Session 1: Labour Markets
Do entrepreneurial skills unlock opportunities for online freelancing? Experimental evidence from El Salvador
Richard Freund (University of Cape Town)
Discussant: Lena Hassani-Nezhad (City, University of London)
This paper reports on a randomized experiment in El Salvador that aimed to improve online labor market outcomes by teaching the entrepreneurial skills required to engage with online marketplaces. Despite low completion rates, the training significantly increases the probability of having an online freelancing profile, being contacted by at least one client, and the number of proposals sent. This translates into positive effects on receiving at least one job offer, securing at least one online freelancing contract, and improved socio-emotional skills. However, no significant effects are observed on the number of online job offers, contracts, or broader labor market outcomes.
Intermediation by Superstars: Evidence from the online freelancing market in Pakistan
Hamna Ahmed (Lahore School of Economics)
Discussant: Richard Freund
Online freelancing is becoming a popular source of employment in developing countries where freelancers perform and deliver services online to final consumers via online platforms. We document the existence of a new form of labor intermediaries in this online market: top freelancers hire workers off-platform to perform tasks received through their individual profiles. Drawing on data from a pilot experiment and Pakistani freelancer profiles on Upwork, we find that intermediation by freelancers is highly prevalent on online platforms, constituting a significant share of the market. Although intermediaries are managed by experienced freelancers, their performance is comparable to that of less experienced individual freelancers. Intermediaries provide soft skills (e.g. English communication) and reputation that their workers lack in order to access the online demand. By collecting original data on intermediaries and their workers, this project studies the novel role of these intermediaries in mitigating workers’ skill constraints in the context of Pakistan.
Female employment, marriage, and childcare
Lena Hassani-Nezhad (City, University of London)
Discussant: Adrienne Lucas
Childcare and women’s employment decisions are intimately linked. I develop a dynamic model designed to analyse the effects of childcare subsidies on labour supply, fertility, marriage, and childcare decisions in a collective setting. In the model, the decision to spend time with the child affects work experience and could have long-term consequences for future financial stability because couples cannot commit to insure one another against the lower wages and lower consumption associated with spending time with a child. I estimate the model using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics in the United States to evaluate the impact of childcare subsidy programmes on various life-cycle outcomes of women and men. Offering a 10 percent childcare subsidy expands the labour supply of single women by 1.4 percent while married women respond much less. Finally, I show that there are large increases in childcare take-up associated with childcare subsidies, which improves the quality of children as a household good. This increases gains from marriage and results in an increase in the married fraction of the sample.
Session 2: Technology, Health and Gender
Digital Chaperon: Punjab Safe City App Shifting Safety Perceptions and Increasing Female Mobility
Fareena Malhi (University of Bath)
Discussant: Salman Khalid
This research paper examines the impact of providing information on a digital app (Women Safety App) on female mobility and autonomy, using a field experiment in a developing country with high levels of gender-based violence (Lahore, Pakistan).The app was designed by the Punjab Safe City Authority in a bid to improve safety. We ask whether providing information about the app improves female mobility (trips taken outside the home) on both the extensive and intensive margins. The intervention includes a comprehensive training and awareness session, followed by the download and registration of the app on participants' smartphones. Furthermore, we track participants’ mobility in two ways: using google location data from their phones, and using monthly travel diaries to explore their modes, motives, and travel companions. We find no evidence of increases in the number of trips, or the distance travelled per trip by participants in the study period. However, we find large and significant increases in the duration of each trip, by approximately 7 minutes that is 26 percent increase over the average trip duration in the control group. Further exploratory analysis shows that our participants change their patterns of travel: information about the app increases the number of walked trips by 14 percentage points. Most strikingly, however, we report a 9-percentage point increase in the number of unaccompanied trips overall, consistent with increased autonomy of our participants. Further results show that these increases in autonomy and mobility are concentrated among households that report trust in the serving institution (i.e. the police), and among households with limited female agency at baseline. These findings underscore the potential and limitations of technology-driven interventions to address gender-based constraints and promote inclusive urban environments.
