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This project is a survey experiment in Tunisia where we measure first and second order beliefs about the appropriateness of women working outside the house. We randomise people into one of four treatment arms in a 2x 2 design (direct question + financial incentive to elicit second order beliefs) (direct question + no financial incentive) (list experiment + financial incentive) (list experiment + no financial incentive)

Continuing education beyond the compulsory years of schooling is one of the most important choices an adolescent has to make; higher education is associated with a host of social and economic benefits both for the person and its community. Today, there is ample evidence that educational aspirations are an important determinant of said choice. We implement a multilevel, networked experiment in 45 Mexican high schools, and provide evidence of the malleability of educational aspirations, and the interdependence of students' choices and the effect of our intervention with peer networks. Moreover, we find that a video- intervention, which combines role-models and information about returns to education, is successful in updating students' beliefs and consequently educational aspirations.

This document describes the pre-analysis plan for an experimental intervention designed to increase citizen trust in political leaders, government representatives and public officials, and voter turnout in Tunisia. In 2018, the Tunisian government initiated the second phase of Programme de Réhabilitation et d’Intégration des Quartiers d’Habitation (PRIQH 2), a public infrastructure programme that targets low-income areas, to be implemented across the country through a phase-in design. Multiple delays led to PRIQH 2 to begin in 2023. As part of the baseline survey, taking place from December 2021 to February 2022, we developed an information experiment in which we show a short video presenting residents of a neighbourhood that benefitted from the first phase of PRIQH. There, individuals talk about the progress that PRIQH brought to their neighbourhood. The intervention is randomly assigned to households living in areas that are to benefit from PRIQH 2 in the two first implementation phases. We aim to assess the effect of the video on citizen trust in political representatives and future voting behaviour. The present document outlines in more detail how outcome variables are defined, and which empirical strategy we will use to assess the anticipated effects.

There is room for optimism. There is a considerable potential to thwart the dystopias of the joint collapse of democracy and the natural environment. We know why public action remains too little too late: too little trust among substantial groups of the population that the collective response to globalization is serving them and too little broadly spread information on the pending collapse of the natural environment. We also know what increases trust: collective action towards more social cohesion, towards less income and wealth inequality, towards better chances for a quality education for all children and a more equal access to health care, funded by taxes on profits and on wealth. The chance for optimism is in the use of that knowledge in public policy. Put knowledge institutes in the position of promoting the knowledge that provides leeway for more trust in society and in Government and for better informing the public that climate change is a threat to all. Trust and information to save the fish from extinction in the 2080’s by taking decisions in the 2020’s.

Girls’ poor ability to manage menstrual health (MH) imposes barriers to education and general wellbeing, especially in low- and middle-income countries. This paper presents the results of the Ritu trial, a 2-year clustered randomized controlled trial, examining the effect of a multi-faceted menstrual health intervention in Bangladesh. We randomized 148 schools from one rural district, into one of three groups; i) receiving a school program (sanitation facilities, MH education and support); ii) a school program and a targeted household program (parental MH education); iii) or the control group. The primary beneficiaries are schoolgirls in grades 6 until 8, age 11-15. We measure short- to medium-term impacts on school attendance, a set of psychosocial outcomes, and menstrual health outcomes. We use three sources of school attendance data: information from administrative records; self-reported survey responses and data from spot-checks where someone from the research team would appear unannounced and on randomly selected dates at school to record attendance. We find significant treatment effects in both treatment arms. The Ritu trial significantly improved menstrual health outcomes. Moreover, it significantly reduced school absence rates and reduced the likelihood of dropping out of school before grade 8. The program also improved psychosocial wellbeing and empowerment during menses, but this did not translate into substantial improvement of general wellbeing and empowerment. We find little evidence that the additional household program generated larger effects than the school program alone – which is important for programming purposes given the substantial additional costs of the household intervention. Our findings show the school program was considerably more cost-effective than the combined program, both when measured in ‘additional years of schooling’ and ‘learning-adjusted years of schooling’. Even though MH programs are becoming more prevalent, supporting quantitative evidence on their impact is very limited. We show a positive impact of a menstrual health program on school attendance and other psychosocial outcomes of adolescent girls.

Youth empowerment, i.e., the ability of young people to take control over key aspects of their lives, has become a growing concern to achieving sustainable development worldwide. An increasing number of policy interventions is targeting the youth, but to monitor the progress a better understanding on what constitutes youth empowerment is needed. However, in contrast to the area of women's empowerment, little progress has been made on determining which domains of empowerment are important for youth and how they can be operationalized with indicators for measurement. We propose four domains of youth empowerment with corresponding indicators and use a well-established methodology for constructing a composite index. Using data from a household survey in Tunisia including a sample of young adults (18 to 30 years old), we assess youth empowerment in the proposed domains, explore correlates to empowerment and assess the link between youth empowerment and youth well-being. The proposed approach can help to monitor youth empowerment in various contexts and to evaluate the effectiveness of youth interventions.

