This week we featured research on subsidising healthcare, minimum wage, IPV, education, cash transfers, urban migration, and more!
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Benjamin Milner examines how the 1870 Education Act shaped education, occupation, and intergenerational mobility in the UK – finding that the reform resulted in significant improvements in the quality of adults' occupations and greatly narrowed the opportunity gap between rich and poor.
In Kenya, Zachary Barnett-Howell, Travis Baseler, Thomas Ginn, and Stepan Gordeev conducted a large study in five rural countries with high rates of underemployment among young adults, designed to directly tackle the factors suppressing urban migration. Providing accurate information on earnings in Nairobi led to increased migration and, consequently, higher incomes.
In Mali, Anja Sautmann and Mark Dean found that subsidising healthcare for children substantially increased necessary care-seeking while generating only minimal unnecessary use. Importantly, the illness spell data they collect makes visible the many instances of serious illness in children that never receive any formal care.
Nicolás Abbate and Bruno Jiménez study a series of country-wide real minimum wage hikes in early 21st-century Argentina, a context marked by moderate but persistent inflation, and quantify their impact on job losses using rich administrative data on registered employment. In this recovering economy with moderate inflation, minimum wage increases did not generate any detectable employment losses in formal jobs.
Intimate partner violence (IPV) remains a pervasive human rights violation and significant global public health challenge. While the social and psychological dimensions of domestic abuse have long been studied by sociologists and public health experts, economists have only recently begun to rigorously analyse the causes, consequences, and costs of IPV. In this week's episode of VoxDevTalks, Manisha Shah discusses the takeaways from this growing body of economic research.
In Nigeria, Mehrab Bakhtiar, Marcel Fafchamps, Markus Goldstein, Kenneth L Leonard, and Sreelakshmi Papineni find that cash transfers to women increased their desire for agency but only when this was kept secret from their husbands – revealing the complex interplay between economic empowerment and social norms.
Elsewhere in development:
- Paddy Carter on guarantees and the cost of capital.
- Alexander Berger outlines four lessons from $4 Billion in impact-focused giving.
- A new collaboration between MrBeast and the Rockefeller Foundation.
- Todd Moss outlines lessons about impact and team building from a true trailblazer.
- Dean Karlan discusses what happens when evidence meets Washington politics on In Pursuit of Development.
- Nalini Gulati and Vikas Dimble outline how social scientists elicit truthful responses on sensitive matters.