Efficacy of Technology-Aided Monitoring for Early Childhood Vaccination Coverage: Evidence from a Natural Experiment
Muhammad Salman Khalid (Institute of Business Administration)
Discussant: Syeda Warda Riaz
Achieving population-wide vaccination coverage against vaccine-preventable diseases (VPDs) remains a challenge across the globe. A promising solution involves technology-aided monitoring, which has promised to improve vaccination rates. The current study estimates the impact of a similar intervention on early childhood vaccination rates in the province of Punjab, Pakistan. During late 2014, E-VACCS (an Electronic Vaccine Registration System) was implemented across the province of Punjab, one of the four provinces in Pakistan. We use yearly data (2010-2019) from Pakistan Social and Living Standards Measurement Survey (PSLM) in a difference-in-differences framework to exploit the natural across-province over-time variation offered to us by Punjab’s adoption of E-VACCS. We analyze the impact of E-VACCS on complete vaccination coverage as well as antigen-specific vaccination rates. Treatment effects on vaccination coverage are largely driven by specific sub-populations. The intervention led to a 2.2%increase in the proportion of children having received at least 1dose of vaccination. Across urban households, we find a 6.2% increase in vaccination coverage on the intensive margin. These treatment effects in urban areas are limited to mid-high income households. Our estimates for antigen-specific rates of vaccination coverage confirm similar trends. Among urban mid-high income households, improvements occurred in the antigen-specific coverage rates for vaccines administered towards the end of the childhood vaccination cycle (e.g. D-Tap-3 or Hep-B-3). However for rural low-income households, we find negative treatment effects for antigen-specific vaccine coverage rates, particularly for the three hepatitis doses. The results suggest that the increase in vaccination coverage across urban mid-high income households came at the expense of a significant decrease in coverage across low-income rural households, signaling redirection of critical resources. Our estimates remain robust to several variations in the specifications. Further robustness is also confirmed through event study estimation methods
Cash Transfers and Postpartum Depression: Evidence from South Africa
Syeda Warda Riaz (University of California, Davis)
Discussant: Fareena Malhi
We study the intra-household spillover effects of South Africa’s Older Person’s Grant—a large unconditional cash transfer—on the mental health of women who are pregnant or who recently gave birth. We first document two stylized facts. First, while depression risk declines with in-creased wealth, women show higher levels of depression risk across all wealth deciles than men. Second, among women, depression risk spikes during pregnancy and only slowly de-clines in the months following childbirth. Next, leveraging the age-eligibility threshold of the Older Person’s Grant and restricting our sample to mothers who live with an older person near the eligibility threshold, we show that the grant, which increases household income, reduces risk of perinatal depression. The magnitude of the effect on depression risk is large enough to effectively eliminate the increased risk of depression associated with pregnancy and childbirth observed in our data. These results demonstrate the importance of improved economic environments, via existing social protection programs, in supporting the mental health of women before and after childbirth.
Sexual Harassment in Public Spaces and Police Patrols: Experimental Evidence from India
Sofia Amaral (World Bank)
Discussant: Zunia Tirmazee
We conducted a randomized controlled trial to evaluate the impact of an innovative police patrol program on sexual harassment in public spaces in Hyderabad, India. In collaboration with the Hyderabad City Police, we randomized both exposure to police patrols and the visibility of officers by deploying both uniformed and undercover personnel to hotspots. We implemented a novel, high-frequency observation exercise to measure sexual harassment at 350 hotspots, where enumerators took note of all observed instances of sexual harassment and women’s responses in real time. We find that although police patrols had no impact on overall street harassment, the visible policing patrols reduced severe forms of harassment (forceful touching, intimidation) by27 percent and reduced the likelihood of women leaving the hotspot due to sexual harassment. We uncovered the underlying mechanisms and found that both police visibility and officers’ attitudes toward sexual harassment are key to understanding its incidence. While the performance of undercover officers was similar to that of uniformed officers, harassment did not decrease when undercover officers were on patrol. This suggests that the visibility of police officers is critical in deterring perpetrators. Additionally, using lab experiments we find that, on average, police officers were more tolerant of mild street harassment and less inclined to punish offenders in such cases. Correspondingly, we observed in uniformed hotspots a decline in all types of harassment only when assigned officers held stronger personal views on harassment.
