SEMINARIOS Y WORKSHOPS

Fecha: 04/05/2021, 11:00

Modalidad: Virtual

Presentador: Eduardo Ferraz (URosario)

Autor: Ferraz, Eduardo

This paper studies the causal effect of stronger legislative support for the mayor on governance and on the interplay between executive and legislative. First, we propose a microfounded way to define whether a candidate to the city council has won his seat by a slim margin. Then, we use this method to determine elections in Brazil in which the mayors' coalition won or lost a seat in the city council by a slim margin. We find that having stronger support gives mayors more flexibility, increases the probability of mayors' reelection, and reduces corruption. These effects are heterogeneous on whether the mayor can be reelected. Our results are compatible with a political tit-for-tat in which legislative members facilitate rent extraction in exchange of a larger share of the rents.

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Fecha: 13/05/2021, 11:00

Modalidad: Virtual

Presentador: Yasir Khan (Haas Business School-UC Berkeley)

Autor: Khan, Yasir

This paper studies whether public sector organizations can strengthen the mission motivation of their workers and get them to exert effort on the job. I implement a field experiment in partnership with the Department of Health in Pakistan, where I randomly emphasize the public health mission to community health workers, provide performance-linked financial incentives, or do both. The mission treatment improves worker performance across incentivized (home visits) and non-incentivized tasks, while financial incentives improve performance only on the incentivized task. Financial incentives also become less effective at increasing home visits when combined with the mission treatment. Finally, the mission treatment improves downstream child health outcomes---there is a lower prevalence of diarrhoea and higher vaccination rates. These results highlight that promoting an organization's mission can be a powerful motivator for public workers, especially in weakly institutionalized environments.

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Fecha: 20/05/2021, 11:00

Modalidad: Virtual

Presentador: Nathaniel Lane (Oxford)

Autor: Lane, Nathaniel

Civil society is essential to governance, especially where laws and authority are weak. We study how a core strategy of international civil society groups - informing and publicizing human rights abuses - impacts those tied to abuse. Our study focuses on a major trend at the center of on-going international media campaigns: the assassination of civil society activists involved in mining activity. Collecting and coding 20 years of data on assassination events, we use Event Study Methodology to study how publicity of these events impact the asset prices of firms associated with abuse. We show that publicizing abuses has a significant impact on multinationals. Firm's associated with an assassination have large, negative abnormal returns following the event. We calculate a median loss in market capitalisation of over 100 million USD, ten days following violence. We highlight the role of media publicity in our results. We show negative returns from assassinations are stronger during periods of low media pressure, versus when they coincide with competing newsworthy events. As well, we argue our results are driven by events where companies are explicitly named in media publicity, using a set of placebo events where no firms were identified by news coverage. Furthermore, we reject that our results are driven by other forms of unrest and conflict. Last, we show activist assassinations are positively related to the royalties paid by firms to domestic governments.

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Fecha: 27/05/2021, 11:00

Modalidad: Virtual

Presentador: Martin Williams

Autor: Williams, Martin

Organizational culture is an important driver of organizational performance, but there is little evidence on how to improve it. We partnered with Ghana’s Civil Service to design a training module geared towards such culture change and delivered it to mid-level bureaucrats at scale on a randomized basis in two arms. The individual-focused, classroom-style training arm significantly improved organizational culture 6-18 months post-training. However, the team-focused arm had no impact. Qualitative evidence suggests that managers’ presence inhibited discussion and may have reinforced existing team culture. Simple and scalable interventions can thus improve organizational culture, but their design matters.

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Fecha: 05/08/2021, 11:00

Modalidad: Virtual

Presentador: Claudio Mora (INCAE)

Autor: Mora, Claudio

This paper uses variation in the timing of implementation of the 1995 Costa Rican primary health care intervention to examine its long-term effect on mortality. We find that, within eleven years after opening a Health Area, age-adjusted mortality rates significantly decreased by 9 percent. The effect is higher among adults older than 65 years and in cardiovascular-related causes of death. The intervention improved access to health services in previously underserved areas and increased citizens’ contact with health services. These results highlight that the pursuit of universal health coverage through strengthening primary health care can have long-lasting and significant effects on mortality.

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Fecha: 12/08/2021, 11:00

Modalidad: Virtual

Presentador: Jorge Garcia (Universidad Autonoma de Madrid)

Autor: Garcia, Jorge

Rehabilitating convicted criminals is challenging; indeed, an important share of them return to prison only a few years after their release. Thus, finding effective ways of encouraging crime desistance, particularly among young individuals, has become an important policy goal to reduce crime and incarceration rates. This paper uses rich administrative data from Chile to provide causal evidence that the local institutions of the neighborhood that receives young individuals after prison matter. Specifically, we show that the opening of an Evangelical church reduces twelve-month reincarceration rates among property crime offenders by more than 11 percentage points. This effect represents a drop of 18% in the probability of returning to prison for this group of individuals. We discuss three classes of mechanisms that could explain our results: social support, promotion of Evangelical values, and social monitoring. We provide evidence that the social support provided by evangelical churches is an important driver of our findings. This suggests that non-religious local institutions could also play an important role in the rehabilitation of former inmates.

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Fecha: 19/08/2021, 11:00

Modalidad: Virtual

Presentador: Andrew Dustan (Vanderbilt University)

Autor: Dustan , Andrew D

The gender gap in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) widens during high school, due both to differences in student choices and institutional barriers to accessing STEM education. Using rich data from Mexico City and a structural model of high school choice, we show that most of the gap is due to gendered choices but that exam-based assignment also restricts access to selective STEM schools. Simulations reveal the potential for policies to decrease the STEM gap with differential effects by student achievement. Targeted affirmative action and policies increasing females’ willingness to travel to STEM schools would reduce the gap significantly.

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Fecha: 02/09/2021, 11:00

Modalidad: Virtual

Presentador: María Lombardi (UTDT)

Autor: Lombardi, María

We study the impact of granting tenure to civil servants on turnover in the context of public school teachers in Chile. We take advantage of a law that required all public education administrators to grant a permanent contract to temporary teachers with at least three consecutive years of experience in 2014. Using an instrumental variable strategy embedded in a difference-in-differences setting, we compare the subsequent turnover of primary and secondary school teachers with temporary contracts who had two and three years of experience in 2010-2014. We find that permanent contracts reduce teacher turnover by 23.5 percentage points, an 85 percent reduction over the mean. We provide suggestive evidence that this reduction in turnover is higher for teachers with low scores in a nationwide teaching evaluation. These findings highlight a potential pitfall of providing high job security irrespective of job performance.

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