Ongoing Research | karlijnmorsink

Working Papers

Do No Harm? -- The Welfare Consequences of Behavioural Interventions - Submitted

with Harrison, G.W., Schneider, M.

Abstract: The stated premises of many behavioural policy interventions suggest they are built on a solid welfare foundation, where they are typically presumed to direct individuals towards a decision that is welfare-improving for the individual. This presumption should be questioned if individuals poorly understand the decision context and implies that welfare effects should be measured in a way that does not assume that agents necessarily understand how financial choices and interventions that are evaluated affect their welfare. Welfare measurement then needs to allow for mistakes, and for welfare losses. We design a range of informational and nudging interventions that are typically used to promote financial products, usually with a view to enhance the welfare of consumers. We then test the effect of these interventions on take-up of products with varying quality, understanding of the product, and structural estimates of expected welfare gains and losses in terms of individual preferences, allowing for any decision to purchase or not purchase the product to be a mistake. We demonstrate that our informational interventions increase understanding, and almost all of our interventions increase take-up on average. The increased take-up, however, also occurs when product quality is low. Our structural welfare estimates suggest that our behavioural interventions do not significantly increase expected consumer welfare for all interventions.

Targeting Men, Women or Both to Reduce Child Marriage - Submitted

with Cassidy, R., Dam, A., Janssens, W., Kiani, U.

Abstract: We ask whether it is more effective to target men, women, or both with the same intervention in the same context, to improve women's and girls' outcomes when behaviour is governed by gendered social norms. We conduct a cluster-randomized controlled trial of an edutainment intervention aimed at delaying marriage of adolescent girls in two provinces of Pakistan, where community norms favour early marriage. We find that targeting men, alone or jointly with women, reduces child marriages in households directly targeted by the intervention. Targeting women, alone or jointly with men, leads to sustained reductions in child marriages at the village level. To rationalize this pattern of results, we build on a model of Bayesian persuasion in the household, where women are more hesitant to deviate from social norms. We extend this by allowing for gender segregated information transmission from targeted spouses to other households in the village.

Keeping the Peace while Getting Your Way: Information,Persuasion and Intimate Partner Violence - Submitted

with Anderberg, D., Cassidy, R., Dam, A., Janssens, W., Veldhoven, A.

Abstract: We study the effects on intimate partner violence (IPV) of new information received by women only, men only, or both, relevant to a high-stakes joint household decision. We model communication between spouses as Bayesian persuasion where disagreements elevate the risk of IPV. Our framework predicts that IPV will be lower when only one spouse is informed, compared to when both are, as the opportunity for persuasion by one spouse leads to more agreement. To test the model’s predictions we leverage an existing randomized controlled trial of an edutainment intervention addressing child marriage decisions for girls in rural Pakistan, targeted at men, women, or both. Our empirical findings confirm the prediction that the likelihood of IPV is highest when men and women are jointly targeted. Due to systematic gender differences in preferences, our persuasion model further predicts that marriage delays are largest when targeting men alone or jointly with women and smallest when targeting women alone, predictions that are also confirmed in the data.

Long-run Effects of Catastrophic Drought Insurance - Submitted

with Barrett, C.B., Jensen, N., Noritomo, Y., Son, H.H. Banerjee, R., Teufel, N.

Abstract: Aggregate shocks such as droughts have negative long-run impacts on lifetime well-being. Formal insurance against such covariate shocks may mitigate these adverse consequences. We study the long-run impacts of catastrophic drought insurance on pastoralists in Kenya and Ethiopia. We leverage randomized premium discounts distributed when insurance was first introduced to estimate the impact of insurance on outcomes ten years later. Insurance induced a shift in household production strategies -- an increased share of large animals herded at the expense of small animals -- and a substantial increase in children's education. This seems to result from both reduced demand for child labor due to herd composition shifts -- the marginal productivity of child labor is lower for herding large rather than small animals -- and suggestive positive income effects. The long-run effects we observe arise from reduced ex ante risk exposure and the behavioral change it induces, not from the cash indemnity payments insured households receive ex post of droughts. The results are robust to controlling for prospective spillovers among households.

Work in Progress

Intimate Partner Violence and Women's Economic Preferences

with Anderberg, D., Cassidy, R., Dam, A., Hidrobo, M., and Leight, J.

