Katrina Kosec

Heat stress increases long-term human migration in rural Pakistan

Human migration attributable to climate events has recently received significant attention from the academic and policy communities (1-2). Quantitative evidence on the relationship between individual, permanent migration and natural disasters is limited (3-9). A 21-year longitudinal survey conducted in rural Pakistan (1991-2012) provides a unique opportunity to understand the relationship between weather and long-term migration. We link individual-level information from this survey to satellite-derived measures of climate variability and control for potential confounders using a multivariate approach. We find that flooding—a climate shock associated with large relief efforts—has modest to insignificant impacts on migration. Heat stress, however—which has attracted relatively little relief—consistently increases the long-term migration of men, driven by a negative effect on farm and non-farm income. Addressing weather-related displacement will require policies that both enhance resilience to climate shocks and lower barriers to welfare-enhancing population movements.

Community-based conditional cash transfers in Tanzania : results from a randomized trial

Given the success of conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs elsewhere in the world, in 2010 the Government of Tanzania, via the Tanzania Social Action Fund (TASAF), rolled out a CCT program in three districts. Its aim was to see if, using a model that relied heavily on communities to target beneficiaries and deliver payments, the program could improve outcomes for the poor the way centrally-run CCT programs have in other contexts. What follows is a summary of the pilot program, the methodology used to evaluate it, and its major impacts.

Public or Private Drinking Water? The Effects of Ownership and Benchmark Competition on U.S. Water System Regulatory Compliance and Household Water Expenditures

Whether water systems should be owned and operated by governments or private firms is intensely controversial, and little empirical research sheds light on the issue. In this paper we use a panel dataset that includes every community water system in the U.S. from 1997-2003 to test the effects of ownership and benchmark competition on regulatory compliance and household water expenditures. We find that when controlling for water source, location fixed effects, county income, urbanization, and year, there is little difference between public and private systems. Public systems are somewhat more likely to violate the maximum levels of health-based contaminants allowed under the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA), while private systems are somewhat more likely to violate monitoring and reporting regulations. The results are reversed for systems that serve more than 100,000 people. Household expenditures on water at the county level decrease slightly as the share of private ownership increases, contradicting fears that private ownership brings higher prices. While direct competition among piped water systems is practically nonexistent, we find that benchmark competition among water systems within counties is associated with fewer SDWA violations and, when combined with private ownership, lower household expenditures. Overall, the results suggest that absent competition, whether water systems are owned by private firms or governments may, on average, simply not matter much.

Federal Competition and Economic Growth

We examine the question of how competition between governments within metropolitan areas affects economic growth outcomes. Using data on metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) in the United States, we find that the number of county governments is significantly and positively correlated with the average annual growth rate of income per employee over 1969-2006. Exploiting exogenous variation in the natural topography of our MSAs to instrument for the number of county governments, we find evidence supporting a causal interpretation of the effect of inter-jurisdictional competition on economic growth. Furthermore, our estimates suggest that not accounting for the endogeneity of inter-jurisdictional competition may lead to systematic underestimation of its growth-enhancing benefits. A natural question is whether our findings merely reflect some form of reversion to the mean. Quite to the contrary, we find that higher inter-jurisdictional competition was already associated with higher income in 1969, and that the disparity only grew over the intervening 37 years.

The Economic Costs of the War in Iraq

Government policies are routinely subjected to rigorous cost analyses. Yet one of todays most controversial and expensive policies - the ongoing war in Iraq - has not been. The

Temporary and permanent migrant selection: Theory and evidence of ability-search cost dynamics

212 billion allocated by the U.S. Treasury has been widely reported. But the real, direct economic costs include more than budgetary allocations. Other costs include lives lost, injuries, and lost civilian productivity of National Guard and Reserve troops mobilized for the conflict. The conflict, however, also has generated cost savings, especially in terms of resources no longer being used to enforce UN sanctions and people no longer being killed by Saddam Husseins regime. In this paper we monetize these direct costs and avoided costs of the war in Iraq, both todate and the total expected net present value of costs through 2015. Our estimates are imprecise. The data are not of high quality and every calculation requires a number of assumptions. In addition, we do not calculate indirect effects of the conflict, such as its impact on oil prices or other macroeconomic impacts, or certain intangibles, like the benefits of a stable democratically elected government in Iraq, should one emerge. Nonetheless, our best estimates suggests that the direct economic costs to the U.S. through August 2005 are about

Predictors of Essential Health and Nutrition Service Delivery in Bihar, India: Results From Household and Frontline Worker Surveys

255 billion, about

The effect of land inheritance on youth employment and migration decisions: Evidence from rural Ethiopia

40 billion to coalition partners, and

What Affects the Quality of Economic Analysis for Life-Saving Investments?

134 billion to Iraq. These estimates suggest a global cost to date of about

Politics and preschool : the political economy of investment in pre-primary education

428 billion. The avoided costs, meanwhile, are about