oil price shocks have been extensively studied since the 1970s despite this huge literature no dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model was available that captures two well known stylized facts 1 the stagflationary impact of an oil price shock together with 2 the influence of the energy productivity of capital on the depth and length of this impact we build estimate and simulate a new keynesian model with capital accumulation which takes the case of an economy where oil is imported from abroad and where these stylized facts can be accounted for moreover the bayesian estimation of the model on the us economy 1984 2007 suggests that the output elasticity of oil might have been above 10 stressing the role of oil use in us growth at this time finally our simulations confirm that an increase in energy efficiency significantly attenuates the effects of an oil shock a possible explanation of why the third oil shock 1999 2008 did not have the same macro economic impact as the first two ones

workfare wellbeing and consumption evidence from a field experiment with kenya s urban poor abstract restrictions like work requirements and constraints on voucher transfers are often used in social welfare systems but little empirical evidence exists on their impact on wellbeing we conducted a 10 day randomized experiment with 432 individuals living below the poverty line in the kawangware settlement of nairobi kenya testing two elements of social welfare design workfare versus welfare and restricted versus unrestricted vouchers participants were randomly assigned to a work condition involving daily work for unrestricted vouchers or one of two wait conditions involving daily waiting for vouchers that were either unrestricted or partially restricted to staple foods we find that working improved psychological wellbeing relative to waiting suggesting that the means of implementing welfare programs may have important effects on individuals beyond the impact of monetary benefit alone furthermore although the restrictions were inframarginal partially restricted vouchers crowded in spending on staple foods suggesting the existence of a flypaper effect in spending from restricted vouchers

the effect of gender targeted conditional cash transfers on household expenditures evidence from a randomized experiment this paper studies the differential effect of targeting cash transfers to men or women on the structure of household expenditures on non durables we study a policy intervention in the republic of macedonia offering cash transfers to poor households conditional on having their children attending secondary school the recipient of the transfer is randomized across municipalities to be either the household head or the mother using data collected to evaluate the conditional cash transfer program we show that the gender of the recipient has an effect on the structure of expenditure shares targeting transfers to women increases the expenditure share on food by about 4 to 5 to study the allocation of expenditures within the food basket we estimate a demand system for food and we find that targeting payments to mothers induces for different food categories not only a significant intercept shift but also a change in the slope of the engel curve

asymmetric effects of oil price uncertainty on corporate investment abstract using a comprehensive data set of a large panel of us firms over 1984 2017 we show that the negative effect of crude oil price return uncertainty on investments is asymmetric in particular we show that investment is more significantly reduced following the volatility of positive oil price changes than that of negative changes and this asymmetric effect is more pronounced in small firms in addition we find that the asymmetric effect is stronger in the crude oil and gas producing companies where the effect of the volatility of negative oil price changes is greater than that of positive oil price changes we also find that the impact of positive or negative oil price change uncertainty on investments substantially differs across different industries the results are quite robust to the way in which we measure the investment and oil price uncertainty and to alternative regression methods

the short term impact of unconditional cash transfers to the poor experimental evidence from kenya we use a randomized controlled trial to study the response of poor households in rural kenya to unconditional cash transfers from the ngo givedirectly the transfers differ from other programs in that they are explicitly unconditional large and concentrated in time we randomized at both the village and household levels furthermore within the treatment group we randomized recipient gender wife versus husband transfer timing lump sum transfer versus monthly installments and transfer magnitude us 404 ppp versus us 1 525 ppp we find a strong consumption response to transfers with an increase in household monthly consumption from 158 ppp to 193 ppp nine months after the transfer began transfer recipients experience large increases in psychological well being we find no overall effect on levels of the stress hormone cortisol although there are differences across some subgroups monthly transfers are more likely than lump sum transfers to improve food security whereas lump sum transfers are more likely to be spent on durables suggesting that households face savings and credit constraints together these results suggest that unconditional cash transfers have significant impacts on economic outcomes and psychological well being

the effects of oil price uncertainty on global real economic activity this paper investigates the effect of oil price uncertainty on global real economic activity using a quarterly vector autoregressive model with stochastic volatility in mean stochastic volatility allows oil price uncertainty to vary separately from changes in the level of oil prices and allows one to incorporate an extraneous indicator of oil price uncertainty such as realized volatility that greatly improves the precision of the estimated uncertainty series the estimation results show that an oil price uncertainty shock has negative effects on world industrial production all else equal for example it is shown that a doubling of oil price volatility is associated with a cumulative decline as high as 0 3 percentage points in world industrial production

the macroeconomic impact of oil earnings uncertainty new evidence from analyst forecasts we develop measures of oil earnings uncertainty oeu using analyst forecasts drawn from a large firm level dataset oeu is related to future economic downturns so some oeu measures may serve to forecast future downturns an increase in oeu also has adverse effects on the us oil sector the results are robust to conditioning on aggregate uncertainty at the same time oeu is related to increases in stock prices unlike aggregate uncertainty which has the opposite effect oeu is thus an independent influence on both the oil industry and on economic aggregates

why don t the poor save more evidence from health savings experiments using data from a field experiment in kenya we document that providing individuals with simple informal savings technologies can substantially increase investment in preventative health and reduce vulnerability to health shocks simply providing a safe place to keep money was sufficient to increase health savings by 66 percent adding an earmarking feature was only helpful when funds were put toward emergencies or for individuals that are frequently taxed by friends and relatives group based savings and credit schemes had very large effects

comparing cash and voucher transfers in a humanitarian context evidence from the democratic republic of congo despite recent calls in support of cash transfers there is little rigorous evidence of the relative impacts of cash versus in kind transfers especially in humanitarian contexts where a majority of such programs take place this paper uses data from a randomized experiment in the democratic republic of congo to assess the relative impacts and costs of equivalently valued cash and voucher transfers the voucher program distorted households purchases along both the extensive and intensive margin as compared with unconstrained cash households yet there were no differences in food consumption or other measures of well being in part due to the fact that voucher households were able to resell part of what they purchased as there were no significant benefits to vouchers cash transfers were the more cost effective modality for both the implementing agency and program recipients in this context

