What shapes our opportunities?
On Wednesday 26 August Erika T. Povea will hold a trial lecture on a prescribed topic and defend her thesis for the PhD degree at NHH.
What does it take for welfare programmes to work?
On Friday 28 August Pallavi Prabhakar will hold a trial lecture on a prescribed topic and defend her thesis for the PhD degree at NHH.
Title of the thesis:
«Essays on Development Economics and Public Service Delivery»
Summary:
Public programs face several frictions in translating public resources into their intended welfare gains. This dissertation studies how informational, resource, and institutional frictions shape welfare outcomes.
The first chapter studies whether informational frictions limit the effectiveness of digital transparency programs. India’s largest transparency program publicly ranks districts on development indicators, yet few citizens knew about it and 75% overestimated their district’s relative performance. In a randomized experiment, Pallavi Prabhakar provides information on the district’s declining rank and available grievance channels. Those who initially overestimated performance update their beliefs and attend grievance workshops. Beliefs about perceived influence over the government do not change.
The findings show that understanding how different dimensions of beliefs affect behavioral responses is important for designing transparency programs to generate accountability.
The second chapter examines how financial and non-financial constraints affect investments in early childhood. A randomized trial in Tanzania compares cash transfers, parenting support, and a cost-equivalent combination:
- cash improves children’s nutrition and physical growth, while
- parenting support improves parental caregiving practices and socio-emotional development
- combining the two generates larger gains in socio-emotional development
Findings demonstrate that financial and non-financial constraints operate through distinct but complementary pathways for child development, with implications for design of social protection policies.
Why gender inequality follows women into retirement
On Tuesday 25 August Qquillaccori G. López will hold a trial lecture on a prescribed topic and defend his thesis for the PhD degree at NHH.
The third chapter builds on the cash transfer arm to examine how digital empowerment affects whether mothers nominate someone else to receive the transfer. Digitally empowered women are less likely to nominate their spouse to receive the transfer. The findings show that digitizing social protection does not ensure that targeted women receive or control transfers.
The fourth chapter synthesizes 39 randomized trials across 22 low- and middle-income countries and finds that cash and nutrition interventions produce larger and more consistent improvements in children’s physical health than information-based interventions.
Together, the chapters show that the returns to public spending depend on whether policy operates on the margin binding for the outcome of interest. Effective policy therefore requires not only choosing the right intervention, but designing it around the constraints that shape how resources translate into outcomes.
Prescribed topic for the trial lecture:
“From Evidence to Policy Impact: Learning from RCTs and Implementing the Lessons”
Trial lecture and defense:
Aud N (NHH)
Members of the evaluation committee:
Professor Gernot Peter Doppelhofer (chair of the committee), Department of Economics, NHH
Assistant Professor Miri Stryjan, Aalto University School of Business
Associate Professor Ann-Sofie Isaksson, University of Gothenburg
Supervisors:
Professor Ingvild Almås (main supervisor), University of Zurich and FAIR (NHH)
Professor Vincent Somville, Department of Economics, NHH
Professor Orazio Attanasio, Yale Department of Economics
The trial lecture and thesis defense will be open to the public.