Economic Development and Growth

Project description:

The OSTIUM project aims to understand, through the study of the ancient city of Ostia, how, with what means and for what purpose humanity has transformed, over the centuries, the urban space in which it lives, to adapt it to the changing needs of its existence, the available resources and the historical contingencies. [...] The project is structured according to three main axes, each of which exploits the methods of the disciplines involved. [...] The second axis intends, through an economic approach, to build a new dataset describing the evolution of the structure, the organization and the demographic features of urban space in Ostia, which is an interesting example of pre-industrial socio-economic system whose transformation can be followed through several centuries. By using the existing information on the Ostian population (epigraphy, osteological remains, historic sources) progressively enriched by the data gathered by the first axis, we will explore the dynamic interplay between
economic development, environmental constraints and relevant socio-economic outcomes such as urban growth, inequality in the access to urban space, social segregation, the evolution of urbanism and architectural forms and the formation of corporate groups. The data made available by the project will also allow to understand whether the economy of Roman Ostia obeyed Malthusian principles, and look into the main mechanisms governing the relationship between economic, demographic and urban transformation.

Project description:

This project tries to shed light on the determinants of the economic success of migrants. In particular, it focusses on the role of the proximity to other migrants with same origin and characteristics in driving economic performance. To address the issue we take advantage of a particular episode of the Italian history, namely the settlement – between 1932 and 1941 – of about 3800 families in the Pontine Marshes, a rural area that was the object of a vast reclamation project by the fascist regime. The settler families, who came from different regions and started working on a sharecropping agreement, were quasi-randomly assigned to the 3000 available plots of land to families that. Eventually, in 1941 settlers were given the choice to redeem their land or opt for a rental contract. Our empirical work is based on the construction of an exceptional dataset covering all the settler families. We interpret the purchase of land by settlers as an indicator of economic success and investigate whether it is explained by the proximity to other families from the same places or with similar cultural characteristics. Such proximity may in fact translate into gains from network effects and homogeneity. We will rely on multiple measures of distance from other settler families, and characterize diversity by looking at the geocultural characteristic of the settlers’ places of origin. By using information on the variation of the value of land, we will check whether the proximity with commonorigin settlers affects the decision to buy the land through a productivity effect, rather than through social preferences. Finally, one may speculate whether a possible positive effect of cultural homogeneity in agricultural production may turn negative as the economy develops and rely more intensively on human capital. Depending on the availability of data on second- andthird-generation migrants, this might be studied within the current project.

Project description :

Understanding the behavioural and institutional origin of learning poverty is critical for effective design of remedial policies. Building upon the ethical concept of equality-of-opportunity, which draws a distinction between sources of inequality related to consequences of effort within one’s control and sources related to circumstances beyond one’s responsibility, this project focuses on the role of effort in school attainment. We argue that effort, construed as a broad and multidimensional concept combining effort exerted at school along with cognitive and non-cognitive skills, is a critical factor for educational performance. We also hypothesize that effort is malleable and not innate. Using rural Bangladesh as a case study, we propose to expand an existing large-scale survey in secondary school with an additional wave and include a larger set of measures of behavioural traits as well as time investment of pupils and their parents. Furthermore, we intend to undertake a lab-in-the-field experiment randomly allocating nudge-type interventions encouraging effort to some of schools and estimate their causal effects on effort as well as student test scores in several subjects.

Project description:

Ending entrenched insurgencies, which impose enormous costs on society, remains a fundamental challenge for the developing world. Policy actors are increasingly focusing on DDR programs, peace agreements and amnesties to mitigate conflicts. Despite the widespread use of such policies, rigorous quantitative evaluations are scarce. We aim to quantitatively evaluate the effectiveness of peace policies using state-of-the-art geospatial and econometric techniques. We seek to identify specific aspects of peace policies that make them (in)effective. In particular, we will study heterogeneity in the effectiveness of peace policies by police reforms, economic shocks and presence of mass media.

Project description:

A rising tide of majoritarian politics has swept across much of the world in the past decade. Drawing on frontier research examining the psychological effects of poverty, as well as recent work examining the effect of government policies on ethnic identity, we investigate how rising Hindu majoritarianism shapes cognitive outcomes and social identity choices among India’s Muslim minority. We suggest that, much like poverty-related constraints, facing constraints when pursuing identity-driven beliefs or practices may consume mental resources, thus reducing cognitive outcomes among marginalized minorities. In addition, we suggest that such identity-driven constraints may enhance ethnic salience and in-group attachment among minorities, further deepening ethnic divides between groups in society. We propose a lab-in-thefield approach that will combine (i) researcher-led manipulation of an identity threat, generated by making two recent government policies that discriminate against the Muslim minority salient, and (ii) a natural experiment generated by elections in the Indian state of West Bengal (scheduled for May 2021), where several constituencies are expected to witness close elections between the BJP and other political parties (allowing a regression discontinuity design). Comparing attitudinal and behavioural outcomes in a sample of approximately 1500 Muslim respondents across 40 state assembly constituencies, we will identify the causal effects of (a) the salience of an identity-based political threat and (b) the transfer of power to a majoritarian party in the local context, on our outcomes of interest. Our study will provide novel insights into how ethnic minorities respond to ethno-nationalist exclusion and will contribute to a richer understanding of the psychological underpinnings of identity threat and social conflict in fractured societies.

Project description:

One reason for poor integration outcomes of immigrants can be a lack of information about local integration support programs, language courses, job offers and other relevant local information. This pilot evaluates the feasibility of an RCT that aims at studying the effectiveness of providing local information for immigrants to improve their economic and social integration outcomes. The information is provided by the app Integreat, developed by our partner NGO Tür an Tür - Digitalfabrik in collaboration with German municipalities. Our project will randomly select immigrants who have recently arrived in Germany and introduce them to the Integreat app. We will evaluate if and how much they use the app, and whether it improves their integration outcomes, as measured in administrative data and complementary surveys.

Project description:

We use an RCT in rural Morocco to test whether matching loan repayments more closely with expected entrepreneurial cash ows increases the take-up and poverty impact of microcredit. The RCT combines subsequent interventions at the individual level (an estimated 3,600 participants across 40 branches) and the village level (320 villages). We introduce two new forms of individual-liability ‘tailored’ microcredit. The rst loan contract has a repayment schedule split into three equal periods. The borrower and loan of cer jointly decide on the monthly amount that the borrower repays in each of these three periods. The second contract is one where the borrower only pays interest during a 5-month grace period (and both interest and capital thereafter). The control loan has a standard, rigid contract. The main outcome variables at the individual level are credit access, loan quality (repayment behavior), incidence and profitability of self-employment, household income and consumption, and hours worked by household members. The main outcome variables at the village level are loan take-up and repayment quality.

Publications