We quantify how pollution affects aggregate productivity and welfare in spatial equilibrium. We show that skilled workers in China emigrate away from polluted cities. These patterns are evident under various empirical specifications, such as when instrumenting for pollution using upwind power plants, or thermal inversions. Pollution changes the spatial distribution of skilled and unskilled workers, and wage returns by location. We quantify the loss in aggregate productivity due to this re-sorting by estimating a spatial equilibrium model. Counterfactual simulations show that reducing pollution increases productivity through spatial re-sorting by approximately as much as the direct health benefits of clean air.
We quantify how pollution affects aggregate productivity and welfare in spatial equilibrium. We show that skilled workers in China emigrate away from polluted cities. These patterns are evident under various empirical specifications, such as when instrumenting for pollution using upwind power plants, or thermal inversions. Pollution changes the spatial distribution of skilled and unskilled workers, and wage returns by location. We quantify the loss in aggregate productivity due to this re-sorting by estimating a spatial equilibrium model. Counterfactual simulations show that reducing pollution increases productivity through spatial re-sorting by approximately as much as the direct health benefits of clean air.
We conduct a systematic re-analysis of intervention-based studies that promote hygienic latrines and evaluate via experimental methods. We impose systematic inclusion criteria to identify such studies and compile their microdata to harmonize outcome measures, covariates, and estimands across studies. We then re-analyze their data to report metrics that are consistently defined and measured across studies. We compare the relative effectiveness of different classes of interventions implemented in overlapping ways across four countries: community-level demand encouragement, sanitation subsidies, product information campaigns, and microcredit to finance product purchases. In the sample of studies meeting our inclusion criteria, interventions that offer financial benefits generally outperform information and education campaigns in increasing adoption of improved sanitation. Contrary to a policy concern about sustainability, financial incentives do not undermine usage of adopted latrines. Effects vary by share of women in the household, in both positive and negative directions, and differ little by poverty status.
Low- and middle-income nations host 76 percent of the world's refugees. This study uses original data to explore within-country spatial variability in refugee-hosting responsibilities. We find that hosting responsibilities for the displaced Rohingya people in Bangladesh are allocated in similarly unequal fashion when analyzed at the national, regional, and microregional levels. Refugee camps are placed in socioeconomically disadvantaged communities relative to both Bangladesh as a whole and surrounding areas. Our findings underscore the importance of considering host communities in the coordination of humanitarian responses to refugee crises to prevent economic hardship and political backlash.
Low- and middle-income nations host 76 percent of the world's refugees. This study uses original data to explore within-country spatial variability in refugee-hosting responsibilities. We find that hosting responsibilities for the displaced Rohingya people in Bangladesh are allocated in similarly unequal fashion when analyzed at the national, regional, and microregional levels. Refugee camps are placed in socioeconomically disadvantaged communities relative to both Bangladesh as a whole and surrounding areas. Our findings underscore the importance of considering host communities in the coordination of humanitarian responses to refugee crises to prevent economic hardship and political backlash.
Less than 30% of people in Africa received a dose of the COVID-19 vaccine even 18 months after vaccine development. Here, motivated by the observation that residents of remote, rural areas of Sierra Leone faced severe access difficulties, we conducted an intervention with last-mile delivery of doses and health professionals to the most inaccessible areas, along with community mobilization. A cluster randomized controlled trial in 150 communities showed that this intervention with mobile vaccination teams increased the immunization rate by about 26 percentage points within 48–72 h. Moreover, auxiliary populations visited our community vaccination points, which more than doubled the number of inoculations administered. The additional people vaccinated per intervention site translated to an implementation cost of US $33 per person vaccinated. Transportation to reach remote villages accounted for a large share of total intervention costs. Therefore, bundling multiple maternal and child health interventions in the same visit would further reduce costs per person treated. Current research on vaccine delivery maintains a large focus on individual behavioural issues such as hesitancy. Our study demonstrates that prioritizing mobile services to overcome access difficulties faced by remote populations in developing countries can generate increased returns in terms of uptake of health services.
Conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs aim to reduce poverty or advance social goals by encouraging desirable behavior that recipients under-invest in. An unintended consequence of conditionality may be the distortion of recipients’ behavior in ways that lower welfare. We first illustrate a range of potential distortions arising from CCT programs around the world. We then show that in the simple case where a CCT causes low return participants to select into a behavior, and social returns and private perceived returns are aligned, transfer size plays an important role: the larger the transfer, the stronger the distortion becomes, implying that (i) there is an optimal transfer size for such CCTs, and (ii) unconditional cash transfers (UCTs) may be better than CCTs when the transfer amount is large. We provide empirical evidence consistent with these claims by studying a cash transfer program conditional on seasonal labor migration in rural Indonesia. In line with theory, we show that when the transfer size exceeds the amount required for travel expenses, distortionary effects dominate and migration earnings decrease.
South Asians traveling to richer Asian nations is the world's largest migration corridor. We track down applicants to a government lottery that randomly allocated visas to Bangladeshis for temporary labor contracts in Malaysia, five years later. Most lottery winners migrate, and migrants' earnings triple. Their remittance raises their family's standard of living in Bangladesh. The migrant's absence pauses marriage and childbirth and shifts decision-making power toward females. Migration removes enterprising individuals, lowering household entrepreneurship, but does not crowd out other family members' labor supply. A deferred migration offer never materialized for a subgroup. Their premigration investments in skills generate no returns in the domestic market.
Reliable testing data for new infectious diseases like COVID-19 is scarce in developing countries making it difficult to rapidly diagnose spatial disease transmission and identify at-risk areas. We propose a method that uses readily available data on bi-lateral migration channels combined with COVID-19 cases at respective migrant destinations to construct a spatially oriented risk index. We find significant and consistent association between our measure and various types of outcomes including actual COVID-19 cases and deaths, indices of government policy responses, and community mobility patterns. Results suggest that future pandemic models should incorporate migration-linkages to predict regional socio-economic and health risk exposure.
This paper studies the welfare effects of encouraging rural–urban migration in the developing world. To do so, we build and analyze a dynamic general-equilibrium model of migration that features a rich set of migration motives. We estimate the model to replicate the results of a field experiment that subsidized seasonal migration in rural Bangladesh, leading to significant increases in migration and consumption. We show that the welfare gains from migration subsidies come from providing better insurance for vulnerable rural households rather than from correcting spatial misallocation by relaxing credit constraints for those with high productivity in urban areas that are stuck in rural areas.
This paper studies the welfare effects of encouraging rural–urban migration in the developing world. To do so, we build and analyze a dynamic general-equilibrium model of migration that features a rich set of migration motives. We estimate the model to replicate the results of a field experiment that subsidized seasonal migration in rural Bangladesh, leading to significant increases in migration and consumption. We show that the welfare gains from migration subsidies come from providing better insurance for vulnerable rural households rather than from correcting spatial misallocation by relaxing credit constraints for those with high productivity in urban areas that are stuck in rural areas.
Addressing public health externalities often requires community-level collective action. Due to social norms, each person’s sanitation investment decisions may depend on the decisions of neighbors. We report on a cluster randomized controlled trial conducted with 19,000 households in rural Bangladesh where we grouped neighboring households and introduced (either financial or social recognition) rewards with a joint liability component for the group, or asked each group member to make a private or public pledge to maintain a hygienic latrine. The group financial reward has the strongest impact in the short term (3 months), inducing a 7.5–12.5 percentage point increase in hygienic latrine ownership, but this effect dissipates in the medium term (15 months). In contrast, the public commitment induced a 4.2–6.3 percentage point increase in hygienic latrine ownership in the short term, but this effect persists in the medium term. Non-financial social recognition or a private pledge has no detectable effect on sanitation investments.
We track the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on mental health in eight Low and Middle Income Countries (LMICs) in Asia, Africa, and South America utilizing repeated surveys of 21,162 individuals. Many respondents were interviewed over multiple rounds pre- and post-pandemic, allowing us to control for time trends and within-year seasonal variation in mental health. We demonstrate how mental health fluctuates with agricultural crop cycles, deteriorating during pre-harvest “lean” periods. Ignoring this seasonal variation leads to unreliable inferences about the effects of the pandemic. Controlling for seasonality, we document a large, significant, negative impact of the pandemic on mental health, especially during the early months of lockdown. In a random effects aggregation across samples, depression symptoms increased by around 0.3 standard deviations in the four months following the onset of the pandemic. The pandemic could leave a lasting legacy of depression. Absent policy interventions, this could have adverse long-term consequences, particularly in settings with limited mental health support services, which is characteristic of many LMICs.