Content:
Winter Development Workshops
| Date | Speaker | Title | Abstract |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01/10/2011 | Bruce Wydick University of San Francisco |
Does International Child Sponsorship Work? A Six-Country Study of Impacts on Adult Life Outcomes | International child sponsorship is one of the leading forms of direct aid from households in wealthy countries to needy children in developing countries, where we estimate that 8.36 million children are currently supported currently through formal international sponsorship organizations. In this paper we present results from a six-country impact study of Compassion International, a leading child sponsorship organization, in which we obtain first‑hand household survey data from 10,144 individuals in Uganda, Guatemala, the Philippines, India, Kenya, and Bolivia. We utilize an age-eligibility rule imposed as programs were introduced across different villages in the six countries from 1980 to 1992 to achieve statistical identification of impact on adult life outcomes of formerly sponsored children relative to their ineligible older siblings. Using household fixed-effects to control for genetics, family environment and household selection, and an instrumental variable that utilizes sibling order relative to program rollout to control for intra-household endogenous child selection, we find that sponsorship results in 2.42 additional years of formal education, and large and statistically significant impacts on the probability of employment, occupational choice, age of marriage and child-bearing, community leadership, and dwelling quality. We also find evidence of positive spillover effects on many of these variables to siblings and other village residents of the same age. We believe that the results of this study may have important policy insights: that the transformation of reference points and self-expectations among children in developing countries may be strong complements to the provision of educational and economic opportunities. |
| 02/24/2011 Please note this seminar is on a Thursday. |
Yasuhara Shimamura Ritsumeikan University |
The Dynamics of Educational Attainment for Orphaned Children and Adolescents in Sub-Saharan Africa: Evidence from Malawi | |
| 02/28/2011 | Ole Dahl Rasmussen & Michael Carter University of Southern Denmark & University of California, Davis |
Methods for assessing community-managed microfinance in Malawi | |
| 03/07/2011 | Jing Cai University of California, Berkeley |
Social Learning in Weather Insurance Take-up: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment in China | |
| 03/14/2011 | Silvia Prina Case Western |
Do simple savings accounts help the poor to save? Evidence from a field experiment in Nepal |