Working Papers
Improving the quality of policing in Uganda: Impact Assessment of the police accountability and reform project
[Under Review with Review of Development Economics]
with Wil Hout and Rose Namara
Uganda and in particular the Ugandan police are perceived as highly corrupt. To address the quality of policing, the Police Accountability and Reform Project (PARP) was implemented between 2010 and early 2013 in selected police districts. This paper studies the impact of PARP for a sample of 600 police officers that were interviewed about the quality of policing by means of twelve hypothetical vignette cases depicting undesirable behaviour of varying degrees of severity. The assessments of the cases by the police officers are analysed using propensity score matching and in-depth interviews. We show that self-selection of police officers into the program is unlikely to drive the results. The results suggest that officers participating in PARP activities (i) judge the presented cases of misconduct more severely, (ii) are more inclined to report misconduct and (iii) also expect their colleagues to judge misbehaviour at the level of the police more critically although the latter coefficient estimates are halved in size. This suggests that PARP activities have affected the perception of police officers but only encouraged them slightly to take action against bad practices.
A study of Egyptian and Palestine trans-formal firms – a neglected category operating in the borderland between formality and informality
with Andrea Floridi and John Cameron
This article outlines a new approach to firm behaviour different from both ‘dichotomist’ and ‘continuum’ formal/informal models. The approach adopts a new heuristic based on the notion of a borderland as space of interaction between dimensions of formality, and creates an umbrella category of trans-formal firms, which are neither purely formal nor informal. Three formality dimensions are adopted: (i) registration of the firm, (ii) existence of a bank account in the name of the firm, and the (iii) presence of an official balance sheet. After elucidating the new approach theoretically, the paper assesses the analytical capacity of the approach with quantitative and qualitative information representing 16 Egyptian and 16 Palestinian firms. The majority of the considered firms are found to be trans-formal moving in a space of decision-making representing our new, broadened notion of borderland showing that policies aiming at formalization processes misrepresent the realities of significant numbers of firms.
Revisiting the Nature vs. Nurture Debate: Patterns of Cognitive Development of Filipino Children
with Stella Quimbo, Aylin Küntay, Xylee Javier and John Peabody
Using the QIDS panel dataset collected in 2003 and 2007, we analyze the determinants of cognitive abilities among Filipino children. We are interested in distinguishing between the effects of the learning and family environment versus health and nutrition in children aged 6 months to 7 years. Cognitive abilities are measured using the Bayley Scales of Infant Development and the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence. The home learning environment is assessed using the Home Observation for Measurement of the Environment. Health and nutrition markers include weight-for-age, height-for-age, hemoglobin and lead levels in blood. Employing a child fixed effects model, we find that the home learning environment has a significant positive effect on cognitive ability explaining more than one fourth of the standard deviation of cognitive development. Nutrition markers, particularly, weight-for-age and hemoglobin levels in blood also have significant positive effects on cognitive ability. Genetic predisposition and other time-invariant traits explain roughly 40 percent of the variation in cognitive ability. A one standard deviation increase in the home learning environment explains 30.4 percent of the standard deviation in cognitive ability whereas a one standard deviation increase in weight-for-age explains another 8.9 percent. Our results indicate that parental inputs or nurture can compensate for weak preconditions and foster cognitive development among young children.
Poverty dynamics -- What they teach us and why we'd rather study income dynamics
with Matthias Rieger
The literature on poverty dynamics is vast and covers many countries. Most studies built on the seminal work by Ravallion and Jalan (2000), who decompose poverty into a chronic and a transient component using panel data on household expenditures. For the case of Senegal, we redo their analysis, but we allow for a continuum of possible poverty lines accounting for the fact that the actual choice of the poverty line is inherently arbitrary. Comparing 100 poverty lines and three popular empirical models of poverty we come to doubt the hitherto established findings about poverty and its determinants. The analysis of poverty dynamics is plagued by (i) the vacuity of the binary poverty measure, (ii) the failure to control for the endogeneity of the determinants of income, and (iii) the focus on cross-sectional models to analyze poverty dynamics. To address these issues we estimate dynamic panel models of the determinants of household expenditure. In contrast to previous research we cannot find any effect of household demographics on per capita expenditure. Yet, per capita land holdings seem to play a very important role in rising household expenditure and growth and decreasing poverty. Our results suggest to analyze expenditure dynamics directly instead of artificially introducing poverty indicators. In line with Schultz (1980) we argue that permanently fighting poverty means addressing the rural poor when designing development interventions.