Session 3: Gender
Bridging the gap: Women's empowerment as a pathway to reducing out-of-pocket health expenditures, catastrophic health expenditures, and impoverishment in Pakistan
Sidra Ishfaq (Health Services Academy)
Discussant: Theresa Chaudhry
Women's empowerment, particularly in household decision-making, plays a pivotal role in influencing healthcare utilization and expenditure in Pakistan, a country grappling with high maternal mortality and gender disparities. This study delves into the relationship between women's empowerment and out-of-pocket (OOP) health expenditures, analyzing data from 24,571households from the 2018-19 Household Integrated Economic Survey. Our results indicate a tangible reduction in OOP health expenditures and impoverishment levels with an increase in women's empowerment. Even minimal empowerment can notably decrease health costs. With every unit increase in empowerment, the odds of encountering catastrophic health expenses reduced by 75-78%. Furthermore, a unit increase in the empowerment index led to an 80%decrease in impoverishment due to health costs. The study advocates for amplifying women's decision-making roles as a strategic solution to alleviate healthcare-related economic burdens, particularly emphasizing the need to support women from poorer socioeconomic backgrounds or with limited education.
Gender differences in teacher efficacy: The mediating effect of using affective outcomes in teaching
Sadia Batool (Karakoram International University, Gilgit-Baltistan)
Discussant: Fareena Malhi
The current study sought to explore the gender differences that are among teachers in regard to self-efficacy in the utilization of affective outcomes in teaching and further go to the extent of determining how the use of affective outcomes mediates between gender and teacher efficacy. A research was conducted with a sample of 750 teachers from Pakistan's schools and universities. The data were collected using the Teachers' Sense of Self-Efficacy Scale (TSES), which has three subscales and the Teachers' Use of Affective Outcomes Scale (TUAOS) based on Krathwohl's five-category objectives in the affective domain. Independent sample t-tests were also carried out to find the differences in efficacy between the two sexes. To test the third objective, it was tested against three models of multiple mediators to predict the student engagement, instructional strategies, and classroom management using the PROCESS macro Model 4 proposed by Hayes(2013). Findings of the study indicated that females had higher efficacy levels and relied more on affective outcomes while teaching. The study further found that all the affective outcomes mediated the relationship between gender and student engagement. The receiving and the responding outcome factors were found to mediate the relationship of gender with gainful strategies, gender with instructional strategies, and gender with classroom management.
Session 4:Trade
Keeping the enemies closer: Exporting behaviour of firms under conflict
Zara Liaqat (Wilfrid Laurier University)
Discussant: Nida Jamil
This paper uses the terrorist attack in India in 2016 as a quasi-natural experiment to investigate the effect of an uncertainty shock on exporting behavior of firms. Using transaction-level international trade data for the universe of exporting firms in Pakistan, we employ a difference-in-differences identification strategy to show that ex-porters experience a smaller export value, quantity, and unit value growth in the Indian market after the attack, relative to other countries. Our results shed light on both the intensive and extensive margins of trade, and document heterogeneous responses to the shock across firms, products, and shipping locations. Smaller exporters experienced a larger drop in exports volume and price, while more import-intensive firms, particularly those importing from India, did not witness a decrease in demand. Similarly, the study detects asymmetric responses across products and shipping ports based on the proximity to the location of the attack.