moving up or just surviving nonfarm self employment in india the classical economic development literature argues that growth is accompanied by a reduction in agriculture s share and an increase in nonagriculture s share of employment yet growth of the nonfarm sector does not necessarily signal increasing levels of development as the sector may serve as subsistence employment for many individuals this ambiguity is heightened by a surprising lack of microevidence regarding sectoral and occupational choice and especially how government policies impact these decisions in this article i make a simple observation regarding how nonfarm self employment reacts to market conditions households and individuals that enter into nonfarm self employment for subsistence reasons are more likely to exit the sector when wages increase or when more stable employment becomes available with this assumption as a starting point i examine the effects of the mahatma gandhi national rural employment guarantee act which increased prevailing wages in rural india the program significantly decreases days spent in nonfarm self employment in addition the implied labor elasticity is three times higher than economy wide estimates suggesting rural nonfarm self employment is a sector of last resort for many individuals additional analyses suggest this impact is driven primarily by two mechanisms higher wages and alternative options for risk management

generating skilled self employment in developing countries experimental evidence from uganda we study a government program in uganda designed to help the poor and unemployed become self employed artisans increase incomes and thus promote social stability young adults in uganda s conflict affected north were invited to form groups and submit grant proposals for vocational training and business start up funding was randomly assigned among screened and eligible groups treatment groups received unsupervised grants of 382 per member grant recipients invest some in skills training but most in tools and materials after four years half practice a skilled trade relative to the control group the program increases business assets by 57 work hours by 17 and earnings by 38 many also formalize their enterprises and hire labor we see no effect however on social cohesion antisocial behavior or protest effects are similar by gender but are qualitatively different for women because they begin poorer meaning the impact is larger relative to their starting point and because women s work and earnings stagnate without the program but take off with it the patterns we observe are consistent with credit constraints

unconditional cash transfers in china who benefits from the rural minimum living standard guarantee dibao program summary this paper analyzes china s rural minimum living standard guarantee dibao program one of the largest minimum income cash transfer schemes in the world and examines possible changes to the program design despite its size and central position in china s current poverty reduction strategy little is known about the rural dibao program s performance and targeting effectiveness our analysis uses annual household survey data from the china household income project matched with published administrative data for the years 2007 09 we find that the program provides sufficient income to poor beneficiaries but does not substantially reduce the overall level of poverty conventional targeting analysis reveals large inclusionary and exclusionary targeting errors propensity score targeting analysis yields smaller but still large targeting errors simulations of possible changes to the program design reveal that expanding coverage can potentially yield greater poverty reduction than increasing transfer amounts replacing locally diverse dibao lines and transfer amounts with a nationally uniform dibao threshold and transfer could in theory reduce poverty further but the potential gains are modest without improvements in targeting this paper makes several contributions to our knowledge this is the first household level empirical analysis of china s dibao program in rural areas so the findings provide new policy relevant information moreover the literature has not settled the question of whether such programs should be centralized or decentralized we show that in practice the potential gains of centralizing the eligibility rule and transfer amount are conditional on the efficiency of targeting by varying the program s key design parameters our analysis also yields insights into alternative policy recommendations to improve the program performance

transfers in cash and in kind theory meets the data we review theoretical explanations for in kind transfers in light of the limited empirical evidence after reviewing the traditional paternalistic arguments we consider explanations based on imperfect information and self targeting we then discuss the large literature on in kind programs as a way of improving the efficiency of the tax system and a range of other possible explanations including the samaritan s dilemma pecuniary effects credit constraints asymmetric information amongst agents and political economy considerations our reading of the evidence suggests that paternalism and interdependent preferences are leading overall explanations for the existence of in kind transfer programs but that some of the other arguments may apply to specific cases political economy considerations must also be part of the story

child labor and schooling responses to anticipated income in south africa abstract forward looking unconstrained households make child labor and schooling decisions considering their permanent income and weighing the relative returns to child time in various potential activities the timing of anticipated changes in income should have no effect on child labor and schooling in a setting where households can borrow against permanent income however this study documents large increases in schooling attendance and declines in total hours worked when black south african families become eligible for fully anticipatable social pension income as an explanation the data are most consistent with liquidity constraints for black elder males forcing rural families into less schooling for boys than they would choose absent the constraint perhaps because of schooling costs

oil price uncertainty and manufacturing production abstract given the rapid rise and volatility of oil prices the paper investigates the effect of oil price uncertainty on the south african manufacturing production using monthly observations covering the period 1974 02 to 2012 12 in addition we quantify the responses of manufacturing production to positive and negative oil price shocks we examine the dynamic relationship using a bivariate garch in mean var simultaneously estimated with a full information maximum likelihood technique the conditional standard deviation of the forecast of the growth of us crude oil imported acquisition cost by refiners is used as a measure of oil price uncertainty our results show that oil price uncertainty negatively and significantly impacts on south africa s manufacturing production we also find that the responses of manufacturing production to positive and negative shocks are asymmetric

examining the reliability of self reported data on school participation abstract many studies evaluate the impacts of conditional cash transfer cct programs on schooling using self reports on enrollment and attendance even though there are reasons to doubt the reliability of these data in this paper we examine the extent to which school age girls overstate their school participation using administrative data from a cash transfer experiment in malawi and school attendance ledgers collected as part of the impact evaluation we find that while all study participants overstate their enrollment and attendance rates the extent to which this happens is significantly higher in the control group than the cct arm this finding implies that exclusive reliance on self reported school participation data can lead to a serious underestimation of actual program impacts we recommend that self reports be supplemented using alternative sources of data on school participation that are appropriate to the experiment at hand even if such efforts are likely to increase evaluation costs