Oil, gas and minerals: The impact of resource-dependence and governance on sustainable development
with Gilles Carbonnier
It has often been argued that oil, gas and minerals may have a negative impact on development as measured by income per capita. This does not say much about sustainability, which is critical for developing countries whose economic growth derives primarily from the exploitation of exhaustible resources. We take adjusted net savings (ANS) as an indicator of weak sustainability to examine the link between resource dependence and sustainable development, and look at specific governance indicators. Since it is hard to disentangle the direct effect of governance on development in empirical studies, we use the relative size of the youth bulge as instrument. Our results highlight a negative relationship between natural resource extraction and ANS but indicate that this is not inevitable. Effective checks on the power of the executive appears to be critical for sustainable outcomes. Effective legislative chambers, an independent judiciary and broad acceptance of established institutions all have a positive impact on ANS per capita. Our results further confirm that armed conflict and armed violence as measured by the homicide rate have a negative impact on ANS. We conclude that extractive industries and donor agencies should expand their focus from community-development programs to strengthening checks-and-balance mechanisms, and suggest avenues to make extractive resources a stake for peace rather than for violent rent seeking.
No matter who rules! -- Local elections and fiscal spending in rural Senegal
More than 50 years after Senegal's independence from France and as the 2012 presidential elections have shown, its political system remains a hybrid regime and qualifies at most as semi-democracy. I analyze budgetary data for a sample of 171 communes around the 2002 local elections to study the interdependence of local electoral dynamics and fiscal spending. Employing the trimmed least absolute deviations (LAD) model, which allows me to account for censoring and commune fixed effects, I find evidence for a political budget cycle in local elections; yet its extent is moderate. New political leadership alongside existing infrastructure programs bolsters the expansion of the road network although being disinclined to cover investment expenses of their predecessors. Expenditure shares for culture, education and health care, in turn, remain independent of political dynamics. Furthermore, during election season, lower tax revenues are projected; these anticipated tax presents do not materialize, though. In fact, in the medium term, a change in the majority party is associated with real tax increases. From a positive perspective, the study shows that there are no great differences in budgetary allocations between councils run by incumbents and those run by challengers, which indicates a certain fiscal stability. Yet, taking a normative view, one might ask why there are no great differences in budget decisions. In light of the Senegalese political set-up, it is evident that incumbent and challenger councils have equally poor budgetary standards and, therefore, they could all benefit from local-level training in the administration of democratic processes and fiscal discipline.
Improving the quality of policing in Uganda: Impact Assessment of the police accountability and reform project
[Under Review with Review of Development Economics]
with Wil Hout and Rose Namara
Uganda and in particular the Ugandan police are perceived as highly corrupt. To address the quality of policing, the Police Accountability and Reform Project (PARP) was implemented between 2010 and early 2013 in selected police districts. This paper studies the impact of PARP for a sample of 600 police officers that were interviewed about the quality of policing by means of twelve hypothetical vignette cases depicting undesirable behaviour of varying degrees of severity. The assessments of the cases by the police officers are analysed using propensity score matching and in-depth interviews. We show that self-selection of police officers into the program is unlikely to drive the results. The results suggest that officers participating in PARP activities (i) judge the presented cases of misconduct more severely, (ii) are more inclined to report misconduct and (iii) also expect their colleagues to judge misbehaviour at the level of the police more critically although the latter coefficient estimates are halved in size. This suggests that PARP activities have affected the perception of police officers but only encouraged them slightly to take action against bad practices.
A study of Egyptian and Palestine trans-formal firms – a neglected category operating in the borderland between formality and informality
with Andrea Floridi and John Cameron
This article outlines a new approach to firm behaviour different from both ‘dichotomist’ and ‘continuum’ formal/informal models. The approach adopts a new heuristic based on the notion of a borderland as space of interaction between dimensions of formality, and creates an umbrella category of trans-formal firms, which are neither purely formal nor informal. Three formality dimensions are adopted: (i) registration of the firm, (ii) existence of a bank account in the name of the firm, and the (iii) presence of an official balance sheet. After elucidating the new approach theoretically, the paper assesses the analytical capacity of the approach with quantitative and qualitative information representing 16 Egyptian and 16 Palestinian firms. The majority of the considered firms are found to be trans-formal moving in a space of decision-making representing our new, broadened notion of borderland showing that policies aiming at formalization processes misrepresent the realities of significant numbers of firms.
