This dissertation consists of three chapters that study questions on take-up and impacts of programs that increase the welfare of vulnerable populations.

In chapter 1, we estimate income effects on earnings using the 2021 expanded Child Tax Credit (CTC). Children born in January 2016 were eligible for a credit of $3,600, while children born in December 2015 were eligible for $3,000. We use tax data and a regression discontinuity design to estimate the earnings response to this temporary, one-year $600 increase in non-labor income. We find that employment decreased by 2.0% in 2021 and 1.1% in 2022 in low-income families, with no effect on families with higher incomes. This decrease in wage employment was offset by an increase in self-employment reported on tax returns, but this result is not robust in all specifications.

In chapter 2, we experimentally test whether information frictions and costs of filing taxes explain low take-up of the expanded CTC. We designed an information and counseling intervention contacting parents through school districts, coupled with assistance from local VITA (Volunteer Income Tax Assistance) programs. According to tax records, treatment increased tax filing by 2 percentage points, increased CTC claims by (a statistically insignificant) 2 percentage points, and tripled filing through VITA. Effects were concentrated among previous non-filers and Spanish speakers, demonstrating the value of targeted outreach.

In chapter 3, we provide the first causal evidence on reducing forced labor risk. 18 million people are victims of labor exploitation globally every year. In the Indian construction sector, the most common indicators include excessive hours, working on rest days, and unpaid wages. Micro-contractors (MCs), who directly control working conditions, often face financial challenges, primarily due to limited access to working capital. This paper tests if easing MC's liquidity constraints can reduce forced labor and improve working conditions. 250 MCs in Bengaluru and Delhi were randomly offered low-cost loans. Overall, working conditions did not improve 6-9 months after loans were disbursed, but we find significant variability: workers of more educated and non-migrant MCs experienced improvements in their working conditions, including timely payments and shorter working hours.

Research in economics has established early childhood and adolescence as critical in influencing long-term health and productivity. Policies and interventions aiming to improve the lives of disadvantaged persons may be most effective if targeted at youth. This work contributes to the literature on the evaluation of programs and interventions targeted at youth on health and labor-market outcomes, both in the short and long-term.

Chapter 1 studies the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program to analyze the long-term impacts of targeting resources to disabled children in poverty. I exploit a natural experiment created by the Supreme Court decision Sullivan v. Zebley that eased standards disproportionately for people with mental disorders to study the effects of qualifying for benefits at a younger age. Using confidential data from the Social Security Administration to select a sample of people who had previously been denied benefits, I find that children with mental disorders who were younger when standards changed spend longer on SSI. Their increased benefit receipt leads to reduced cumulative labor market earnings, with the reduction highest for those with the longest exposure to eased standards in childhood.

Chapter 2 uses a randomized controlled trial to study ways to alleviate malnutrition in poor, rural areas of Nepal. We evaluate the effects of an intervention aimed at new mothers that provided both an unconditional cash transfer and information about health and nutrition issues. The program successfully improved maternal knowledge about best practices, led women to implement behavioral changes, and improved child development. Such an intervention makes use of existing social infrastructure, and if scaled up could be a useful tool in combatting childhood malnutrition in Nepal.

Chapter 3 analyzes the impacts of opening the High Line Park on home values in New York City. I implement a difference-in-differences strategy, comparing values over time for properties by distance from the park. Home values of properties within one-third of a mile of the park increased 10% immediately following its opening. I also show that more new businesses opened in the surrounding areas, implying that only measuring property values underestimates the broader effects on the economy.

A fundamental concern in development economics is the presence of institutional and labor market failures that interact with frictions in financial markets, which may prevent economic growth. This dissertation studies the importance of these interactions in a series of three papers. Chapter 1 studies the extent to which by allowing grassroots organizations--as opposed to banks--to allocate publicly-funded credit, it is possible to overcome existing financial frictions and deliver resources the community members who need it the most: poor, high-productivity households. Using a long panel dataset I find evidence of misallocation: credit was provided to households with poor credit history, which were richer and less productive than non-borrowers. Instead, resources were delivered to households with connections to local political leaders. The results highlight the limitation of community-based approaches to allocating public resources in developing countries. Chapter 2 shows that a cash-transfer program targeted to children in Bolivian public schools boosted employment among mothers of beneficiary children by providing extra-liquidity in a context of fixed costs to work. Chapter 3 exploits rich data from Thailand to show that estimates of total factor productivity can be used to predict business success in the aftermath of credit-expansion programs.

