Niels Kemper

Pronatal Property Rights Over Land and Fertility Outcomes: Evidence from a Natural Experiment in Ethiopia

This study exploits a natural experiment to investigate the impact of land reform on the fertility outcomes of households in rural Ethiopia. Public policies and customs created a situation where Ethiopian households could influence their usufruct rights to land via a demographic expansion of the family. The study evaluates the impact of the abolishment of these pronatal property rights on fertility outcomes. By matching aggregated census data before and after the reform with administrative data on the reform, a difference-in-differences approach between reform and non-reform districts is used to assess the impact of the reform on fertility outcomes. The impact appears to be large. The study estimates that women in rural areas reduced their life-time fertility by 1.2 children due to the reform. Robustness checks show that the impact estimates are not biased by spillovers or policy endogeneity.

Financial Shock-Coping in Rural Thailand and Vietnam

This research examines financial decision-making not from the perspective of the ordinary but from the extraordinary. Shocks are extraordinary. Events such as excessive rainfall or drought, illness or death of a household member have the potential to dramatically impair household income streams. Shocks to income are shocks to consumption unless households manage to mitigate or avoid the reduction in consumption through the choice of an appropriate smoothing mechanism. Affected households take such measures under the commonly employed assumption that households prefer smooth over fluctuating consumption (due to risk aversion). It is the purpose of this research to analyse household financial decision making after the occurrence of a shock.

Enhancing Clients’ Livelihoods: Design, Implementation and Impact Evaluation of Decent Work Innovations in Microfinance

In 2007 the International Labour Organization (ILO) launched the “Microfinance for Decent Work” (MF4DW) action research programme, which was intended to foster the development of innovative financial and non-financial products and services for microfinance clients. A bottom-up approach was pursued where microfinance institutions could propose innovations that promised to have a social impact. The piloting of these interventions was complemented by an impact evaluation. In this article the 17 selected innovations are described as well as the accompanying impact evaluation approaches. Even if final evaluation results are not available yet, lessons learnt during the implementation of the MF4DW initiative seem worthwhile to be made available to other programmes targeting a systematic improvement of microfinance impact.