Trade liberalization and emissions: Firm level evidence from Pakistan
Nida Jamil (University of Edinburgh)
Discussant: Philipp Barteska
Trade liberalization offers numerous economic benefits by providing increased access to international markets. However, given global climate change, it is important to consider the potential negative impact on the environment. If the advantages of trade liberalization come at the expense of environmental degradation, the economic losses may outweigh the gains. This study investigates the effects of two instances of trade policy changes on firm-level carbon emissions by Pakistani firms. In 2005, Pakistan and China signed a Free Trade Agreement (FTA), which expanded the access of Pakistani firms to Chinese markets. Simultaneously, the Multifibre Agreement (MFA), which imposed quotas on exports from developing countries to the United States and the European Union, was abolished. These exogenous events resulted in foreign demand shocks for Pakistani firms. By focusing on textile manufacturers in Punjab, Pakistan, we analyze the impact of the FTA and the end of the MFA on firm level emissions resulting from changes in access to the Chinese and US markets.
Bureaucrats and the Korean export miracle
Philipp Barteska (Harvard Kennedy School)
Discussant: Zara Liaqat
Does bureaucratic capacity matter for growth miracles? This paper investigates how much the effect of an industrial policy during South Korea’s growth miracle depends on bureaucratic capacity. We find that the bureaucrats implementing the policy greatly change its effect on exports – the variable targeted by the policy and key to South Korea’s economic success. These bureaucrats manage offices that promote exports on appointments to 87 countries between 1965, when South Korea was one of the world’s poorest countries, and 2000. We exploit the three-yearly rotation of managers between countries to show that increasing bureaucrat ability by one standard deviation causes a 37% increase in exports. This effect is comparable to the policy’s average effect– estimated from office openings. Hence, this industrial policy entirely depends on bureaucratic capacity: It has no effect when implemented by a bureaucrat one standard deviation below average. We find evidence for a key mechanism via which better bureaucrats increase exports: transmitting information about market conditions. Under better bureaucrats South Korean exports increase more strongly with a country’s import demand – taking advantage of this demand. Finally, we investigate whether bureaucrat experience increases South Korean exports. We isolate quasi-random variation in experience: a product’s import demand growth during the bureaucrat’s first appointment. Such experience increases exports in subsequent appointments of this bureaucrat. This highlights that organizational capacity grows endogenously, implying a novel channel for path dependence in organizational capacity
Session 5: Political Economy
Effectiveness of Non-Governmental Organizations: Evidence from Pakistan
Sarah Shaukat (Tufts University)
Discussant: Nikita Grabher-Meyer
In recent decades, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have become increasingly prominent, marking a shift from exclusive reliance on government initiatives to a significant role for private-led efforts. This trend is based on the belief that NGOs are uniquely effective in alleviating poverty, fueling a surge in NGO numbers, especially in developing countries. Despite this rapid expansion of NGOs, there remains a critical gap in empirical evidence regarding their effectiveness. Our study addresses this gap by leveraging a natural experiment: an unexpected 25%decrease in the number of NGOs in Punjab, Pakistan. Using an event study approach, we compare regions with high and low proportions of NGOs deregistered to assess the impact of NGO presence on key development indicators. We find that NGO closures reduce household investment in education, particularly affecting girls and urban households. Additionally, the reduction in health-specific NGO activity decreases prenatal care access and immunization likelihood for girls, especially in rural areas. Although the government increases its role to compensate, it does not fully replace the services provided by NGOs. The broader regional impacts include diminished economic development, as indicated by reduced night light intensity, increased public discontent evidenced by more demonstrations and riots, and heightened violence against women, reflected by higher admissions to female shelter homes. These findings underscore that NGOs are essential to community welfare and stability.
Right in the Middle: A Field Experiment on The Role of Integrity, Training and Norms in Combating Corruption
Nikita Grabher-Meyer (University of East Anglia)
Discussant: Sarah Shaukat
Although integrity education and awareness is touted as an important solution to combat corruption, there is little evidence on its effectiveness. To fill this gap, we conduct a lab-in-the-field experiment where law students in Ukraine are randomly assigned to aninnovativeandinteractiveintegrity training programme to enhance students' awareness and behavior around ethical issues. We collect data on attitudes towards corruption and actual corrupt behavior through a series of surveys and a novel experimental game, in which both the integrity-trained students and those who did not get assigned to integrity training play the role of middlemen in a bribe exchange between firms and public officials. We show that integrity training had a significant impact on attitudes towards corruption but only significantly reduced corrupt behavior in the game when the students knew they were playing alongside other integrity-trained students.
