Ximena V. Del Carpio

Does cash for school influence young women's behavior in the longer term? Evidence from Pakistan

The Punjab Female School Stipend Program, a female-targeted conditional cash transfer program in Pakistan, was implemented in response to gender gaps in education. An early evaluation of the program shows that the enrollment of eligible girls in middle school increased in the short term by nearly 9 percentage points. This paper uses regression discontinuity and difference-in-difference analyses to show that five years into the program implementation positive impacts do persist. Beneficiary adolescent girls are more likely to progress through and complete middle school and work less. There is suggestive evidence that participating girls delay their marriage and have fewer births by the time they are 19 years old. Girls who are exposed to the program later, and who are eligible for the benefits given in high school, increase their rates of matriculating into and completing high school. The persistence of impacts can potentially translate into gains in future productivity, consumption, inter-generational human capital accumulation and desired fertility. Lastly, there is no evidence that the program has negative spillover effects on educational outcomes of male siblings.

The Impact of Syrians Refugees on the Turkish Labor Market

Currently 2.5 million Syrians fleeing war have found refuge in Turkey, making it the largest refugee-hosting country worldwide. This paper combines newly available data on the distribution of Syrian refugees across Turkey and the Turkish Labour Force Survey to assess their labor market impact. Syrian refugees are overwhelmingly employed informally, since they were not issued work permits, making their arrival a well-defined supply shock to informal labor. Consistent with economic theory our instrumental variable estimates, which also control for distance from the Turkish-Syrian border, suggest large-scale displacement of natives in the informal sector. At the same time, consistent with occupational upgrading, there are increases in formal employment for the Turkish - though only for men without completed high school education. Women and the high-skilled are not in a good position to take advantage of lower cost informal labor. The low educated and women experience net displacement from the labor market and, together with those in the informal sector, declining earning opportunities.

Local Labor Supply Responses to Immigration

How natives adjust is central to an understanding of the impact of immigration in destination countries. Using detailed labor force data for Malaysia for 1990–2010, we provide estimates of native responses to immigration on multiple extensive margins and rare evidence for a developing country. Instrumental variable estimates show that increased immigration to a state causes substantial internal inward migration, consistent with the fact that immigration increases the demand for native workers. Relocating Malaysian workers are accompanied by their spouses (three-quarters of whom are housewives) and children who attend school. We find that these effects are concentrated among middle- and lower-skilled Malaysians.

Minimum Wage: Does it Improve Welfare in Thailand?

We study the causal impact of the minimum wage on employment and welfare in Thailand using a difference-in-difference approach that relies on exogenous policy variation in minimum wages across provinces. We find that minimum-wage increases have small disemployment effects on female, elderly, and less-educated workers and large positive effects on the wages of prime-age male workers. As such, increases in the minimum wage are associated with increases in household consumption per capita in general, but the consumption increase is greatest among those households around the median of the distribution. In fact, rises in the minimum wage increased inequality in consumption per capita within the bottom half of the distribution.

Can a market-assisted land redistribution program improve the lives of the poor? : evidence from Malawi

This paper evaluates the Malawis community based rural land development project (CBLDP), which provides a conditional cash and land transfer to a group of families to relocate to larger and more productive plots of land. In addition to supporting families in obtaining land, the program administers a farm development grant, assists in the procurement of water infrastructure, provides extension services, and makes sure that beneficiaries obtain group titles to the land. This paper sheds light whether the project had an impact on agricultural production, productivity, and a host of welfare outcomes by measuring differences between beneficiaries and statistically comparable non-beneficiaries, before and after the program. The paper also investigates whether aspects of the program, improved or worsened impacts. Rigorous evaluations are especially important for policy makers given that land reforms require vast financial resources, human resources, and political will. This paper contributes to the very limited body of research on market-based redistributive land reform, particularly in the African context, by evaluating the impact of 27 million dollars land resettlement program in Malawi. Increased access to farmland and cash for farm inputs should increase production, increased extension support is expected to enhance productivity, and formal land title may promote longer-term investments in land. To measure the impact of the program on all variables of interest propensity score matching is used to identify a control group among the ineligible population that is similar to the beneficiaries at baseline, a series of t-tests at baseline helps ensure that the groups are comparable at baseline, qualitative information obtains in-depth information on potential sources of biases that need to be taken care of in the estimations and difference-in-difference is used. This analysis indicates that the program had overall positive effects on the landholdings, title-holdings, and agricultural production of participating households. However, there is mixed evidence of the impact of the program on the food security and asset holding. The paper is organized as follows: part one gives introduction; part two describes the background of the project; part three discusses both the qualitative and quantitative analytical approaches; part four describes the empirical strategy; part five discusses the quantitative and qualitative findings; and part six concludes.

The Impact of Wealth on the Amount and Quality of Child Labor

This paper analyzes to what extent, and under what conditions, an increase in household wealth affects the use of child labor in poor households. It develops a simple theoretical model, which uses child labor, training, and schooling to maximize household income over time, subject to resource constraints. Then, it conducts an empirical analysis using randomized trial data, which were collected for the evaluation of the 2006 Nicaragua conditional cash transfer program. This social program transfers wealth to poor families in rural areas, conditional on childrens school attendance and health check-ups. In addition, for one third of the beneficiaries, there is a further wealth transfer to start a non-agricultural business. The paper finds that the conditional cash transfer program affected the volume and quality of child labor, reducing it in the aggregate and steering it towards skill-forming activities. Specifically, the program appears to have reduced the use of child labor for household chores and farm work, while increasing it for the non-traditional, skill-forming activities related to commerce and retail. Moreover, the paper finds that the source behind the increase in skill-forming child labor is not the basic component, which provides a transfer for paying for schooling and health services, but its the business-grant component, which provides a household grant for the creation of a micro business or a new economic activity.

Global migration of talent and tax incentives : evidence from Malaysia's returning expert program

This paper presents the first evidence on the efficacy of a major program designed to encourage the return migration of high-skilled individuals. The Malaysian Returning Expert Program targets high-skilled Malaysians abroad and provides them with tax incentives to return. At several eligibility thresholds, the probability of acceptance into the program increases discontinuously. Using administrative data on applicants, the analysis is able to identify the impact of acceptance to the Returning Expert Program on the probability of returning to Malaysia. The fuzzy regression discontinuity design estimates suggest that program approval increases the return probability by 40 percent for applicants with a preexisting job offer in Malaysia. There is no significant treatment effect for those who apply without a job offer. The estimated migration elasticity with respect to the net-of-tax rate, averaged across all applicants, is 1.2. Fiscal cost-benefit analysis of the Returning Expert Program finds a modest net fiscal effect of the program, between minus

Are irrigation rehabilitation projects good for poor farmers in Peru

6,900 and plus

Leveling the Intra-Household Playing Field: Compensation and Specialization in Child Labor Allocation

4,200 per applicant, suggesting that the program roughly pays for itself.

Does the minimum wage affect employment ? evidence from the manufacturing sector in Indonesia

This paper analyzes changes in agricultural production and economic welfare of farmers in rural Peru resulting from a large irrigation infrastructure rehabilitation project. The analysis uses a ten-year district panel and a spatial regression discontinuity approach to measure the causal effect of the intervention. While general impacts are modest, the analysis shows that the project is progressive--poor farmers consistently benefit more than non-poor farmers. Farmers living in districts with a rehabilitated irrigation site experience positive labor dynamics, in terms of income and agricultural jobs. Poor farmers increase their total income by more than