Essays on Education and Health in Sub-Saharan Africa
Allen IV, James
2023
Abstract
My dissertation aims to ameliorate global poverty through the study of development economics with a focus on education and health. I identify novel interventions for improving human capital in sub-Saharan Africa, where poverty is most dire, and offer lessons for both scholars and policymakers. My first essay observes that, across sub-Saharan Africa, countries with a greater percentage of overlapping days in their school and farming calendars also have lower primary school survival rates, as greater overlap between these calendars presumably reduces the time available for both schooling and farm-based child labor. I causally identify such effects by leveraging a four-month shift to the school calendar in Malawi that differentially affected communities based on their pre-policy crop allocations. I find that a 10-day increase in school calendar overlap during peak farming periods decreases school advancement by 0.34 grades (one lost grade for every three children) and decreases the share of children engaged in peak-period household farming by 11 percentage points after four years. Secondary analyses reveal stronger negative schooling impacts for girls and poorer households driven by school's overlap with the labor-intensive sowing period. Policy simulations illustrate that adapting the school calendar to minimize overlap with peak farming periods should increase school participation by better accommodating farm labor demand. My second essay implements a randomized experiment to promote learning about COVID-19 among Mozambican adults--implemented over the phone during the pandemic lockdown--via a “supply-side” teaching intervention that provided targeted feedback on knowledge questions, a “demand-side” financial incentives intervention, and a joint treatment. The paper sets up a framework for how to evaluate whether supply- and demand-side educational interventions are substitutes or complements by estimating a “complementarity parameter”. Between the treatments, we find significantly more complementary than predicted by experts in a forecasting survey, with the joint treatment performing better than the combined effect of each standalone treatment (increasing COVID-19 knowledge by 0.5 standard deviations), and evidence of the complementarity persisting 9 months after the intervention. The paper’s framework can also be used to estimate complementary between supply- and demand-side educational interventions in more complex settings. My third essay tests randomized treatments aimed at accelerating social norms on an emerging preventive health behavior, motivated by early survey work in Mozambique during the COVID-19 pandemic revealing that respondents underestimated community support for social distancing. In theory, updating social norms upwards on a publicly beneficial health behavior can have ambiguous impacts: encouraging free-riding if ”everyone else is doing it”, or encouraging good behavior if the norm correction also updates the perceived infectiousness of the disease. Indeed, we find that the effect of correcting individuals’ underestimates of community support (or affirming accurate estimates) is heterogeneous: decreasing social distancing where COVID-19 cases were low and free-riding dominated, but increasing it where cases were high and the perceived-infectiousness effect dominated. The findings highlight that correcting misperceptions of health behavior norms may have heterogeneous effects depending on disease prevalence--an important lesson for policymakers on how to schedule public health interventions for maximum efficacy.Deep Blue DOI
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Development Economics Sub-Saharan Africa
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