Session 6: Poverty and Social Protection
What happens when cash transfers suddenly end?
Mahreen Mahmud (University of Exeter)
Discussant: Jonathan Morduch
Cash transfers are the most popular form of social protection globally. However, they may not pay out indefinitely due to budget cuts, changes to program design, or graduation of recipients from the program. How do low-income households cope after long-running cash transfers suddenly stop? Using regression discontinuity around an updated eligibility threshold, we investigate the effect of the discontinuation of a large unconditional cash transfer program in Pakistan. One year after discontinuation, we find no significant impacts on households’ economic outcomes or women’s empowerment. Two years later, we find weakly significant negative effects: a 6% decline in consumption expenditures and a 6 ppt decline in women’s mobility. The negative effects are stronger on households that previously received regular payments, while those with prior payment delays better mitigated the effects using various coping strategies.
The Power of Assets: A Catalyst for Multidimensional Well-being
Saima Nawaz (COMSATS University Islamabad)
Discussant: Mahreen Mahmud
Asset transfer program, known as the "Big Push" intervention, emerges as a powerful tool to promote multidimensional well-being among the poor. However, its effectiveness in settings with decade-long state-provided consumption support remains unclear. This study investigates the impact of asset transfers under the National Poverty Graduation Program (NPGP) in Pakistan, amid an established framework of unconditional cash transfers. Using a quasi-experimental approach, we observe significant enhancements in overall well-being, food consumption, ownership of assets, and social integration among beneficiaries. Furthermore, the NPGP encourages savings behavior among beneficiaries, contributing to their long-term financial resilience. Our findings exhibit substantial differences in the magnitude of impacts from previous studies, suggesting that the program’s design, characterized by sustained unconditional cash transfers, magnifies the incremental impact of asset transfers. While no impact on women’s empowerment was observed, suggesting prior engagement through cash transfers facilitated their participation in decision-making. This research offers valuable insights for optimizing poverty reduction strategies in similar contexts worldwide.
Session 7: Climate and Environment
Vulnerable markets: Impact of extreme flooding on agriculture supply chains in Punjab, Pakistan
Farah Said (Lahore University of Management Sciences)
Discussant: Muhammad Bin Khalid
This paper analyzes the impact of the 2022 floods on agricultural supply networks in Punjab, Pakistan. We unlock high-frequency agriculture supply chain data on quantities and merge it with spatial remote-sensing data from February 2022 to December 2022 to assess disruptions to the movement of agricultural commodities between "source" supply regions and "destination" consumption districts, where a lot of the demand is driven in large urban centers. Using an event study design, we find statistically significant pre-event anticipatory effects that increase supply by 35%followed by reduction of up to 34% on the overall quantities compared to the baseline in the after-math of the floods. We document heterogeneity over crop types and district sizes. Vegetables show the highest susceptibility to such shocks, whereas the trajectory of grains is suggestive of state interventions. We also estimate optimal road networks and show that flooding of roads does not significantly disrupt the supply lines. We test the robustness of our findings by generating a spatial flood risk profile for Pakistan and demonstrate that anticipatory effects exist only in high-risk regions, which also show relatively quicker recovery. This study contributes to the economics literature by offering new policy-relevant insights on the response of agricultural networks to natural disasters in the context of developing countries.