asymmetries in the responses of regional job flows to oil price shocks this paper studies the effect of oil price innovations on manufacturing job flows across u s states first i estimate a nonlinear structural equation model and compute impulse response functions by monte carlo integration i find asymmetries in the responses of job flows to positive and negative oil price innovations yet these asymmetries do not pass a test of symmetry on the impulse responses especially after accounting for data mining third i use a test for the absence of job reallocation to evaluate whether an unexpected increase in the real price of oil price triggers an important change in job reallocation i find that oil price shocks have limited regional allocative effects

the impact of unconditional cash transfer on fuel choices among ultra poor in pakistan quasi experimental evidence from the benazir income support program abstract we analyze the impact of the unconditional cash transfer program namely the benazir income support program bisp on fuel choices among ultra poor in pakistan using two rounds of household level data collected in 2011 and 2016 the analysis based on regression discontinuity design shows that bisp cash transfer has a significant impact on interfuel substitution cash transfer increases the use of modern fuels among bisp beneficiaries besides cash transfer also encourages the use of intermediate fuels even in some cases traditional fuels cash transfer also increases the share of fuel expenses in total household expenses therefore the fuel stacking theory provides a better explanation of interfuel substitution than the energy ladder theory of the cash transfer program the provincial analysis shows that interfuel substitution exists due to cash transfer but varies from province to province signifying the role of regional heterogeneities the net impact on fuel choices may depend on the availability of different fuel components from policy perspective the expansion of the cash transfer program as planned by the government would require a reasonable investment in the energy sector to ensure an uninterrupted supply of modern fuels

do husbands and wives pool their resources evidence from the united kingdom child benefit common preference models of family behavior imply income pooling a restriction on family demand functions such that only the sum of husband s income and wife s income affects the allocation of goods and time testing the pooling hypothesis is difficult because most family income sources are not exogenous to the allocations being analyzed in this paper we present an alternative test based on a natural experiment a policy change in the united kingdom that transferred a substantial child allowance to wives in the late 1970s using family expenditure survey data we find strong evidence that a shift toward greater expenditures on women s clothing and children s clothing relative to men s clothing coincided with this income redistribution

oil price shocks and the dispersion hypothesis recent research by david lilien shows that a significant fraction of aggregate unemployment can be explained by the dispersion of employment growth across industries this paper presents two new results in this area first it is shown that a significant fraction of the variation in lilien s dispersion index is due to the differential impact of oil shocks across industries second and more important it is shown that once the dispersion in employment growth due to oil shocks is accounted for the residual dispersion has no explanatory power for unemployment

does the old age pension scheme improve household welfare evidence from india abstract as india s population has been ageing due to declines in fertility and mortality rates more policy emphasis has been placed on reducing poverty among the elderly the present study aims to examine the effect of indira gandhi national old age pension scheme ignoaps on household welfare indicators such as consumption expenditure income assets and poverty using the household longitudinal data based on the india human development survey in 2004 5 and 2011 12 we have applied the propensity score matching to build a counterfactual group and have used the propensity score weighted fixed effects model to eliminate time invariant unobservable household characteristics the results show that the ignoaps participation increased consumption expenditure food and non food expenditure and assets while reducing the household labour supply the sub sample estimations show that these effects are observed only when recipients are women however the results of difference in difference model imply that the poverty reducing effect deteriorated in 2011 12 after the government made several changes to programme specifications in 2007 this was likely because some households which accessed ignoaps after 2007 reduced the labour supply significantly while keeping the level of consumption

program trading and intraday volatility program trading and intraday changes in the s p 500 index are correlated future prices and to a lesser extent cash prices lead program trades index arbitrage trades are followed by an immediate change in the cash index which ultimately reverses slightly no reversal follows nonarbitrage trades the cumulative index changes associated with buy and sell trades and with arbitrage and nonarbitrage trades all are similar price decompositions suggest that the results are not due to microstructure effects program trades in this 1989 1990 sample do not seem to have created major short term liquidity problems the results are stable within the sample many practitioners regulators and public commentators have expressed concerns about potential destabilizing effects of program trading they argue that program trades especially index arbitrage programs increase intraday volatility and decrease

oil price uncertainty and the u s stock market analysis based on a garch in mean var model abstract this paper uses a bivariate garch in mean var model to examine the effect of oil price uncertainty on the u s real stock returns at the aggregate and sectoral levels estimation results suggest that there is no statistically significant effect of oil price volatility on the u s stock returns the absence of an uncertainty effect might be explained by the fact that companies are likely to hedge against fluctuations in oil prices it could also stem from the ability of most companies to transfer the higher cost of oil to customers moreover the impulse responses indicate that accounting for oil price uncertainty oil price increases and decreases have symmetric effects on the u s aggregate stock returns in that energy price increases and decreases are estimated to have equal and opposite effects on the u s financial market however this symmetric effect doesn t hold across all the sectors studied in this paper

asymmetries in the response of economic activity to oil price increases and decreases abstract it has been common to assume that the relationship between economic activity and oil prices is asymmetric theoretical underpinnings for this asymmetry include costly sectoral reallocation partial equilibrium models of irreversible investment and some version of precautionary savings yet recent studies that use new methodologies to test for asymmetries in u s data have cast some doubts on that premise in this paper we use state of the art techniques to evaluate the presence of asymmetries for a set of oecd countries containing both oil exporters and oil importers we find very little support for the hypothesis that the response of industrial production to oil price increases and decreases is asymmetric our results have important implications for theoretical models of the transmission of oil price shocks they point towards the importance of direct supply and direct demand transmission channels as well as indirect transmission channels that imply a symmetric response

