Abstract: To raise school enrollment and attendance, many programs in developing countries eliminate or reduce private contributions to education. This paper documents an unintended negative effect of such programs. Using data from a randomized experiment that provides free uniforms to primary school children in Ecuador, we find that the intervention has a significantly negative impact on attendance. An explanation is that parents who pay for their children's uniforms (the control group) feel more committed to the school than parents who got the uniforms for free (the treated) and therefore encourage their children to attend school. Consistent with this, we find that the impact is largest shortly after the purchase of the uniform, and during the exam period when more is at stake. Download this paper.
Abstract: Recent studies for primary and secondary education find positive effects of the share of girls in the classroom on achievement of boys and girls. This study examines whether these results can be extrapolated to post-secondary education. We conduct an experiment in which the shares of girls in workgroups for first year students in economics and business are manipulated and students are randomly assigned to these groups. Boys tend to postpone their dropout decision when surrounded by more girls, and there is also a modest reduction in early absenteeism. On the other hand, boys perform worse on courses with high math content when assigned to a group with many girls. Overall, however, we fail to find substantial gender peer effects on achievement. This in spite of the fact that students in groups with many girls help each other more often and study together more often. Download this paper.
Abstract: This paper examines the wage premium to computer use in a developing country: Ecuador. We use different approaches to examine whether the premium is causal. Controlling for an extensive set of observables, we find a wage difference between users and non-users of around 20%. Using first differences, the premium drops and is no longer significant in a specification that includes proxies for workers' computer experience and knowledge. Estimates of the impact of the intensity of computer use are also small and in most cases insignificant. Estimates of the pencil premium are substantial in level specifications, but become insignificant in fixed effect specifications. Taken together, the findings suggest that also in the setting of a developing country the computer premium does not reflect a causal impact of computers on productivity, but should be attributed to unobserved worker and/or job characteristics. Download this paper.
Abstract: In 2007 the government of Ecuador launched a micro-credit program for enterprises run by poor households. The program was targeted to households at the bottom two quintiles in the wealth distribution. This paper uses data collected prior to the start of the program to examine whether the government’s targeting strategy reaches all households that are constrained in their access to loans of the type provided by the program. We find that the program excludes households in the third quintile of the wealth distribution that are equally credit constrained and have very similar demands for credit as households served by the program. Download this paper.
Abstract: We study student loan behavior in the Netherlands where i) higher education students know little about the conditions of the government's financial aid program and ii) take-up rates are low. In a field experiment we manipulated the amount of information students have about these conditions. The treatment has no impact on loan take-up, which is not due to students already having decided to take a loan or students not absorbing the information. We conclude that a lack of knowledge about specific policy parameters does not necessarily imply a binding information constraint. Download this paper.
Abstract: This paper presents evidence about the impact on school enrollment of a program in Ecuador that gives cash transfers to the 40 percent poorest families. The evaluation design consists of a randomized experiment for families around the first quintile of the poverty index and of a regression discontinuity design for families around the second quintile of this index, which is the program’s eligibility threshold. This allows us to compare results from two different credible identification methods, and to investigate whether the impact varies with families’ poverty level. Around the first quintile of the poverty index the impact is positive while it is equal to zero around the second quintile. This suggests that for the poorest families the program lifts a credit constraint while this is not the case for families close to the eligibility threshold. Download this paper.
Abstract: A vast body of empirical studies lends support to the incentive effects of rank-order tournaments. Evidence comes from experiments in laboratories and non-experimental studies exploiting sports or firm data. Selection of competitors across tournaments may bias these non-experimental studies, whereas short task duration or lack of distracters may limit the external validity of results obtained in lab experiments or from sports data. To address these concerns we conducted a field experiment where students selected themselves into tournaments with different prizes. Within each tournament the best performing student on the final exam of a standard introductory microeconomics course could win a substantial financial reward. A standard non-experimental analysis exploiting across tournament variation in reward size and competitiveness confirms earlier findings. We find however no evidence for effects of tournament participation on study effort and exam results when we exploit our experimental design, indicating that the non-experimental results are completely due to sorting. Treatment only affects attendance of the first workgroup meeting following the announcement of treatment status, suggesting a difference between short-run and long-run decision making. Download this paper.
Abstract: This paper estimates the effects of attending medical school on health behavior and health status exploiting that admission to medical school in the Netherlands is determined by a lottery. Because lottery losers are permitted to re-apply, we use the result of the first lottery in which someone participates as instrumental variable. Our results show that health education reduces alcohol intake and being underweight, and seems to reduce smoking. It has, however, no impact on being overweight or obese, or on subjective health status. The effect on the frequency of physical exercise is even negative. This mixed evidence makes it unlikely that the content of education programs explains the education gradient for health. Health education has a large impact on the probability of being registered for donations of organs, suggesting that information provision is a possible channel to raise the supply of organs. Download this paper.
Abstract: Incentive instruments like asset ownership and performance pay often have to strike balance between the productive incentives and the rent-seeking incentives they provide. Standard theory predicts that a given instrument becomes less attractive when the effectiveness of rent-seeking activities increases. More recent theories that emphasize the importance of reciprocity, however, suggest that this relationship may go the other way around. In this paper we test these predictions by means of a laboratory experiment. By and large our findings confirm standard theory. Incentive instruments typically become less attractive when the scope for rent-seeking activities increases. However, reciprocity motivations do seem to mitigate the adverse effects of rent-seeking opportunities to a considerable extent. Download this paper.
Abstract: To stimulate investment in training by individuals, the Dutch tax system allows a deduction of direct training expenditures from taxable income. This paper investigates to what extent the resulting cost reduction encourages training investments. Two different identification strategies are used. The first strategy uses the progressive structure of the income tax scheme and compares groups with taxable income just above or just below kinks. The second strategy takes advantage of the 2001 tax reform, which implied substantial changes in marginal tax rates. These strategies exploit different sources of exogenous variation and are based on different identifying assumptions. Nevertheless, the results point in the same direction: tax incentives increase training participation. Download this paper.