In Chapter 1, we study the intergenerational persistence of inequality by estimating grandmother-mother associations in the loss of a child, using pooled data from 119 Demographic and Health Surveys in 44 developing countries. Compared with compatriots of the same age, women with at least one sibling who died in childhood face 39% higher odds of having experienced at least one own-child death, or 7 percentage points at age 49. Place fixed effects reduce estimated mortality persistence by 47%; socioeconomic covariates explain far less. Within countries over time, persistence falls with aggregate child mortality, so that mortality decline disproportionately benefits high-mortality lineages.

In Chapter 2, we examine the marriage market outcomes of forcibly displaced women. Using data from 12 representative surveys in 7 countries, we document that women who are adolescents at the time of displacement are more likely to be married. This pattern is robust to the choice of control group and across countries. We do not find this pattern for displaced adolescent men. We provide additional evidence of this relationship by using unique features of the partition of India in 1947, an event that resulted in large-scale bilateral displacement between India and the newly formed Pakistan. Using a representative household survey collected in 1973, we find that women who were adolescents when they were displaced by partition were significantly more likely to marry earlier, in line with the descriptive cross-country evidence.

In Chapter 3, we estimate mother-daughter associations in IPV victimization using representative survey data from 16 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, a region of the world with particularly high IPV rates. We find that persistence is large in both levels and relative magnitudes. Women who report that their mother was physically abused by their father are 26 percentage points (1.9x) more likely to report physical or sexual violence from their current spouse. We then explore the role of cultural transmission. We find robust evidence for parental socialization, where daughters’ exposure to interparental violence increases their reported acceptability of IPV, and mixed evidence for the role of assortative matching in the marriage market on these attitudes.

Chapter 1 studies the effect of reducing class-size, by hiring more tenured teachers, on students’ scholastic performance. Using a maimonides’ rule-kind of instrumental variable strategy and a longitudinal panel data from India, I find that a 10% reduction in pupil-teacher ratio (PTR) results in 0.02 improvement in value-added scores. However, a cost effectiveness calculation suggests that reduction in PTR, by hiring more regular teachers, entails cost-benefit ratio of 2.8, meaning that for every INR 100 spent on hiring a regular teacher, the student gains only INR 35 in future income. Thus, despite of positive impact on student learning, it is an economically costly program.Chapter 2 examines the long-term health and educational effects of the Bhopal Gas Disaster (BGD), one of the most serious industrial accidents in history, using geolocated data from India’s National Family Health Survey-4 (NFHS-4) and the 1999 Indian Socio-Economic Survey [NSSO-1999]. A spatial difference-in-differences strategy estimated the relative effect of being in utero near Bhopal relative to other cohorts and to those further from Bhopal. We find that men who were in utero at the time were more likely to have a disability that affected their employment 15 years later, and had higher rates of cancer and lower educational attainment over 30 years later. These results indicate social costs stemming from the BGD that extend far beyond the mortality and morbidity experienced in the immediate aftermath. In Chapter 3, I combine a novel dataset of >1 million patent applications from India with the firm level R&D expenditures to study the impact of weak Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) on innovation activities. With the announcement of TRIPS, the technology classes that were allowed to patent only the process innovations (a weak form of IPR) before, started showing uptick in innovation activities both in terms of patent counts and industry-level R&D expenditures, compared to technology groups that were already enjoying more secured product patenting provisions. Decomposing the industry-level impact reveals that the incremental innovations by smaller firms that require modest sums of R&D have been replaced by more expensive R&D projects by larger firms, following the adoption of TRIPS.

Too often governments fail to provide access to quality public services to the poor. My work focuses on this issue and the bottlenecks that impede high-quality government provision of education in sub-Saharan African countries.