cash transfers and labor supply evidence from a large scale program in iran abstract this paper examines the impact of a national cash transfer program on labor supply in iran in 2011 iran started monthly deposits of cash into individual accounts covering more than 70 million people and amounting to 28 of the median per capita household income the payments were compensation for the sudden removal of hefty energy subsidies the program has been heavily criticized for its disincentive for work especially for the poor we use panel data to study the causal effect of the transfers on labor supply using exogenous variation in the time households first started receiving transfers and in the intensity of treatment which we define as the share of net transfers from the program in total per capita household expenditures we find no evidence that cash transfers reduced labor supply in terms of hours worked or labor force participation to the contrary we find positive effects on the labor supply of women and self employed men

the effects of lottery prizes on winners and their neighbors evidence from the dutch postcode lottery each week the dutch postcode lottery pcl randomly selects a postal code and distributes cash and a new bmw to lottery participants in that code we study the effects of these shocks on lottery winners and their neighbors consistent with the life cycle hypothesis the effects on winners consumption are largely confined to cars and other durables consistent with the theory of in kind transfers the vast majority of bmw winners liquidate their bmws we do however detect substantial social effects of lottery winnings pcl nonparticipants who live next door to winners have significantly higher levels of car consumption than other nonparticipants

oil shocks and aggregate macroeconomic behavior the role of monetary policy a recent paper by bernanke gertler and watson 1997 suggests that monetary policy could be used to eliminate any recessionary consequences of an oil price shock this paper challenges this conclusion on two grounds first we question whether the federal reserve actually has the power to implement such a policy for example we consider it unlikely that additional money creation would have succeeded in reducing the fed funds rate by 900 basis points relative to the values seen in 1974 second we point out that the size of the effect that bernanke gertler and watson attribute to oil shocks is substantially smaller than that reported by other researchers primarily due to their choice of a shorter lag length than that used by other researchers we offer evidence in favor of the longer lag length employed by previous research and show that under this specification even the aggressive federal reserve policies proposed would not have succeeded in averting a downturn

does money matter the effects of cash transfers on child development in rural ecuador abstract a large body of research indicates that child development is sensitive to early life environments so that poor children are at higher risk for poor cognitive and behavioral outcomes these developmental outcomes are important determinants of success in adulthood yet remarkably little is known about whether poverty alleviation programs improve children s developmental outcomes we examine how a government run cash transfer program for poor mothers in rural ecuador influenced the development of young children random assignment at the parish level is used to identify program effects our data include a set of measures of cognitive ability that are not typically included in experimental or quasi experimental studies of the impact of cash transfers on child well being as well as a set of physical health measures that may be related to developmental outcomes the cash transfer program had positive although modest effects on the physical cognitive and socioemotional development of the poorest c

mobile money adoption and households vulnerability to shocks evidence from togo we investigate the determinants of mobile money adoption process and whether its use helps households in togo to be resilient to predictable and unpredictable life events using ordered logit and s

when the money runs out do cash transfers have sustained effects on human capital accumulation this study examines the medium term effects of a two year cash transfer program targeted to adolescent girls and young women significant declines in hiv prevalence teen pregnancy and early marriage among recipients of unconditional cash transfers ucts during the program evaporated quickly two years after the cessation of transfers however children born to uct beneficiaries during the program had significantly higher height for age z scores at follow up on the other hand conditional cash transfers ccts offered to out of school females at baseline produced a large increase in educational attainment and a sustained reduction in the total number of births but caused no gains in health labor market outcomes or empowerment the findings point to both the promise and the limitations of cash transfer programs for sustained gains in welfare among young women

nonlinearities in the response of real gdp to oil price shocks abstract this paper re examines whether real gdp growth responds asymmetrically to real oil price increases and decreases using a sample that includes the recent oil price declines i follow kilian and vigfusson 2011a and conduct a test of symmetry i find no evidence against the null of symmetry using the 3 year net oil price increase specification moreover i find that the results are not stable for different nonlinear transformations of the real price of oil finally evidence of asymmetry vanishes after computing specification robust critical values

reshaping institutions evidence on aid impacts using a pre analysis plan this brief summarizes the results of a gender impact evaluation study entitled reshaping institutions evidence on aid impacts using a pre analysis plan conducted between 2005 and 2009 in sierra leone the study observed the impact of pre analysis plan pap on local institutions by imposing participation requirements for marginalized groups including women and test for learning by doing effects in sierra leone on the individual and village level requiring women and young adults to take on leadership positions participate in project meetings and sign off on project finances does not have any persistent effect on their participation in local decision making or attitudes regarding leadership ability the project successfully established village organizations and tools to manage the project the distributions of the project s benefits were equitable and leakage was minimal there was a significant positive impact on the stock and quality of local public infrastructure however there are no detectible changes in the ability to raise funds for local public goods decision making process or social norms and attitudes funding for the study derived from the gobifo project the institutional reform and capacity building project ircbp the world bank development impact evaluation dime the horace w goldsmith foundation the international growth center 3ie and the national bureau of economic research nber african successes project

the effects of oil price shocks on job reallocation we investigate the effect of oil price innovations on u s manufacturing job flows using a simultaneous equation model that nests symmetric and asymmetric responses we find no evidence of asymmetry in the response of job flows to positive and negative oil price innovations we then inquire whether firms when facing positive shocks shed jobs faster than they create jobs we show that positive innovations lead to a decline in net employment and an increase in job reallocation possibly due to search and matching issues yet the latter effect becomes statistically insignificant when we control for data mining we demonstrate that the cumulative one year effect of oil price shocks on job creation and destruction was smaller during the great moderation but it was larger for gross job reallocation these variations were caused by a change in the transmission channel and not by smaller oil price shocks

