Pierluigi Conzo

Credit Access and Life Satisfaction: Evaluating the Nonmonetary Effects of Micro Finance

Microfinance Institutions (MFIs) are used to claim that their impact goes beyond money since rescuing from exclusion uncollateralized poor borrowers significantly affects their dignity, self-esteem, social recognition, future economic perspectives and, through it, life satisfaction. Our article aims to verify the validity of this claim by evaluating whether access to microfinance loans has significant direct impact on life satisfaction beyond its indirect impact via current income changes. Empirical findings on a sample of poor borrowers in the suburbs of Buenos Aires show that, after controlling for survivorship, selection and interview bias, microfinance membership has a significant and positive effect on life satisfaction.

Market Access, Organic Farming and Productivity: The Effects of Fair Trade Affiliation on Thai Farmer Producer Groups

The study analyses the impact of Fair Trade (FT) and organic farming on a sample of FT rice producers in Thailand. It finds that per capita income from agriculture is positively and significantly affected by years of organic certification and FT affiliation. The estimated FT and organic certification contributions to producers’ economic well-being are higher when account is taken of the relatively higher proportion of selfconsumption among affiliated farmers. But the per capita income effect does not translate into higher productivity owing to a concurrent increase in hours worked.

Sociability, Altruism and Subjective Well-Being

We provide non experimental evidence of the relevance of sociability on subjective wellbeing by investigating the determinants of life satisfaction on a large sample of Europeans aged above 50. We document that voluntary work, religious attendance, helping friends/neighbours and participation to community-related organizations affect positively and significantly life satisfaction. We illustrate the different impact that some sociability variables have on eudaimonic versus cognitive measures of subjective wellbeing. Our empirical findings discriminate among other regarding and self-regarding preferences as rationales explaining such behaviour. We document that different combinations between actions and motivations have different impact on life satisfaction thereby providing support for the relevance of these specific “contingent goods” and to the literature of procedural utility. Our findings are confirmed in robustness checks including refinements of the dependent variable, instrumental variables and sensitivity analysis on departures from the exogeneity assumption.

Calamity, Aid and Indirect Reciprocity: The Long Run Impact of Tsunami on Altruism

Natural disasters produce effects on social, risk and time preferences of victims. We test altruistic preferences on a sample of Sri Lankan microfinance borrowers affected/unaffected by the tsunami 2004 after 7 years from the event. People reporting at least one damage transfer and expect less in the dictator game than no-damaged. Among damaged, who suffered also house damages or injuries send and expect more than those reporting only losses to the economic activity. Since the former are shown to receive significantly more aids than the latter we interpret such superior generosity as a form of indirect reciprocity.

The effects of microfinance on child schooling: a retrospective approach

Two crucial problems when research agencies or donors need to assess empirically the microfinance/children education nexus on already operating organizations are lack of availability of panel data and selection bias. We propose an original approach which tackles these problems by combining retrospective panel data, fixed effects and comparison between pre- and post-treatment trends. The relative advantage of our approach vis-à-vis standard cross-sectional estimates (and even panels with just two time periods) is that it allows to analyse the progressive effects of microfinance on borrowers. With this respect, our article gives an answer to the widespread demand of impact methodologies required by regulators or by funding agencies which need to evaluate the current and past performance of existing institutions. We apply our approach to a sample of microfinance borrowers coming from two districts of Buenos Aires with different average income levels. By controlling for survivorship bias and heterogeneity in time invariant and time varying characteristics of respondents we find that years of credit history have a positive and significant effect on child schooling conditional to the borrower’s standard of living and distance from school.

Education and health in Europe

ABSTRACT The productive and allocative theories predict that education has positive impact on health: the more educated adopt healthier life styles and use more efficiently health inputs, and this explains why they live longer. We find partial support for these theories with an econometric analysis on a large sample of Europeans aged above 50 documenting a significant and positive correlation among education years, life styles, health outputs and functionalities. We however find confirmation for an anomaly already observed in the United States, namely the more educated are more likely to contract cancer. Our results are robust when controlling for endogeneity and reverse causality in IV estimates with instrumental variables related to quarter of birth and neighbours’ cultural norms.

Disaster, Aid, and Preferences: The Long-run Impact of the Tsunami on Giving in Sri Lanka

Do natural disasters produce effects on preferences of victims in the long run? We test the impact of the tsunami shock on generosity of a sample of Sri Lankan affected/unaffected microfinance borrowers seven years after the event.

The impact of health expenditure on the number of chronic diseases

We investigate the impact of health expenditure on health outcomes on a large sample of Europeans aged above 50 using individual and regional level data. We find a negative and significant effect of lagged health expenditure on subsequent changes in the number of chronic diseases. This effect varies according to age, health behavior, gender, income, and education. Our empirical findings are confirmed also when health expenditure is instrumented with parliament political composition.

Fertility and Life Satisfaction in Rural Ethiopia

Despite recent strong interest in the link between fertility and subjective well-being, the focus has centered on developed countries. For poorer countries, in contrast, the relationship remains rather elusive. Using a well-established panel survey—the Ethiopian Rural Household Survey (ERHS)—we investigate the empirical relationship between fertility and life satisfaction in rural Ethiopia, the largest landlocked country in Africa. Consistent with the fertility theories for developing countries and with the sociodemographic characteristics of rural Ethiopia, we hypothesize that this relationship varies by gender and across life stages, being more positive for men and for parents in old age. Indeed, our results suggest that older men benefit the most in terms of life satisfaction from having a large number of children, while the recent birth of a child is detrimental for the subjective well-being of women at reproductive ages. We address endogeneity issues by using lagged life satisfaction in ordinary least squares regressions, through fixed-effects estimation and the use of instrumental variables.

Education, Health and Subjective Wellbeing in Europe

The productive and allocative theories predict that education has positive impact on health: the more educated adopt healthier life styles and use more efficiently health inputs and this explains why they live longer. We find partial support for these theories with an econometric analysis on a large sample of Europeans aged above 50 documenting a significant and positive correlation among education years, life styles, health outputs and functionalities. We however find confirmation for an anomaly already observed in the US, namely the more educated are more likely to contract cancer. Our results are robust when controlling for endogeneity and reverse causality in IV estimates with instrumental variables related to quarter of birth and neighbours’ cultural norms.