Violent conflict has enduring effects on child health, but the speed at which these effects manifest is not fully understood. By use of data from a decade before to shortly after the Nigerian Boko Haram insurgency extended across the border to Cameroon, this study investigates the immediate effects of a deteriorating security environment caused by foreign-born insurgent terrorism on children’s health. Boko Haram attacks decrease weight-for-height for children under 5 years—an indicator of short-term health and nutrition—within an average of 2.6 months after the attacks. This effect is likely driven by a reduction in health-care service utilization, which can exacerbate the prevalence and the severity of conditions such as fever and diarrhea. However, the attacks do not affect dietary diversity or child mortality. The results underscore the importance of maintaining accessibility to health-care service after the start of terrorist violence to prevent irreversible effects, a concern that is increasingly relevant for countries combating the infiltration of foreign terrorists.
Financial stress is correlated with behavioral biases thought to negatively affect quality of economic decision-making. To investigate whether this hypothesis holds for short-term (acute) financial stress, I conducted a lab-in-the-field experiment with vendors in neighborhood markets in Addis Ababa. Half of the vendors in the study were visited by a mystery shopper who made a single sizable purchase at their stalls, tripling vendors’ average daily earnings on that day but leaving their poverty status unchanged. Vendors who received this unanticipated earnings shock reported higher than expected earnings and an improvement in psychological well-being. However, the unanticipated increase in earnings did not translate into improved cognition or decision-making. Descriptive evidence shows that monthly shortfalls in earnings are more predictive of better-quality decision-making (as proxied by income-seeking behavior) than day-to-day variation in earnings.
We test for cheap talk between husbands and wives in farm households. In a lab-in-the-field experiment, husbands allocate inputs between their own plots and their wives' higher-return plots. We vary how returns on the wife's plot are communicated. Across all treatments, husbands underinvest in their wives' land. We model this with limited enforcement of marital agreements and derive additional predictions. Allocative inefficiencies are greater when women hold private information, especially in households with low resource sharing under full information. Communication only partly offsets inefficiencies, and only when information is verifiable ex post.
We conducted a randomized experiment to study the effects of a summer learning camp and the language of instruction on education outcomes. The program, covering social studies and mathematics, provided additional high-quality learning time for fourth and fifth graders in Malawi. The program significantly increased test scores in social studies and mathematics (0.24–0.36 standard deviations). We find suggestive evidence that the effect on test scores in social studies was greater for students instructed in Chichewa, the local language, than for those instructed in English. However, we find no such evidence of differential effects on test scores in mathematics by the language of instruction.
Noncommunicable diseases impede development, yet evidence on screening in low-resource settings is scarce. We evaluate hypertension screening in rural South Africa using a multidimensional regression discontinuity: a survey measures blood pressure (BP) and refers individuals exceeding either of two thresholds. Overall, referral modestly raises treatment uptake but shows no average BP effect after 4 years. We use BP variation with time of day and temperature to identify screens that are less likely to produce false positives. For these, referrals lower systolic BP by 5 mm Hg and uncontrolled BP by 22 percentage points. Limiting false positives may increase referral impact and program cost-effectiveness.
This study evaluates the effect of the Read Liberia intervention that provided teacher training, coaching, and teaching and learning materials, reaching 57,600 grades 1 and 2 students across 640 schools. Exploiting the randomized assignment of schools to the program, we find that Read Liberia improved students’ ability to read a paragraph, doubling oral reading fluency in intervention schools relative to control schools (an effect size of 0.60 standard deviations), and increased their ability to comprehend that paragraph (oral reading comprehension) by 12–13 percentage points, corresponding to an effect size of 0.47 standard deviations. On the basis of the analysis of the program implementation data, teachers’ and students’ surveys, and in-depth classroom observations, we argue that the improvements in reading performance are driven by the availability and utilization of Read Liberia reading materials and not by improved teaching practices in schools. Good-quality reading materials combined with improved instructional practices have the potential to generate even higher effects.
A standard view in the migration literature is that of a fixed family sending off a migrant who may leave his or her spouse and children behind. We show empirically that changing marital status after migration is widespread for migrants moving from developing countries to the United States, so that the family unit itself changes with migration. Only one-third of ever-married adult migrants are currently married to a spouse they wed before migration. The variance of spousal characteristics is higher for migrants than nonmigrants. Using a survey experiment with young unmarried Mexican men, we find that they have more uncertainty about the characteristics of their future spouses should they migrate than if they were to stay at home, and that priming them to think about marriage reduces their expressed likelihood of migrating. We draw out implications of these counterfactual spouses for empirical research on migration decisions and effects and for migration policy.