why are the 2000s so different from the 1970s a structural interpretation of changes in the macroeconomic effects of oil prices in the 1970s large increases in the price of oil were associated with sharp decreases in output and large increases in inflation in the 2000s even larger increases in the price of oil were associated with much milder movements in output and inflation using a structural var approach blanchard and gali in j gali and m gertler eds 2009 international dimensions of monetary policy university of chicago press pp 373 428 argued that this reflected a change in the causal relation from the price of oil to output and inflation they then argued that this change could be due to a combination of three factors a smaller share of oil in production and consumption lower real wage rigidity and better monetary policy their argument based on simulations of a simple new keynesian model was informal our purpose in this paper is to take the next step and to estimate the explanatory power and contribution of each of these factors to do so we use a minimum distance estimator that minimizes over the set of structural parameters and for each of two samples pre and post 1984 the distance between the empirical svar based impulse response functions and those implied by a new keynesian model our empirical results point to an important role for all three factors

beyond baseline and follow up the case for more t in experiments the vast majority of randomized experiments in economics rely on a single baseline and single follow up survey if multiple follow ups are conducted the reason is typically to examine the trajectory of impact effects so that in effect only one follow up round is being used to estimate each treatment effect of interest while such a design is suitable for study of highly autocorrelated and relatively precisely measured outcomes in the health and education domains this paper makes the case that it is unlikely to be optimal for measuring noisy and relatively less autocorrelated outcomes such as business profits household incomes and expenditures and episodic health outcomes taking multiple measurements of such outcomes at relatively short intervals allows the researcher to average out noise increasing power when the outcomes have low autocorrelation it can make sense to do no baseline at all moreover the author shows how for such outcomes more power can be achieved with multiple follow ups than allocating the same total sample size over a single follow up and baseline the analysis highlights the large gains in power from ancova rather than difference in differences when autocorrelations are low and a baseline is taken the paper discusses the issues involved in multiple measurements and makes recommendations for the design of experiments and related non experimental impact evaluations

oil price uncertainty in canada bernanke bernanke ben s irreversibility uncertainty and cyclical investment quarterly journal of economics 98 1983 85 106 shows how uncertainty about energy prices may induce optimizing firms to postpone investment decisions thereby leading to a decline in aggregate output elder and serletis elder john and serletis apostolos oil price uncertainty http ssrn com abstract 908675 2009 find empirical evidence that uncertainty about oil prices has tended to depress investment in the united states in this paper we assess the robustness of these results by investigating the effects of oil price uncertainty in canada our results are remarkably similar to existing results for the united states providing additional evidence that uncertainty about oil prices may provide another explanation for why the sharp oil price declines of 1985 failed to produce rapid output growth impulse response analysis suggests that uncertainty about oil prices may tend to reinforce the negative response of output to positive oil shocks

payment mechanisms and antipoverty programs evidence from a mobile money cash transfer experiment in niger abstractcash transfers have become an increasingly important component of social protection policies in both developed and developing countries while such programs are often implemented electronically in developed countries in many developing countries with weak financial infrastructure such transfers are distributed manually resulting in significant costs to program recipients and the public sector alike the introduction of mobile money systems in many developing countries offers new opportunities for distributing cash transfers using data from a randomized experiment of a mobile money cash transfer program in niger we find evidence of benefits of this new system household diet diversity was 9 16 higher among households who received mobile transfers and children ate an additional one third of a meal per day these results can be partially attributed to time savings associated with mobile transfers as program recipients spent less time traveling to and waiting for their transfer they are also

the oregon health insurance experiment evidence from the first year in 2008 a group of uninsured low income adults in oregon was selected by lottery to be given the chance to apply for medicaid this lottery provides an opportunity to gauge the effects of expanding access to public health insurance on the health care use financial strain and health of low income adults using a randomized controlled design in the year after random assignment the treatment group selected by the lottery was about 25 percentage points more likely to have insurance than the control group that was not selected we find that in this first year the treatment group had substantively and statistically significantly higher health care utilization including primary and preventive care as well as hospitalizations lower out of pocket medical expenditures and medical debt including fewer bills sent to collection and better self reported physical and mental health than the control group

where do jobs go when oil prices drop abstract in this paper we estimate a factor augmented vector autoregressive favar model to investigate the effect of oil price shocks on total private job flows as well as on industry level job creation and destruction following an unexpected oil price drop in the first year we find that in oil and gas extraction and support activities for mining exhibit a reduction in job creation and an increase in job destruction instead industries in construction manufacturing and services exhibit an increase in the net employment change an unexpected decline in the real oil price slows down the pace of gross job reallocation we demonstrate that the increase decrease in private job destruction creation observed during the first year is primarily driven by the response of closing expanding firms in services and manufacturing

the long run impact of cash transfers to poor families lleras muney we estimate the long run impact of cash transfers to poor families on children s longevity educational attainment nutritional status and income in adulthood to do so we collected individual level administrative records of applicants to the mothers pension program the first government sponsored welfare program in the united states 1911 1935 and matched them to census wwii and death records male children of accepted applicants lived one year longer than those of rejected mothers they also obtained onethird more years of schooling were less likely to be underweight and had higher income in adulthood than children of rejected mothers jel i12 i14 i18 i32 i38 j16 n32

an experiment on cash and in kind transfers with application to food assistance programs the impact of providing food assistance in kind via food stamps or restricted debit cards vs cash has long been a subject of debate prior efforts to causally identify the effects of the two types of transfers have been hindered by concerns over non random selection into assistance programs misreporting of program benefits and identification of inframarginal households who theoretically should treat cash and in kind transfers identically this paper reports the results of an economic experiment designed to cleanly test some conceptual issues associated with in kind vs cash giving in a lunchroom meal setting given current debates about the healthiness of food assistance recipients diets we also consider the impacts of placing restrictions on in kind transfers that either prohibit soda purchases with the transfer or require the transfer be spent on fruits and vegetables overall we find that as theory predicts in kind transfers have the same effect on food expenditures as an unrestricted cash transfer for inframarginal consumers and for extramarginal consumers food expenditures are higher for in kind than cash transfers participants also respond to the fruit and vegetable restriction as theory would predict however in contrast to the theoretical prediction the soda restriction reduces soda expenditures for more than half the inframarginal consumers

