Rema Hanna

Incentives Work: Getting Teachers to Come to School

We use a randomized experiment and a structural model to test whether monitoring and financial incentives can reduce teacher absence and increase learning in India. In treatment schools, teachers’ attendance was monitored daily using cameras, and their salaries were made a nonlinear function of attendance. Teacher absenteeism in the treatment group fell by 21 percentage points relative to the control group, and the children’s test scores increased by 0.17 standard deviations. We estimate a structural dynamic labor supply model and find that teachers respond strongly to financial incentives. Our model is used to compute cost-minimizing compensation policies. (JEL I21, J31, J45, O15)

Environmental Regulations, Air and Water Pollution, and Infant Mortality in India

Using the most comprehensive data file ever compiled on air pollution, water pollution, environmental regulations, and infant mortality from a developing country, the paper examines the effectiveness of Indias environmental regulations. The air pollution regulations were effective at reducing ambient concentrations of particulate matter, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen dioxide. The most successful air pollution regulation is associated with a modest and statistically insignificant decline in infant mortality. However, the water pollution regulations had no observable effect. Overall, these results contradict the conventional wisdom that environmental quality is a deterministic function of income and underscore the role of institutions and politics.

Does the Effect of Pollution on Infant Mortality Differ Between Developing and Developed Countries? Evidence from Mexico City

Much of what we know about the marginal effect of pollution on infant mortality is derived from developed country data. However, given the lower levels of air pollution in developed countries, these estimates may not be externally valid to the developing country context if there is a nonlinear dose relationship between pollution and mortality or if the costs of avoidance behavior differs considerably between the two contexts. In this paper, we estimate the relationship between pollution and infant mortality using data from Mexico. We find that an increase of 1 parts per billion in carbon monoxide (CO) over the last week results in 0.0032 deaths per 100,000 births, while a 1 μg/m3 increase in particulate matter (PM10) results in 0.24 infant deaths per 100,000 births. Our estimates for PM10 tend to be similar (or even smaller) than the U.S. estimates, while our findings on CO tend to be larger than those derived from the U.S. context. We provide suggestive evidence that a non-linearity in the relationship between CO and health explains this difference.

Self-Targeting: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Indonesia

This paper shows that adding a small application cost to a transfer program can substantially improve targeting through self-selection. Our village-level experiment in Indonesia finds that requiring beneficiaries to apply for benefits results in substantially poorer beneficiaries than automatic enrollment using the same asset test. Marginally increasing application costs on an experimental basis does not further improve targeting. Estimating a model of the application decision implies that the results are largely driven by the nonpoor, who make up the bulk of the population, forecasting that they are unlikely to pass the asset test and therefore not bothering to apply.

Does Elite Capture Matter? Local Elites and Targeted Welfare Programs in Indonesia

This paper investigates the impact of elite capture on the allocation of targeted government welfare programs in Indonesia, using both a high-stakes field experiment that varied the extent of elite influence and non-experimental data on a variety of existing government transfer programs. Conditional on their consumption level, there is little evidence that village elites and their relatives are more likely to receive aid programs than non-elites. Looking more closely, however, we find that this overall result masks a difference between different types of elites: those holding formal leadership positions are more likely to receive benefits, while informal leaders are actually less likely to. We show that capture by formal elites occurs during the distribution of benefits under the programs, and not during the processes when the beneficiary lists are determined by the central government. However, while elite capture exists, the welfare losses it creates appear quite small: since formal elites and their relatives are only 9 percent richer than non-elites, are at most about 8 percentage points more likely to receive benefits than non-elites, and represent at most 15 percent of the population, eliminating elite capture entirely would improve the welfare gains from these programs by less than one percent.

The Impact of Inspections on Plant-Level Air Emissions

Abstract Each year, the United States conducts approximately 20,000 inspections of manufacturing plants under the Clean Air Act. This paper compiles a panel dataset on plant-level inspections, fines, and emissions to understand whether these inspections actually reduce air emissions. We find plants reduce air emissions by fifteen percent, on average, following an inspection under the Clean Air Act. Plants that belong to industries that typically have low abatement costs respond more strongly to an inspection than those who belong to industries with high abatement costs.