Revisiting the Nature vs. Nurture Debate: Patterns of Cognitive Development of Filipino Children
with Stella Quimbo, Aylin Küntay, Xylee Javier and John Peabody
Using the QIDS panel dataset collected in 2003 and 2007, we analyze the determinants of cognitive abilities among Filipino children. We are interested in distinguishing between the effects of the learning and family environment versus health and nutrition in children aged 6 months to 7 years. Cognitive abilities are measured using the Bayley Scales of Infant Development and the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence. The home learning environment is assessed using the Home Observation for Measurement of the Environment. Health and nutrition markers include weight-for-age, height-for-age, hemoglobin and lead levels in blood. Employing a child fixed effects model, we find that the home learning environment has a significant positive effect on cognitive ability explaining more than one fourth of the standard deviation of cognitive development. Nutrition markers, particularly, weight-for-age and hemoglobin levels in blood also have significant positive effects on cognitive ability. Genetic predisposition and other time-invariant traits explain roughly 40 percent of the variation in cognitive ability. A one standard deviation increase in the home learning environment explains 30.4 percent of the standard deviation in cognitive ability whereas a one standard deviation increase in weight-for-age explains another 8.9 percent. Our results indicate that parental inputs or nurture can compensate for weak preconditions and foster cognitive development among young children.
Poverty dynamics -- What they teach us and why we'd rather study income dynamics
with Matthias Rieger
The literature on poverty dynamics is vast and covers many countries. Most studies built on the seminal work by Ravallion and Jalan (2000), who decompose poverty into a chronic and a transient component using panel data on household expenditures. For the case of Senegal, we redo their analysis, but we allow for a continuum of possible poverty lines accounting for the fact that the actual choice of the poverty line is inherently arbitrary. Comparing 100 poverty lines and three popular empirical models of poverty we come to doubt the hitherto established findings about poverty and its determinants. The analysis of poverty dynamics is plagued by (i) the vacuity of the binary poverty measure, (ii) the failure to control for the endogeneity of the determinants of income, and (iii) the focus on cross-sectional models to analyze poverty dynamics. To address these issues we estimate dynamic panel models of the determinants of household expenditure. In contrast to previous research we cannot find any effect of household demographics on per capita expenditure. Yet, per capita land holdings seem to play a very important role in rising household expenditure and growth and decreasing poverty. Our results suggest to analyze expenditure dynamics directly instead of artificially introducing poverty indicators. In line with Schultz (1980) we argue that permanently fighting poverty means addressing the rural poor when designing development interventions.
Oil, gas and minerals: The impact of resource-dependence and governance on sustainable development
with Gilles Carbonnier
It has often been argued that oil, gas and minerals may have a negative impact on development as measured by income per capita. This does not say much about sustainability, which is critical for developing countries whose economic growth derives primarily from the exploitation of exhaustible resources. We take adjusted net savings (ANS) as an indicator of weak sustainability to examine the link between resource dependence and sustainable development, and look at specific governance indicators. Since it is hard to disentangle the direct effect of governance on development in empirical studies, we use the relative size of the youth bulge as instrument. Our results highlight a negative relationship between natural resource extraction and ANS but indicate that this is not inevitable. Effective checks on the power of the executive appears to be critical for sustainable outcomes. Effective legislative chambers, an independent judiciary and broad acceptance of established institutions all have a positive impact on ANS per capita. Our results further confirm that armed conflict and armed violence as measured by the homicide rate have a negative impact on ANS. We conclude that extractive industries and donor agencies should expand their focus from community-development programs to strengthening checks-and-balance mechanisms, and suggest avenues to make extractive resources a stake for peace rather than for violent rent seeking.
No matter who rules! -- Local elections and fiscal spending in rural Senegal
More than 50 years after Senegal's independence from France and as the 2012 presidential elections have shown, its political system remains a hybrid regime and qualifies at most as semi-democracy. I analyze budgetary data for a sample of 171 communes around the 2002 local elections to study the interdependence of local electoral dynamics and fiscal spending. Employing the trimmed least absolute deviations (LAD) model, which allows me to account for censoring and commune fixed effects, I find evidence for a political budget cycle in local elections; yet its extent is moderate. New political leadership alongside existing infrastructure programs bolsters the expansion of the road network although being disinclined to cover investment expenses of their predecessors. Expenditure shares for culture, education and health care, in turn, remain independent of political dynamics. Furthermore, during election season, lower tax revenues are projected; these anticipated tax presents do not materialize, though. In fact, in the medium term, a change in the majority party is associated with real tax increases. From a positive perspective, the study shows that there are no great differences in budgetary allocations between councils run by incumbents and those run by challengers, which indicates a certain fiscal stability. Yet, taking a normative view, one might ask why there are no great differences in budget decisions. In light of the Senegalese political set-up, it is evident that incumbent and challenger councils have equally poor budgetary standards and, therefore, they could all benefit from local-level training in the administration of democratic processes and fiscal discipline.