returns to capital in microenterprises evidence from a field experiment small and informal firms account for a large share of employment in developing countries the rapid expansion of microfinance services is based on the belief that these firms have productive investment opportunities and can enjoy high returns to capital if given the opportunity however measuring the return to capital is complicated by unobserved factors such as entrepreneurial ability and demand shocks which are likely to be correlated with capital stock the authors use a randomized experiment to overcome this problem and to measure the return to capital for the average microenterprise in their sample regardless of whether they apply for credit they accomplish this by providing cash and equipment grants to small firms in sri lanka and measuring the increase in profits arising from this exogenous positive shock to capital stock after controlling for possible spillover effects the authors find the average real return to capital to be 5 7 percent a month substantially higher than the market interest rate they then examine the heterogeneity of treatment effects to explore whether missing credit markets or missing insurance markets are the most likely cause of the high returns returns are found to vary with entrepreneurial ability and with measures of other sources of cash within the household but not to vary with risk aversion or uncertainty

efficient intra household allocations a general characterization and empirical tests the neoclassical theory of demand applies to individuals yet in empirical work it is usually taken as valid for households with many members this paper explores what the theory of individuals implies for households that have more than one member we make minimal assumptions about how the individual members of the household resolve conflicts all we assume is that however decisions are made outcomes are efficient we refer to this as the collective setting we show that in the collective setting household demands must satisfy a symmetry and rank condition on the slutsky matrix we also present some further results on the effects on demands of variables that do not modify preferences but that do affect how decisions are made we apply our theory to a series of surveys of household expenditures from canada the tests of the usual symmetry conditions are rejected for two person households but not for one person households we also show that income pooling is rejected for two person households we then test for our collective setting conditions on the couples data none of the collective setting restrictions are rejected we conclude that the collective setting is a plausible and tractable next step to take in the analysis of household behavior

oil price shocks and u s economic activity abstract our understanding of the sources of oil price fluctuations and their effects on the u s economy has undergone important transformations in the last decades first several studies have demonstrated the importance of identifying the causes of oil price fluctuations whether they are driven by demand or supply shocks instead of assuming that oil price changes are exogenous to the evolution of the world s economic activity second new methodologies have allowed researchers to re evaluate the functional form of the relationship between oil prices and u s gdp its components and job flows third significant advances have been made in understanding the relationship between oil price uncertainty news economic policy uncertainty and aggregate economic activity finally investigations into the time varying nature of oil price macroeconomy relationship have provided important insights into the reasons why unexpected increases in oil prices appear to shock less now than in the 1970s this paper reviews the studies that have contributed to these different aspects of the literature

wealth health and child development evidence from administrative data on swedish lottery players we use administrative data on swedish lottery players to estimate the causal impact of substantial wealth shocks on players own health and their children s health and developmental outcomes our estimation sample is large virtually free of attrition and allows us to control for the factors conditional on which the prizes were randomly assigned in adults we find no evidence that wealth impacts mortality or health care utilization with the possible exception of a small reduction in the consumption of mental health drugs our estimates allow us to rule out effects on 10 year mortality one sixth as large as the crosssectional wealth mortality gradient in our intergenerational analyses we find that wealth increases children s health care utilization in the years following the lottery and may also reduce obesity risk the effects on most other child outcomes including drug consumption scholastic performance and skills can usually be bounded to a tight interval around zero overall our findings suggest that in affluent countries with extensive social safety nets causal effects of wealth are not a major source of the wealth mortality gradients nor of the observed relationships between child developmental outcomes and household income jel codes i10 i14 j24

testing among models of intrahousehold resource allocation households are the locus for much economic decision making households function as producers investors in human and physical capital managers of risk and as consumers many resources are allocated within households and the effects of many policies depend on the dynamics of household decision making for example household decisions about allocating food among individual household members may determine who benefits from programs to improve health nutrition or welfare in many microeconomic studies the household is treated as an individual for analytical purposes in other words it is assumed that a household acts as a single entity with a single set of preferences recently however a number of economists have recognized that households are sites of conflict as well as cooperation and have begun to use new classes of models to explain how resources are allocated among household members this literature has especially improved our understanding of households in which income is not completely pooled in such a setting standard household models may offer misleading conclusions about the effects of policies on individual household members i this paper goes beyond recent surveys of intrahousehold issue by explicitly examining the assumptions predictions and empirical implications of different intrahousehold models in particular it analyzes empirical tests that distinguish among competing models by clarifying the similarities and differences among alternative models this paper also clarifies what has actually been demonstrated and what has not been demonstrated by previous empirical studies in so doing the paper points to specific topics in need of further research this paper is organized as follows section 2 analyzes the assumptions and predictions of each of the five main classes of intrahousehold resource allocation models section 3 describes empirical tests of these assumptions along with an analysis of empirical work that has been generated sections 4 and 5 discuss the questions that remain unanswered and directions for future research

oil price uncertainty and unemployment abstract in this study we empirically search the effects of oil price uncertainty and oil price shocks on u s unemployment rate using a garch in mean var model for the period 1974 q2 2017 q4 based on our findings we show that oil price uncertainty significantly increases unemployment rate in the u s economy likewise our impulse response analysis affirms that a positive oil price shock increases unemployment while the response of unemployment to a negative oil price shock is negative moreover we reveal that unemployment rate reacts to positive and negative shocks asymmetrically more specifically the response of unemployment to negative oil price shocks is negative and slighter in size besides oil price uncertainty is found to magnify the rise in the u s unemployment rate these findings are in keeping with the real options theory which reveals that the uncertainty about goods prices leads firms to postpone or abandon their production and investment and they seem to be robust to the use of different real oil price measures

