Essays on household decision making in developing countries

This dissertation contains three essays on household decision making in the areas of education and health in developing countries. The first chapter explores intra-household decision making in the context of conditional cash transfer programs in education. This study provides an empirical test of whether the recipient of the incentive-either the parent or the child-affects outcomes. I conduct this test through a field experiment in Gurgaon, India where an incentive to achieve a specific reading goal was randomly assigned to be received by either the parent or by the child. I find that incentives to parents result in worse outcomes than incentives to children when parents are less productive in their children's education, measured through lower initial test scores. Conversely, incentives to parents result in better outcomes when parents are more productive, measured through higher initial test scores. In the second chapter, written jointly with Leigh Linden, we estimate the effects of peer networks on the enrollment and attendance patterns of children in a community-based education program in India. The program is open to all out-of-school children, and we randomly assign a subset of the eligible children to be actively encouraged to participate. We find that active encouragement increases participation among selected children by 30 percentage points. Having a treated friend increases participation by about 20% of the main effect.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Economics.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2009

Author dc:creator

• Berry, James W. (James Wesley)

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Esther Duflo, Abhijit Banerjee and Benjamin Olken.

• Economics.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/49710

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/49710