Tessa Bold

Scaling Up What Works: Experimental Evidence on External Validity in Kenyan Education

The recent wave of randomized trials in development economics has provoked criticisms regarding external validity. We investigate two concerns – heterogeneity across beneficiaries and implementers – in a randomized trial of contract teachers in Kenyan schools. The intervention, previously shown to raise test scores in NGO-led trials in Western Kenya and parts of India, was replicated across all Kenyan provinces by an NGO and the government. Strong effects of short-term contracts produced in controlled experimental settings are lost in weak public institutions: NGO implementation produces a positive effect on test scores across diverse contexts, while government implementation yields zero effect. The data suggests that the stark contrast in success between the government and NGO arm can be traced back to implementation constraints and political economy forces put in motion as the program went to scale.

Insurance for the Poor

Households in developing countries are exposed to high risks, with important consequences for their welfare. It has long been acknowledged that shocks, ranging from individual-specific (such as illness, theft or unemployment) to economy-wide (such as droughts or recessions), have important implications for consumption and nutrition, not least among the poor. Policy responses have mainly focused on safety nets or other social security mechanisms. This chapter goes beyond this view by arguing, first, that the costs associated with these risks are much higher than those estimated from their short-term impact and, second, that expanding insurance provision for the poor could result in substantial long-term welfare benefits. To illustrate this possibility, we use examples, mainly from Latin America, starting from a consideration of how risk affects the poor and the ways in which they respond to it. The chapter assesses the most promising insurance instruments, while emphasizing that expanding insurance provision should not be seen as a panacea, but instead be viewed as part of a comprehensive extension of protection of the poor.

Why Did Abolishing Fees Not Increase Public School Enrollment in Kenya

A large empirical literature has shown that user fees significantly deter public service utilization in developing countries. While most of these results reflect partial equilibrium analysis, we find that the nationwide abolition of public school fees in Kenya in 2003 led to no increase in net public enrollment rates, but rather a dramatic shift toward private schooling. Results suggest this divergence between partial- and general-equilibrium effects is partially explained by social interactions: the entry of poorer pupils into free education contributed to the exit of their more affluent peers.

The High Return to Private Schooling in a Low-Income Country

Existing studies from the United States, Latin America, and Asia provide scant evidence that private schools dramatically improve academic performance relative to public schools. Using data from Kenya — a poor country with weak public institutions — we find a large effect of private schooling on test scores, equivalent to one full standard deviation. This finding is robust to endogenous sorting of more able pupils into private schools. The magnitude of the effect dwarfs the impact of any rigorously-tested intervention to raise performance within public schools. Furthermore, nearly two-thirds of private schools operate at lower cost than the median government school.

Implications of Endogenous Group Formation for Efficient Risk‐Sharing

This paper models the implications of endogenous group formation for efficient risk-sharing contracts in the dynamic limited commitment model. Endogenising group formation requires that any risk-sharing arrangement is not only stable with respect to individual deviations but also with respect to deviations by sub-groups. This requirement alters the central predictions of the dynamic limited commitment model for efficient bilateral risk-sharing. Firstly, consumption of constrained agents depends on the previous history of shocks and the interaction of the history of shocks with the current income realizations of other constrained agents. As a consequence, the efficient contract does not display amnesia. Secondly, the covariance between current consumption and past income can take on negative values. Based on the first result, we derive a formal test for the presence of endogenous group formation under limited commitment. In addition, we show how this test can be extended to distinguish a limited commitment/perfect information environment from a full commitment/imperfect information environment empirically.

Clientelism in the public sector : why public service reforms may not succeed and what to do about it

The World Development Report 2017 Governance and the Law (World Bank, 2017) highlights the intimate connection between the effectiveness of policy reforms and governance. The Report argues that power asymmetries play an important role in ensuring that policy reforms are credible and overcome collective action problems; with one particular manifestation being clientelism. Further, it notes that in order to expand the set of implementable policies, there is need to change the policy arena by: (a) changing incentives; (b) reshaping preferences; and (c) increasing the contestability of the decision-making process. In this background paper, The author focusses on how power structures affect incentives for policy reforms and ultimately outcomes in the context of public service delivery. Here, It have a particular power structure in mind, namely when public servants themselves hold power. In many developing countries (and beyond), public servants are not just the agents tasked with delivering services by the principal (the clients of the service, usually represented by politicians), they are also elites, in the sense that they can have direct influence on policy design and implementation. This has implications for the quality of public services: if the main purpose of the relationship between principal and agent is not to deliver quality public services, but rather to share rents accruing from public office, then service delivery outcomes are likely to be poor. Breaking such an equilibrium may be difficult and successful policy reform needs to take these kind of power constraints into consideration. In the first part make the case that public servants – aside from delivering services – may capture rents in a multitude of ways : through the allocation of jobs, through above market wages, and through low performance on the job, including with absenteeism or moonlighting. This research also suggests why public sector reform may be so difficult: if rent-sharing arises as part of a tacit agreement between politicians and public servants in which rents are transferred in exchange for political support, then any reform that tries to make public servants more accountable and reduce their rents will likely be seen as reneging on such an agreement and be met with opposition.In the second part of the paper, we review research that has focused on making public servants more accountable. This, mainly experimental literature, usually takes the political power constraints as given, and highlights the importance of information and the identity of those monitoring the public servant. We discuss to what extent such local reforms can be successful.

Delivering Service Indicators in Education and Health in Africa: A Proposal

The Delivering Service Indicators seek to provide a set of indices for benchmarking service delivery performance in education and health in Africa in order to track progress in and across countries over time. It seeks to enhance effective and active monitoring of service delivery systems and to become an instrument of public accountability and good governance in Africa. The main perspective adopted by the Delivering Service Indicators index is one of citizens accessing services and facing potential shortcomings in those services available to them. The index is thus presented as a Service Delivery Report Card on education and health. However, unlike traditional citizen report cards, it assembles objective information from micro level surveys of service delivery units.