reducing crime and violence experimental evidence from cognitive behavioral therapy in liberia abstract we show that a number of noncognitive skills and preferences including patience and identity are malleable in adults and that investments in them reduce crime and violence we recruited criminally engaged men and randomized one half to eight weeks of cognitive behavioral therapy designed to foster self regulation patience and a noncriminal identity and lifestyle we also randomized 200 grants cash alone and therapy alone initially reduced crime and violence but effects dissipated over time when cash followed therapy crime and violence decreased dramatically for at least a year we hypothesize that cash reinforced therapy s impacts by prolonging learning by doing lifestyle changes and self investment jel d12 d83 h23 i32 k42 o15 o17

income timing and liquidity constraints evidence from a randomized field experiment abstract people in developing countries sometimes desire deferred income streams which replace more frequent income flows with a single later lump sum we study the effects of short term wage deferral using a randomized experiment with participants in a temporary cash for work program workers who are assigned to lump sum payments are five percentage points more likely to purchase a high return investment we discuss the role of both barriers to saving and credit constraints in explaining our results while stated preferences for deferred payments suggest a role for savings constraints the evidence is also consistent with a simpler model of credit constraints alone

fluctuations in uncertainty this review article tries to answer four questions i what are the stylized facts about uncertainty over time ii why does uncertainty vary iii do fluctuations in uncertainty matter and iv did higher uncertainty worsen the great recession of 2007 2009 on the first question both macro and micro uncertainty appears to rise sharply in recessions on the second question the types of exogenous shocks like wars financial panics and oil price jumps that cause recessions appear to directly increase uncertainty and uncertainty also appears to endogenously rise further during recessions on the third question the evidence suggests uncertainty is damaging for short run investment and hiring but there is some evidence it may stimulate longer run innovation finally in terms of the great recession the large jump in uncertainty in 2008 potentially accounted for about one third of the drop in gdp

intra household resource allocation an inferential approach if household income is pooled and then allocated to maximize welfare then income under the control of mothers and fathers should have the same impact on demand with survey data on family health and nutrition in brazil the equality of parental income effects is rejected unearned income in the hands of a mother has a bigger effect on her family s health than income under the control of a father for child survival probabilities the effect is almost twenty times bigger the common preference or neoclassical model of the household is rejected if unearned income is measured with error and income is pooled then the ratio of maternal to paternal income effects should be the same equality of the ratios cannot be rejected there is also evidence for gender preference mothers prefer to devote resources to improving the nutritional status of their daughters fathers to sons

no longer trapped promoting entrepreneurship through cash transfers to ultra poor women in northern kenya we examine the short to medium run impacts of the rural entrepreneur access program a poverty graduation program that promotes entrepreneurship among ultra poor women in arid and semi arid northern kenya a context prone to poverty traps the program relies on cash transfers rather than asset transfers in addition to business skills training business mentoring and savings participation in each of the program s three rounds was randomly determined through a public lottery in the short to medium run we find that the program has a positive and significant impact on income savings and asset accumulation similar to more traditional poverty graduation programs that rely on asset transfers

control of resources bargaining power and the demand of food evidence from progresa abstract i use a structural model of households to recover how much resources each individual controls in the context of the mexican progresa program i find that the eligibility to receive the cash transfers induces a redistribution of resources from the father to both the mother and children although the mother is the one benefiting the most with these information i compute individual poverty rates and quantify to what extent the program reduces within household inequality i also combine these measures to construct a proxy for women s bargaining power and using causal identification techniques i estimate its direct effects on household demand for food exploiting random assignment of the cash transfers as an instrumental variable for the treatment of interest i show that mothers having majority control of household resources relative to fathers increase food consumption as a share of the household budget by 6 5 8 3 i use these estimates to argue that by knowing i the distribution of pre program resources inside the household and ii how much influence each decision maker can have on the desired policy outcome a policymaker can improve the cost effectiveness of a cash transfer program by targeting the cash to resource shares in addition to gender

cash or condition evidence from a cash transfer experiment this brief summarizes the results of a gender impact evaluation study entitled cash or condition evidence from a cash transfer experiment conducted from 2008 to the end of 2009 in malawi the study observed the impact of conditionality in cash transfer programs with two distinct interventions unconditional transfers uct arm and transfers conditional on school attendance cct arm targeted at adolescent girls in malawi on individual level dropout rates declined in both treatment arms however the uct arm is 43 percent as large as the cct arm the fraction of days attended in the cct arm is significantly higher than the uct cognitive ability math and english scores significantly improve for the cct but not for the uct probability of pregnancy and marriage were much lower in the uct arm the delays in marriage and fertility in the uct arm are found entirely among adolescent girls who dropped out of school after the start of the intervention improvements in human capital for the recipients of the cct are achieved at the cost of worse outcomes for people who drop out of school funding for the study derived from the global development network bill and melinda gates foundation national bureau of economic research nber africa project world bank research support budget grant world bank knowledge for change trust fund world development report 2007 small grants fund spanish impact evaluation fund and gender action plan trust fund

direct and indirect effects of malawi s public works program on food security labor intensive public works programs are important social protection tools in low income settings intended to supplement income of poor households and improve public infrastructure in this evaluation of the malawi social action fund an at scale government operated program across and within village randomization is used to estimate effects on food security and use of fertilizer there is no evidence that the program improves food security and some negative spillovers to untreated households these disappointing results hold even under modifications to the design of the program to offer work during the lean rather than harvest season or increase the frequency of payments