The effect of disaster relief on climate adaptation: Evidence from floods in Pakistan
Muhammad Bin Khalid (National University of Singapore)
Discussant: Farah Said
Extreme weather events such as floods, cyclones, and droughts are expected to increase with climate change. Many governments are currently putting in place cash relief policies to reduce the effect of such events. However, little is known about how such relief policies interact with private adaptation behavior, such as migration away from disaster-prone areas. A standard moral hazard model suggests that relief efforts may reduce adaptation. We study the long term effects of cash relief on migration in the context of the 2010 Pakistan floods. We find that providing cash transfers and building a payment infrastructure for future cash relief at the village level does not reduce migration away from flood-prone areas. Instead, our findings suggest that the liquidity effects of the transfers were larger than the moral hazard effects and caused more people to leave flood-prone areas
The effect of timely cash transfers during an extreme flood shock: Evidence from the 2022 Pakistan Floods
Nihan Rafique (The World Bank)
Discussant: Jonathan Morduch
This paper evaluates the impact of an unconditional cash transfer program which was implemented unusually rapidly in response to severe flooding in Pakistan during 2022. The program, administered by the Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP), provided one-time cash transfers to 1.3 million BISP-registered households in Sindh province – the province most severely affected by the floods and which is the setting for this study. Exploiting a discontinuity in the eligibility criteria for this cash relief, we use a regression discontinuity design to estimate the causal effects of these transfers on several welfare indicators, such as household food consumption and asset holdings. We also ask whether we can identify the effects of cash on relevant flood adaptation pathways, with a special focus on migration behaviour. We find null results of the cash transfer programme on our major household welfare indicators, suggesting that while cash transfers of this size in disaster scenarios may help smooth consumption in the short term, they are unlikely to have lasting benefits
Session 8: Climate and Environment
Raising Climate Change Awareness through Civic Clubs: A School-Based Intervention in Karachi
Aatir Khan (Habib University)
Discussant: Mahniya Zafar
This project aims to raise climate change awareness and promote civic engagement in students by establishing civic clubs in public schools in the city of Karachi, Sindh. This paper evaluates the pre-pilot of the project conducted in 5 schools across Karachi. In these schools, civic clubs were established and an on boarding session was conducted with the newly appointed club leadership. On a second visit, a vegetable gardening activity was conducted during which the students were given information about concepts such as carbon emissions, green cover, and food security. The impact of these clubs on students’ knowledge levels and civic participation was evaluated using a one-group pre test post test design. Additionally, data from field observations during the visits to the schools and semi-structured interviews with the school heads and faculty advisors was used to adapt the intervention design, which will be tested in the upcoming academic year
Beyond Borders: A Comparative Analysis of Trading Partners and Regional Integration on CO2 Emissions in Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh
Azka Sarosh (Lahore School of Economics)
Discussant: Nihan Rafique
Regional trade integration has long been considered a driver for economic growth and development, but its environmental impact remains a topic of intense debate. This study examines the complex relationship between regional integration, trading partners, andCO2 emissions, with a specific focus on the varying effects across three South Asian economies: Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh. The study employs a comprehensive panel dataset spanning from 1996 to 2020 and uses robust econometric techniques, including the Fully Modified Ordinary Least Square (FMOLS) estimation approach, the Cross-sectional Im-Pesaran-Shin (CIPS) panel unit root test, and the Westerlund cointegration test. The empirical analysis reveals the uneven impact of regional trade integration and trade on environmental outcomes, highlighting the heterogeneous nature of trade dynamics. While increased regional integration generally contributes to a reduction in carbon emissions, the magnitude and direction of these effects vary significantly across the three countries under study. Similarly, the trading with the same partners shows the heterogenous effects on carbon emissions. For instance, Bangladesh's trade with China increased CO2 emissions by approximately 20%, while India experienced the same effect, with increased emissions stemming from the same bilateral trade relationship by approximately 5%. Opposite was the case with Pakistan that experienced reduced emissions by 3%. Similarly, trade with African nations resulted in a decrease in carbon emissions for Pakistan by 5% but an increase for India by 22%, further reflecting the uneven effects with the same trading regions. These findings underscore the "unevenness" of trade, a phenomenon that challenges the conventional wisdom of uniform environmental impacts within a regional integration framework. The study highlights the need for a refined understanding of trade dynamics and their environmental consequences, considering individual countries' unique characteristics and trade relationships.