Debunking the Stereotype of the Lazy Welfare Recipient: Evidence from Cash Transfer Programs Worldwide

Targeted transfer programs for poor citizens have become increasingly common in the developing world. Yet, a common concern among policy makers - both in developing as well as developed countries - is that such programs tend to discourage work. We re-analyze the data from 7 randomized controlled trials of government-run cash transfer programs in six developing countries throughout the world, and find no systematic evidence that cash transfer programs discourage work.

Citywide effects of high-occupancy vehicle restrictions: Evidence from “three-in-one” in Jakarta

How to make traffic worse everywhere One policy aimed at improving traffic flows in large cities requires vehicles to carry two or three passengers, usually in lanes or roads set aside for high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) travel. Whether this actually increases speeds depends on how heavily the HOV roads are used and the availability of alternate routes. Hanna et al. took advantage of an abrupt policy change—the elimination of HOV rules—in Jakarta to collect the travel times from Google Maps for HOV and alternate routes before and after the change (see the Perspective by Anderson). They observed a serious worsening of traffic throughout the city. Science, this issue p. 89; see also p. 36 Upon removing vehicle occupancy requirements, more drivers and fewer passengers substantially reduced vehicle speeds in Jakarta, Indonesia. Widespread use of single-occupancy cars often leads to traffic congestion. Using anonymized traffic speed data from Android phones collected through Google Maps, we investigated whether high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) policies can combat congestion. We studied Jakarta’s “three-in-one” policy, which required all private cars on two major roads to carry at least three passengers during peak hours. After the policy was abruptly abandoned in April 2016, delays rose from 2.1 to 3.1 minutes per kilometer (min/km) in the morning peak and from 2.8 to 5.3 min/km in the evening peak. The lifting of the policy led to worse traffic throughout the city, even on roads that had never been restricted or at times when restrictions had never been in place. In short, we find that HOV policies can greatly improve traffic conditions.

Implications of Climate Change for Children in Developing Countries

Summary: Climate change may be particularly dangerous for children in developing countries. Even today, many developing countries experience a disproportionate share of extreme weather, and they are predicted to suffer disproportionately from the effects of climate change in the future. Moreover, developing countries often have limited social safety nets, widespread poverty, fragile health care systems, and weak governmental institutions, making it harder for them to adapt or respond to climate change. And the fact that many developing countries have high birth rates and high ratios of children to adults (known as high dependency ratios) means that proportionately more children are at risk there than in the developed world. In this article, Rema Hanna and Paulina Oliva delve into climate change’s likely implications for children in developing countries. Such children already face severe challenges, which climate change will likely exacerbate. In particular, most people in developing countries still depend primarily on agriculture as a source of income, and so anything that reduces crop yields—such as excessive heat or rain—is likely to directly threaten the livelihoods of developing-country families and their ability to feed their children. Poor nutrition and economic disruption are likely to lower children’s scholastic achievement or even keep them out of school altogether. Children in developing countries also face more-severe threats from both air and water pollution; from infectious and parasitic diseases carried by insects or contaminated water; and from possible displacement, migration, and violence triggered by climate change. How can we temper the threat to children in developing countries? Hanna and Oliva write that we should design and fund policies to shield children in developing nations from the harm caused by climate change. Such policies might include developing new technologies, inventing more-weather-resistant crops, improving access to clean water, increasing foreign aid during disasters, and offering more assistance to help poor countries expand their safety net programs.

Tangible Information and Citizen Empowerment: Identification Cards and Food Subsidy Programs in Indonesia

Redistribution programs in developing countries often “leak” because local officials do not implement programs as the central government intends. We study one approach to reducing leakage. In an experiment in over 550 villages, we test whether mailing cards with program information to targeted beneficiaries increases the subsidy they receive from a subsidized rice program. On net, beneficiaries received 26 percent more subsidy in card villages. Ineligible households received no less, so this represents substantially lower leakage.