UC Santa Cruz

This dissertation contains three essays broadly related to program evaluation using randomized control trial in developing countries.

In Chapter 1, joint work with David Sungho Park, we evaluate the impact of a multifaceted female empowerment program on reducing intimate partner violence (IPV) in urban Liberia. We ran a randomized controlled trial (RCT) in partnership with the Liberian Red Cross. The program intervention includes intensive psychosocial therapy and vocational skills training throughout a full year. About 12 months after program completion, we find the program significantlyreduced the proportion of women who experienced emotional, physical, and sexual IPV by 10-26 percentage points (from control bases of 24-62 percent). While there are multiple pathways through which IPV could be impacted, one channel is that the business training was highly effective: labor supply increased by 37 percent and expenditure by 49 percent. One focus of the program is psychological empowerment, and we find positive but statistically insignificant effects on distress and happiness indices. We also find improvements in social norms around IPV: perceived justifiability of IPV reduced by 0.3 standard deviations.

In Chapter 2, joint work with Shilpa Aggarwal, Dahyeon Jeong, David Sungho Park, Jonathan Robinson and Alan Spearot, we study the dynamic effects of large, unconditional cash transfers in rural Liberia and Malawi using bi-monthly surveys. We document improvements in food security until the end of surveying (about a year in Liberia and two in Malawi), but find a short-lived effect on food expenditures and no effect on non-agricultural income at any point. Increased productive investments appear to drive increased food security. After 18-25 months, we also document improvements in IPV, psychological well-being, and resilience, as well as investment and agricultural output. We find no evidence of effects on local prices or of spillovers to untreated households.

In Chapter 3, joint work with Shilpa Aggarwal, Dahyeon Jeong, David Sungho Park, Jonathan Robinson and Alan Spearot, we quantify effects of survey fatigue by randomizing the order of questions in 2–3 hour-long in-person surveys. An additional hour of survey time increases the probability that a respondent skips a question by 10\%–64\%. Because skips are more common, the total monetary value of aggregated categories such as assets or expenditures declines as the survey goes on, and this effect is sizeable for some categories: for example, an extra hour of survey time lowers food expenditures by 25\%. We find similar effect sizes within phone surveys in which respondents were already familiar with questions, suggesting that cognitive burden may be a key driver of survey fatigue.