Abstract: Despite the fact that one third of women worldwide face intimate partner violence (IPV), little is known about how IPV affects economic decision making. IPV is traumatic, and we know from other contexts that traumatic events may alter preferences of individuals. We provide causal evidence from two methods and four data sets, of the effect of IPV on women's economic decision-making. We conduct two survey experiments with women in Ethiopia who are asked to recall specific acts and injuries they have incurred from IPV events, before we elicit their time preferences. We find that women who have experienced IPV in the past months, when asked to recall these experiences, become less patient, than women with such experiences who are not asked to recall these events. Second, we leverage a reduction in IPV from two separate randomized interventions as an instrument to test for impacts on time preferences. We find that women who experience a reduction in IPV exhibit more patient behaviour. Taken together, these results provide novel evidence that IPV events may change victim's preferences, which are key parameters in economic decision making, such as women's investment decisions as well as actions needed to exit violent relationships.

Can teaching soft skills improve academic outcomes? Evidence from a goal-setting curriculum

with Dam, A, Gray-Lobe, G. Kremer, M, de Laat, J.

Abstract: We examine the impact of an intensive soft-skills goal-setting curriculum on high-stakes school-leaving exams and secondary school transitioning in Uganda and Kenya. Designed by practitioners, the program taught primary school students over a 25-week period how to make effective goals, manage time, and provided them with a structured environment in which to regularly make and evaluate progress towards goals. It also taught students to be aware of behavioral patterns that could prevent them from achieving goals (e.g., procrastination). The program did not improve academic outcomes or survey-reported measures of personality traits like patience and conscientiousness, and related behaviors like planning. Conversely, there is also no evidence that by displacing instruction for academic subjects, the program had negative impacts on scores in those subjects. This suggests that the cost in terms of academic subject knowledge from policy experimentation with soft skills curricula may be low.

The effect of 3G on child marriage and teen pregnancy

with Wildeman, J. and Wagner, N.

Abstract: Sub-Sahara Africa has persistently high rates of child marriage and teen fertility. Recognizing the rapid expansion of mobile broadband internet (3G) -- a key driver of social media access -- we investigate the effect of 3G coverage on child marriage and teen pregnancy in sub-Saharan Africa. We combine geo-referenced information on 3G coverage with marriage and fertility information for over 500,000 women-year observations from 20 sub-Saharan African countries between 2011-2022. Employing a two-way fixed effects estimator, we find that the risk of child marriage and teen pregnancy reduces substantially as 3G expands. Women are 1.7 percentage points less likely to get married during adolescence and 1.3 percentage points less likely to give birth, while older women are unaffected by 3G expansion. Heterogeneity analyses show that the effect is especially evident among wealthier and more educated women, as they are more likely to be early adopters. Complementary exploratory analyses highlight knowledge about family planning, attitudes towards women and children and behavioral change, including the use of contraception, as mechanisms, suggesting that simply the introduction of 3G is more powerful than most targeted conventional family planning interventions.

Weathering Conflict: The Effect of Resource Shocks on Livestock Raids

with Jensen, N., Lopez-Rivas, J.D., and Rikken, E.E.

Abstract: Aggregate shocks such as droughts have negative long-run impacts on lifetime well-being. Formal insurance against such covariate shocks may mitigate these adverse consequences. We study the long-run impacts of catastrophic drought insurance on pastoralists in Kenya and Ethiopia. We leverage randomized premium discounts distributed when insurance was first introduced to estimate the impact of insurance on outcomes ten years later. Insurance induced a shift in household production strategies – an increased share of large animals herded at the expense of small animals – and a substantial increase in children’s education. This seems to result from both reduced demand for child labor due to herd composition shifts – the marginal productivity of child labor is lower for herding large rather than small animals – and suggestive positive income effects. The long-run effects we observe arise from reduced ex ante risk exposure and the behavioral change it induces, not from the cash indemnity payments insured households receive ex post of droughts. The results are robust to controlling for prospective spillovers among households.

Tailoring Advice and Incentives to Enhance Consumer Welfare from Livestock Insurance

with Barrett, C.B., Gidey, T.G., Harrison, G.W, Jensen, N.D., Son, H., Swarthout, J.T.

Summary: Consumers often struggle to select financial products that enhance their welfare. We investigate the impact of tailored financial advice about satellite-based catastrophic drought insurance based on real-time consumer information combined with two types of incentives for agents that promote insurance: sales and welfare incentives. We do so in a cluster randomized control trial among 2,416 pastoral households in Ethiopia who are offered this insurance commercially. Tailored advice, when provided jointly with agent incentives that explicitly promote the advice, decreases excess demand for insurance, increases adherence to advice, and increases expected consumer surplus from insurance purchase decisions. In contrast, we find no evidence that tailored advice has such impacts when combined with standard sales agents' incentives. We show that trust in agents explains the behavioral effects. Tailored advice reduces trust in agents, irrespective of the agents' incentive scheme. However, in a context with sales incentives, high trust in agents offsets any gains from reductions in excess purchases due to tailored advice for those with low trust in agents.