Job Market Paper

Program Evaluations and Policy Spending

Program evaluations are motivated in part by a desire to improve policy effectiveness. Yet there is limited empirical evidence on the efficacy of evaluation itself. This paper examines the systematic relationship between program evaluations and changes in policy spending, in the context of Conditional Cash Transfers in Latin America and the Caribbean. Using a novel dataset of 128 program evaluations mapped to spending on the corresponding evaluated programs, I find a robust zero relationship between research results and spending. This holds for several definitions of evaluation outcomes: more statistically significant, larger magnitude, more surprising, or more positively framed results, do not correspond with larger increases in spending. As policymakers may learn from cumulative evidence rather than individual studies, I then use a Bayesian hierarchical approach to aggregate evaluations. I find a zero association between a country’s cumulative evidence base and its spending. Finally, I explore mechanisms for this result by considering heterogeneous responses to evaluations that are more credible, actionable, or generalizable. I find that credibility and generalizability are unrelated to spending, but evaluations conducted quickly (within four years of the effect year) and attributable to the political party in power, are significantly predictive of spending. Thus, timeliness may be an overlooked aspect of the evidence-to-policy pipeline.


Working Papers

Women and Cash transfers: how program design and local conditions relate to causal estimates of impact, with Gabriela Diaz-Pardo.

In this paper, we conduct a systematic review of the literature on the impact of cash transfers on women’s employment and empowerment. We construct a dataset of 265 impacts of cash transfers on adult women across 56 studies and 30 programs in Lower and Middle-income countries. Our dataset is the first that matches estimated treatment effects with harmonised information on the design of cash transfer programs, including the transfer size, payment methods and frequencies, and program conditionalities. Across studies, we find that cash transfers have a positive and insignificant impact on women’s employment and empowerment. We use our data to explore how the impact of cash transfers differs by program design features and baseline country conditions, including local labor market structures and gender social norms. We find that cash transfers have a larger impact on women’s labor force participation when they are larger in size, and when there is a higher proportion of women who work in formal employment before the program evaluation. Overall, our results suggest that cash transfers have more meaningful impacts on women’s employment and empowerment when pre-existing gender constraints are low. Our findings highlight the importance of interpreting estimated program impacts in the context of country-level conditions and program design.


Gender differences in altruism: a Bayesian hierarchical analysis of dictator games 

I aggregate evidence on gender differences in dictator game giving from experiments published in all working papers and peer-reviewed journals since 1990. Using a two-stage Bayesian hierarchical model, I find that on average women give around 3 percentage points more than men in studies of dictator games. I show that while this estimate is smaller than that found in previous studies, it is likely to be an upper bound estimate due to publication bias. Using a truncated selectivity model, I estimate the conditional probability of publication as a function of experiment results. My findings suggest that experiments that find positive results (i.e. women contribute more than men) and are statistically different from zero at the 5% level, are around 13 times more likely to be published than statistically significant and negative results.


Published Papers

Men are from Mars and Women too: a Bayesian meta-analysis of overconfidence experiments, with Oriana Bandiera, Barbara Petrongolo and Nidhi Parekh.  Economica, 2022 

Gender differences in self-confidence could explain women's under-representation in high-income occupations and glass-ceiling effects. We draw lessons from the economic literature via a survey of experts and a Bayesian hierarchical model that aggregates experimental findings over the last 20 years. The experts’ survey indicates beliefs that men are overconfident and women underconfident. Yet the literature reveals that both men and women are typically overconfident. Moreover, the model cannot reject the hypothesis that gender differences in self-confidence are equal to zero. In addition, the estimated pooling factor is low, implying that each study contains little information over a common phenomenon. The discordance can be reconciled if the experts overestimate the pooling factor or have priors that are biased and precise. 



Works in Progress

Targeting Barriers to Gender Evidence Use, with Michael O'Sullivan and Léa Rouanet

A large literature in Development Economics provides rigorous causal evidence on innovations to improve women’s outcomes in business and entrepreneurship. Yet little is known about how and when these evidence-based interventions are implemented in practice. In this project, we provide new observational and experimental evidence on determinants and barriers to gender-evidence use in LMICs. We use rich administrative data on the educational background, employment history, and networks of development policy professionals to document existing patterns of evidence-use, and identify key barriers and constraints. We then conduct a randomized controlled trial, to study how changing the communication of evidence affects changes in beliefs, evidence-use, and engagement with researchers up to six-months following the intervention. 


Peer learning and Productivity across NGOs, with Jack Thiemel

Interventions in development, education, and workforce development organizations increasingly involve non-governmental organizations (NGOs) or civil society organizations. In this project, we randomly assign NGOs that share a common funder into community organizations to study the effect of networks on organizational performance. These NGOs will send representatives to monthly meetings wherein they will discuss best practices and share information on monitoring and evaluation, among other topics. We plan to study how the formation of these networks affects outcomes for the funder, and organisational performance and decisions for the funded NGOs.


Pre-doctoral work

Gender-oriented languages and Female Labour Force participation: Evidence from sub-Saharan Africa, CSAE working paper