We use an implicit association test (IAT) next to a set of direct survey questions to measure implicit and explicit gender attitudes in Tunisia. Tunisia is among the most advanced countries in the Arab region in terms of women rights and legal reforms that shall strengthen the position of women. Yet, there still exists a tension between the law and what is practiced. We examine the malleability of these attitudes using (i) a randomized video intervention and (ii) natural variation in interviewer characteristics with respect to gender and perceived religiosity. The video has no average impact, which is consistent with the idea that in a highly polarized society like Tunisia such an intervention only affects attitudes of specific groups in a society. We indeed find that the video mitigates the implicit gender bias only among a specific subpopulation: conservative women. We also confirm the presence of interviewer effects, both for implicit and explicit attitudes. These effects are more pronounced for explicit attitudes, which may suggest social desirability at work. We discuss the implications of our findings for further research and policies targeted at gender attitudes.

We use an implicit association test (IAT) to measure implicit gender attitudes and examine the malleability of these attitudes using a randomized field experiment and quasi-experimental data from Tunisia. Women that appear most conservative respond to a randomized video treatment by reducing their implicit gender bias. Also, female interviewers invite more conservative responses to the IAT, especially among the male subsample. Perceived religiosity of the interviewer affects self-reported gender attitudes, but not IAT measures, suggesting social desirability may be at work. We discuss the implications of our findings for the use of implicit measures in development research.

This study examines the effect of smallholder farmers’ access to a formal climate risk transfer mechanism on their risk preferences. Survey and experimental data were collected from smallholder farmers that have access to weather index-based crop insurance (WICI) in Ethiopia. We use an endogenous switching (ESP) model to address self-selection and simultaneity bias. Results from the ESP model show that farmers who purchased WICI are less likely to be risk-averse compared with non-purchaser farmers. Similarly, non-purchasers would have attained a significant reduction in their risk-aversion if they had taken up the insurance product. We also find that WICI has a positive and statistically significant effect on farmers’ real-life risk-taking behavior as exemplified by mineral fertilizer use. The implication of our findings is that formal climate risk transfer mechanisms can positively influence households’ economic decisions and outcomes, through reducing risk aversion. Therefore, they can possibly contribute to poverty alleviation and economic development within agrarian economies that are exposed to recurrent and severe climate shocks.

In this paper we use geographical and time variations to estimate the impact of war and occupation on firms in Croatia. We propose that during occupation firm exit was significantly subdued in the whole country, irrespective of occupation. After war, firm exit intensifies, dividing into three clusters. We find a clear and very strong positive effect of a firm being located in a municipality that was occupied at some point in time, on firm exit. The movement of war from 0 to 1 produced a 3.8 percentage point change in the probability of firm exit. As the sample mean amounts up to 12.2 percent, war increases the mean up to 16.0 percent. When we further separate occupied territory into "middle" and "east", the effect is much stronger in the "middle" territory, and it suggests that the movement of war from 0 to 1 produced a 4.3 percentage point change in the probability that firm exit occurs, or that war increases the mean up to 16.5 percent. We believe that this result comes from differences in the termination of occupation that was violent in the "middle" case, and peaceful afterwards. There is also a negative effect of the number of employees, capital and revenues, implying that larger capital and revenues, and higher number of employees decrease the probability of firm exit. For example, a 100 percent change in revenues generates a 0.9 percentage point decrease in the probability of exit. The probability of firm exit for a firm in the least capital-intensive sector goes up by 5.4 percentage points when a firm is in a municipality that was occupied in some period. For the smallest minimum efficient scale, the probability of firm exit increases by 4.3 percentage points when a firm is in a municipality that was occupied in some period.

In this study, using data from lab-in-the-field experiment, we explore whether the introduction of weather index insurance crowds in or crowds out social capital in northern Ethiopia. We use contributions in the public good game as a measure of social capital. We find that weather index insurance crowds out social capital. The free-riding problem created by the positive externality of weather index insurance and development of self-sufficiency behaviour are found to be the causal mechanisms behind the crowding out phenomenon. Our results indicate that formal insurance mechanisms do not occur in a vacuum and may have unintended effects. Hence, this study suggests that novel insurance product design and marketing strategies should be used to ameliorate such unintended effects.

This paper exploits exogenous variation in Burundi’s latest episode of civil war violence to estimate the causal impact of exposure to violence and the probability of growing coffee, some four years after the war ended. I constructed a unique panel dataset for a nationally representative sample of 242 households in 35 communities. Household fixed effects estimates show that exposure to individual violence decreases the probability of growing coffee in the post-war period by some 16%. This effect seems to be driven by a household member’s experience of physical violence rather than theft of crops or assets. The results are consistent with the idea that physical violence may decrease household labour availability if such violence caused people to die or become physically or mentally disabled. On the other hand, I cannot rule out that changing risk and time preferences in response to violence may also play a role.

This paper challenges the idea that farmers revert to subsistence farming when confronted with violence from civil war. While there is an emerging macroeconomic consensus that wars are detrimental to development, we find contrasting microeconomic evidence. Using several rounds of (panel) data at the farm and community level, we find that farmers in Burundi who are confronted with civil war violence in their home communities increase export and cash crop growing activities, invest more in public goods and reveal higher levels subjective welfare evaluations. We interpret this in the light of similar recent micro‐level evidence that points to post‐traumatic growth effects after (civil)warfare. Our results are confirmed across specifications as well as in robustness analyses., info:eu-repo/semantics/published