oil price uncertainty and u s employment growth abstract this paper studies the effects of oil price changes on u s aggregate and sectoral employment growth in the presence of time varying oil price uncertainty we estimate a bivariate garch in mean var model using u s monthly data of oil prices and employment growth for the period 1974 m2 2018 m11 based on the results we show that an increase in oil prices reduces total employment growth and that in most private sectors but the public sector is largely unaffected the effects on employment growth in various hub sectors are also different furthermore employment growths at both aggregate and disaggregate levels respond asymmetrically to positive and negative oil price shocks which could possibly be attributed to oil price uncertainty this asymmetric impact is more evident when the model is estimated on the entire sample than on the 1970s sample implying that the role of oil price uncertainty in accounting for variations in employment growth can differ over time these findings underline the empirical relevance of oil price uncertainty for the u s labor market dynamics

the impact of conditional cash transfers on consumption and investment in nicaragua abstract this article examines the impact of a nicaraguan conditional cash transfer programme on measures of expenditures and productive investment despite clear evidence from a randomised evaluation that the programme increased current expenditures there is little evidence that it increased agricultural or non agricultural investment an estimated marginal propensity to consume out of the transfers of nearly one combined with no effect of cumulative past transfers on current consumption corroborate the direct evidence on investment in contrast to gains made in human capital investment the potential for long term increases in consumption as a result of other forms of increased investment may be limited

the demand for food and calories we investigate nutrition and expenditure in rural maharashtra in india we estimate that the elasticity of calorie consumption with respect to total expenditure is 0 3 0 5 a range that is in accord with conventional wisdom the elasticity declines only slowly with levels of living and is far from the value of zero suggested by a recent revisionist literature in these indian data the calories necessary for a day s activity cost less than 5 percent of the daily wage which makes it implausible that income is constrained by nutrition rather than the other way around

tying odysseus to the mast evidence from a commitment savings product in the philippines we designed a commitment savings product for a philippine bank and implemented it using a randomized control methodology the savings product was intended for individuals who want to commit now to restrict access to their savings and who were sophisticated enough to engage in such a mechanism we conducted a baseline survey on 1777 existing or former clients of a bank one month later we offered the commitment product to a randomly chosen subset of 710 clients 202 28 4 percent accepted the offer and opened the account in the baseline survey we asked hypothetical time discounting questions women who exhibited a lower discount rate for future relative to current trade offs and hence potentially have a preference for commitment were indeed significantly more likely to open the commitment savings account after twelve months average savings balances increased by 81 percentage points for those clients assigned to the treatment group relative to those assigned to the control group we conclude that the savings response represents a lasting change in savings and not merely a short term response to a new product

the employment and wage effects of oil price changes a sectoral analysis in this paper we use micro panel data to examine the effects of oil price changes on employment and real wages at the aggregate and industry levels we also measure differences in the employment and wage responses for workers differentiated on the basis of skill level we find that oil price increases result in a substantial decline in real wages for all workers but raise the relative wage of skilled workers the use of panel data econometric techniques to control for unobserved heterogeneity is essential to uncover this result which is completely hidden in ols estimates while the short run effect of an oil price increase on aggregate employment is negative the long run effect is in fact positive we find that changes in oil prices induce changes in employment shares and relative wages across industries however we find little evidence that oil price changes cause labor to consistently flow into those sectors with relative wage increases copyright 1996 by mit press

governance and the effectiveness of public health subsidies evidence from ghana kenya and uganda abstract distributing subsidized health products through existing health infrastructure could substantially and cost effectively improve health in sub saharan africa there is however widespread concern that poor governance in particular limited health worker accountability seriously undermines the effectiveness of subsidy programs we audit targeted bed net distribution programs to quantify the extent of agency problems we find that around 80 of the eligible receive the subsidy as intended and up to 15 of subsidies are leaked to ineligible people supplementing the program with simple financial or monitoring incentives for health workers does not improve performance further and is thus not cost effective in this context

risk sharing and transactions costs evidence from kenya s mobile money revolution we explore the impact of reduced transaction costs on risk sharing by estimating the effects of a mobile money innovation on consumption in our panel sample adoption of the innovation increased from 43 to 70 percent we find that while shocks reduce consumption by 7 percent for nonusers the consumption of user households is unaffected the mechanisms underlying these consumption effects are increases in remittances received and the diversity of senders we report robustness checks supporting these results and use the four fold expansion of the mobile money agent network as a source of exogenous variation in access to the innovation jel e42 g22 o16 o17 z13 in developing countries informal networks provide an important means by which individuals and households share risk though the insurance they provide is often incomplete economists have proposed a number of reasons for this incompleteness including information asymmetries which manifest in problems of moral hazard and limited commitment both of which induce positive correlations between realized income and consumption in this article we emphasize a complementary source of incompleteness transaction costs literally the costs of transferring resources between individuals we test the impact of transaction costs on risk sharing by analyzing data from a large panel household survey that we designed and administered in kenya over a three year period to capture the expansion of mobile money this financial innovation has allowed individuals to transfer purchasing power by simple short messaging service sms technology and has dramatically reduced the cost of sending money across large distances mobile money is a recent innovation in developing economies one of the first and most successful examples to date is kenya s m pesa 1 in just four years after its

training wages and sample selection estimating sharp bounds on treatment effects this paper empirically assesses the wage effects of the job corps program one of the largest federally funded job training programs in the u s even with the aid of a randomized experiment the impact of a training program on wages is difficult to study because of sample selection a pervasive problem in applied microeconometric research wage rates are only observed for those who are employed and employment status itself may be affected by the training program this paper develops an intuitive trimming procedure for bounding average treatment effects in the presence of sample selection in contrast to existing methods the procedure requires neither exclusion restrictions nor a bounded support for the outcome of interest identification results estimators and their asymptotic distribution are presented the bounds suggest that the program raised wages consistent with the notion that the job corps raises earnings by increasing human capital rather than solely through encouraging work the estimator is generally applicable to typical treatment evaluation problems in which there is nonrandom sample selection attrition copyright wiley blackwell