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Childcare, Labor Supply, and Business Development: Evidence from Uganda

It is almost common knowledge that access to childcare is and has been fundamental for increasing women’s labor force participation in High-Income countries. However, it is not fully clear if the lessons drawn from such countries can be applied to contexts in low-income ones. Since in such settings evidence of the effects of childcare on women’s labor market outcomes is scarce and that of the effects it has on child development mixed, there is a research gap that needs to be filled.

Motivated by this, researchers of this Working Paper set themselves to experimentally assess this research question in Uganda. Their research design is not only intended to analyse the effect of childcare on to the labor market outcomes of women, but also on the ones of husbands and that of the household in general. Researchers therefore selected Women that had children between the age of 3 and 5 at the time of the experiment and either gave a cash grant, a childcare subsidy or nothing. Consequently and with this setting, investigators find that childcare leads to a 44 per cent increase in household income and that the childcare subsidy improves child development while the cash grant does not. Read the detailed Working Paper here.

Intergenerational Mobility in India: New Methods and Estimates across Time, Space and Communities

When thinking about the economic development of India in past decades there are two dominating points of view. On the one hand, that economic and political liberalization have increasingly led to a more equal society where intergenerational upward mobility has become more likely, while on the other, that India’s inequalities are persistent as ever. Approaches and methodologies intended to measure the changes and the development of such mobilities have mainly focused on education. Within this however, analyses have been constrained to analyse the relationship between parents’ education and the one of children. While the insights from such research endeavours can tell new and important stories, they are less meaningful when concentrating on subgroup analyses as they only measure progress against members of the same group.

Researchers in this Working Paper therefore set to analyse how intergenerational mobility in India has developed across years and between and within groups. Approaching mobility through education but applying modern methodologies to the analysis that departs from sole linear estimations researchers have three main Findings. First, that upward mobility has remained surprisingly constant, second, that there are significant changes in the cross-group distribution of upward mobility over time, particularly among sons, and thirdly that upward mobility is highest in places that are southern, urban and have high average education levels. Read the detailed Working Paper here.

Glass Walls: Experimental Evidence on Access Constraints Faced by Women

Diverse approaches and experiments in the economic literature have shown that offering subsidies and making certain services available do no result in a take-up at an expected scale when targeting those that have been historically excluded from government programmes. Although calculations often have left the non-take-up cases out arguing that whenever subsidies are of the right size such access constraints become less of a concern, there is a growing interest in analysing the nature of such constraints to understand and address them better.

This paper follows such a research motivation and analyses the nature, form and extent of such an access constraint, namely the travel that requires a woman to move outside her community. Studying a skills development program in Pakistan, researchers make use of differences in the size of the constraint to analyse the corresponding take up. They find that distance is indeed strongly related with a reduced take-up of the program, but more strikingly that the boundary of a village is the distance-feature that deems the most effect on the low take-up rates. It appears that the imaginary boundary of the village poses the highest constraint for women even though in terms of distance, there is no form of discontinuity induced by such a border. Read the detailed Working Paper here.

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Childcare, Labor Supply, and Business Development: Experimental Evidence from Uganda

In a field experiment in Uganda, mothers of young children are randomly offered a childcare subsidy, an equivalent cash grant, both or nothing. Childcare leads to a 44 percent increase in household income, which is at least as large as the impact of the cash grant and driven by an increase in mothers’ business revenues and fathers’ wage earnings. The childcare subsidy also improves child development while the cash grant does not. Overall, our findings demonstrate that childcare subsidies can be an effective policy to simultaneously promote child development and reduce poverty in a low-income context.

Intergenerational Mobility in India: New Methods and Estimates across Time, Space and Communities

We study intergenerational mobility in India over time, across groups, and across space. We show that the modern set of rank-based mobility measures can be at best partially identified with education data. We develop a new measure of upward mobility that works well under data constraints common in developing countries. We find that intergenerational mobility in India has been constant and low since before liberalization. Among boys, rising mobility for Scheduled Castes is almost exactly offset by declining mobility among Muslims, a comparably sized group with few constitutional protections. Mobility among girls is lower, with less crossgroup variation over time. Mobility is highest in places that are southern, urban, and have high average education levels. A natural experiment suggests that affirmative action for Scheduled Castes has substantially improved their mobility. Our measures are relevant for the study of mobility in poorer countries and in historical contexts.

Glass Walls: Experimental Evidence on Access Constraints Faced by Women

Access barriers can substantially constrain individuals from obtaining benefits. Using experimental evidence from Pakistan, we show distance poses a major hurdle for women in accessing a valued and subsidized skills training program. Women who have to travel a few kilometers outside their village for training are four times less likely to complete it than those whose village received a training center. This penalty is not readily reconciled with measured financial or time costs of travel and over half of it is incurred upon crossing the village boundary. Exogenous stipend variation reveals this “boundary effect” is costly to offset, requiring a cash transfer equivalent to half of household expenditure. While informational and social interventions don’t ameliorate this barrier, reliable group transportation helps. The importance of secure transport and additional results suggest the boundary effect may be partly due to safety concerns. A notable share of the boundary effect is explained by having to traverse underpopulated spaces, a proxy for threats to safety in this context. Our work provides experimental confirmation that access constraints faced by women are significant, costly to address monetarily, but can be ameliorated through locally attuned interventions.

Women’s Mobility and Labor Supply: Experimental Evidence from Pakistan

In cities with conservative norms or high crime, female workers may face greater restrictions on their physical mobility. This limits women’s labor market opportunities and the pool of workers that firms can attract. In this study, we experimentally vary access to a transport service in Lahore, Pakistan, to quantify the overall impact of transport to work on men, women, and the differential impact of transport exclusively for women. We show that reducing physical mobility constraints has a large impact on job searching for women, including women who are not searching at baseline. Women’s response is driven by a women-only transport treatment arm, suggesting that safety and social acceptability, rather than simply cost, are key constraints.

The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Migrant Remittances in the Philippines

Money sent home by migrants working abroad is an important source of income, particularly in low and middle-income countries. In the Philippines, remittances represent ten percent of GDP, and about a quarter of Philippine households report receiving remittances. 1 With the outbreak of COVID-19 and its impact on the global economy, policymakers worried about the resilience of these important remittance flows. The lower-than-expected fall in remittances to low and middle income countries (-1.7% in 2020 versus -7.1% forecast)2 could be the result of a transition from informal to formal channels. Field studies are necessary to assess the correct dimension of the COVID shock. To investigate how pandemic closures and restrictions affect migrants’ income and remittances, researchers built on a previous study to conduct two rounds of phone surveys between Filipino migrants in the UAE and their families in the Philippines. A total of 1,188 migrants and 1,329 households participated in the first round of the survey, from September to November 2020. 1,081 migrants and 1,358 households participated in the second round, from March to May 2021.

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