Chapter 1 studies whether outsourcing public services to private entities improves service delivery in fragile states. It provides experimental evidence from the Partnership Schools for Liberia (PSL) program, which delegated management of 93 public schools to eight different private organizations. Within one academic year, outsourcing increased students scores in English and math by .18$\sigma$, relative to control schools. While the highest-performing providers generated increases in learning of \input{tables/alto_effect}\unskip$\sigma$, the lowest-performing providers had no impact on learning. Consistent with the rules of provider contracts, we find no evidence that providers engaged in student selection. However, providers were allowed to shift pupils from oversubscribed schools and underperforming teachers to other government schools. These results suggest that leveraging the private sector to improve service delivery in fragile states is promising, but they also highlight the importance of procurement rules and contracting details to aligning public and private interests.

Chapter 2 studies cross-age tutoring --- in which older students tutor younger students --- as an inexpensive alternative for providing personalized instruction. Tutoring in math has a small positive effect on math test scores. The effect is concentrated among middle-ability students, suggesting that tutors are not able to help advanced learners and those lagging behind grade-level competencies.

Chapter 3 studies complementarities across policies in education. While the idea that complementarities across policies can lead to increasing returns has a long tradition in economics, there is limited evidence that clearly identifies such complementarities. It presents evidence of the impact of providing schools with (a) unconditional capitation grants, (b) bonus payments to teachers based on student performance, and (c) both of the above. We find no impact on student learning from providing either the grants or teacher incentives but significant positive effects from providing both. We find strong evidence of complementarities between improving school inputs and teacher incentives, with the combined effect being greater than the sum of the individual effects.

This paper investigates the causal relationship between birth weight and school achievement among children in grades 1 through 8. We find that birth weight significantly affects performance on both math and language test scores in school. Children with higher birth weight do better - a 10% increase in birth weight improves performance in math by nearly 0.05 standard deviations in 1st grade. Children who are born at a weight less than 1500 grams (very low birth weight) have scores in math that are 0.15 standard deviations less in 1st grade. We exploit repeated observations on children to show that birth weight has a persistent effect that does not deteriorate as children advance through grades (upto 8th grade). Children with greater birth weight are also less likely to have ever repeated a grade. The causal link is identified by using a twins estimator - we collected birth weight and basic demographic data on all twins born in Chile between 1992-2000 and match these twin pairs to administrative school records between 2002-2008. There are no differences in school attendance by birth weight, suggesting that missing school perhaps due to health problems is likely not a channel via which test score differentials arise.

Economic development is deeply connected with politics. Policies that foster economic growth and reduce poverty typically rely on politicians who might prefer specific groups and have career concerns. This dissertation consists of three chapters related to this issue.

Chapter 1 studies the role that political time horizons play on investments in service delivery. It leverages a policy change in Mexico that removed a ban on the consecutive re-election of local politicians in the context of staggered local elections. The results show that mayors affected by the reform make significantly more investments in the ability of their local governments to provide public goods; they also borrow less and finance their investments through less corrupt practices. The chapter presents a theoretical framework that discusses some of the key incentives at play and proposes a simple strategy to parse out these incentives empirically. The estimated treatment effects are more pronounced in places where mayors face a higher probability of re-election, suggesting that the longer horizon effect is a key incentive driving the results.

Chapter 2 studies the role that political parties play in the allocation of credit by development banks. Using a regression discontinuity design in the context of loans to municipal governments in Mexico, it shows that municipal governments represented by a mayor of the presidential party are significantly more likely to receive new loans and more resources. These effects are driven by the allocation of credit by the largest state-owned development bank, whereas there is no effect on the allocation of credit by private banks. Municipalities where a candidate of the presidential party won spend more in debt services, yet the evidence overall indicates that they do not increase service delivery.

Chapter 3 studies whether voters reward politicians for the provision of public infrastructure. Leveraging different sources of variation in the allocation of a public infrastructure program in Mexico, it finds that voters living near the infrastructure projects do not reward municipal and federal incumbents. The evidence suggests that a mechanism driving the allocation of this program is an infrastructure-for-money mechanism.

Rationale

Objectives

Methods

Measurements and main results

Conclusions