Survey Research in Economics – Insights from my LEAP Internship

By Edoardo Ardito, LEAP Intern

Within the various fields of Economics, scholars are often confronted with the challenge of translating the complex and sometimes blurry reality of human behaviour into elegant models and assumptions, or into datasets and observable variables. This is often not an easy job: picture for example ability, or motivation. Labor economics’ models largely study how the interplay of these variables can affect productivity and other labor market outcomes, or what role they play in defining the returns to human capital investments such as university education. But how these variables should be uniquely defined and, most importantly, how they can be observed and measured is far from obvious.

The aim of this blog post is to propose some food for thought on surveys as a key data collection and measurement method in economic research, specifically by pointing out some of their strengths, drawbacks, and possible innovative alternatives. Most of what I write about in this post I have had the opportunity to closely observe during my internship at LEAP as a Research Assistant. Indeed, my experience at LEAP was an opportunity to interact with experts in the field of survey research and not only to learn from them about clever survey designs from a theoretical standpoint, but also to get my hands on real survey data and understand how it is managed.

Overall, surveys are an extremely powerful instrument to turn elusive human attributes into manageable variables and indices. For example, survey research employs an array of techniques to capture empirical data on individuals’ subjective expectations regarding the future. These may include point expectations (such as the expected age of retirement for a given individual), but also comprehensive distributions of expected outcomes. To illustrate, the latter measure involves soliciting respondents’ belief of the likelihood that a given outcome will exceed a number of predefined thresholds in the future. For example, respondents may be asked to express the probability that, at the age of 40 and with a university degree, their salary will surpass a specific threshold X. By aggregating a respondent’s answer to such a question for various values of X, a researcher may elicit the respondent’s subjective distribution of their expected salary.

Surveys also serve as an effective tool to capture individuals’ habits and beliefs. A well known illustration of belief measurement is through Likert scale questions, which ask respondents to express a degree of agreement (say, from 0 to 10) to a provided statement. By strategically employing multiple Likert scale questions, researchers can construct multifaceted and comprehensive indices that encapsulate the nuances of the respondent’s beliefs. For example, large-scale surveys like the European Social Survey collect data on individuals’ beliefs and perceptions, that can be aggregated into indexes of perceived fairness of the public services, understanding and evaluation of democracy, or attitudes towards climate change. In addition, survey questions can be used to observe individuals’ beliefs and attitudes by scrutinising their everyday habits: information about how many times an individual drives the car to cover relatively short distances, consumes meat, or recycles waste is (at least in part) informative about their attitudes towards climate change.

These examples are only breadcrumbs compared to the mass of information that surveys can unlock and to the vast repertoire of survey designs and elicitation techniques that are available. Still, they are informative on some of two major strengths I have learned to associate to surveys as measurement tools:

1. Flexibility: surveys can be tailor-made for any research question and this adaptability empowers researchers with a canvas on which they can unleash their creativity, devising survey questions that meticulously gauge even the most intricate or concealed aspects of respondents’ characters.
2. Competitive advantage: not many other data collection techniques are available to turn human characteristics such as beliefs, expectations, habits, preferences into quantitative variables as easily and cheaply as surveys can. In my view, this capability renders surveys particularly indispensable in the realm of social science research.

Clearly, surveys don’t come without imperfections: how many questions the survey has, the order in which questions are presented , the conditions under which respondents answer them, how easy it is to understand what the survey questions are asking, whether respondents may feel like their privacy is being violated are only a few of the many sources of error that can arise from relying on surveys as measurement instruments. It is well known how crucial it is to carefully design and test a survey before delivering it to the field, and how costly it can be to make sure that data collection is bias-proof, especially in contexts in which it may be necessary to have thoroughly trained interviewers and supervisors meet and interview the respondents on the field.

Still, even the perfectly designed and well-performing survey may produce data that is not free of all bias. Together with the values of the measured variables, survey data also carries a hidden story about some patterns unconsciously followed by respondents follow, triggered by the very fact of answering survey questions. For example, respondents may predict what would be the most socially acceptable answer to a given question, unconsciously tend not to select extreme values in a Likert scale, or to report an idealised version of their habits rather than the reality.

Interestingly, we may consider how the ever-evolving technological advancements of our time have the potential to give way to innovative strategies to gather data on large populations and set the basis for the development of new measurement techniques to observe variables that we typically do through surveys. Smartphone applications have a disarming capability of data collection nowadays. They can easily track users’ commutes, consumption habits, physical activity, or sleeping schedules as they happen in real time. An even more ventured example is the one of the so called neuroeconomic experiments, which allow researchers to observe individuals’ preferences towards risk and uncertainty, reward processing, or temporal discounting from an observation of their recorded brain activities rather than through the survey intermediary (see, for example, Berns et al., 2008). In the literature of development economics, some alternative methods of data collections have been used already. Haushofer and Shapiro (2016), for example, paired survey data and saliva samples to obtain measures of concern and the psychological distress of respondents. Indeed, stress increases the production of the cortisol hormone, whose levels can be detected in the saliva samples.

Needless to say, alternatives to survey data come with their flaws as well: ethical or privacy concerns, high costs and resource/technical requirements, or the fact that they may not be optimised for economic research, just to name a few. Still, it is interesting to discover whether measuring people’s habits, preferences, or beliefs through surveys or through complex brain-reading contraptions would result in similar observations or not, and in turn to understand to what extent the findings of economic research would change across different methods of data collection.

To conclude, I include a list of related readings, some of which I studied during my internship experience at LEAP, that I found interesting and that useful to learn more about survey research:

1. Delavande (2023): It explores how probabilistic expectations have been measured in LMICs and highlights variations in these measurements.
2. Giustinelli (2022): A literature review on subjective expectations in education, with a specific emphasis on methods and analysis of youth’s expectations of the returns to schooling through survey elicitation.
3. (With the risk of being out of topic) Nudge, by Thaler and Sunstein (2009): An interesting book that effectively describes how people’s decision-making and perceptions change with the specific context they are in.

References

Berns, G. S., Capra, C. M., Moore, S., & Noussair, C. (2008). Three studies on the neuroeconomics of decision-making when payoffs are real and negative. In Advances in health economics and health services research (pp. 1–29). https://doi.org/10.1016/s0731-2199(08)20001-4

Delavande, A. (2023). Expectations in development economics. In Elsevier eBooks (pp. 261–291). https://doi.org/10.1016/b978-0-12-822927-9.00016-1

Giustinelli, P. (2022). Expectations in Education: Framework, elicitation, and evidence. Social Science Research Network. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4318127

Haushofer, J., & Shapiro, J. P. (2016). The Short-term Impact of Unconditional Cash Transfers to the Poor: Experimental Evidence from Kenya*. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 131(4), 1973–2042. https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjw025

Thaler, R. H., & Sunstein, C. R. (2009). Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. Penguin.

Having an impact on your birth place: my first field work experience

by Michele Salatino

Introduction

When I applied for the internship program at the Laboratory for Effective Anti-Poverty Policies, this summer, I was looking for an opportunity to gain useful experience on the field of research. In particular, my main goals were to improve my data management skills, using softwares such as Stata or R, while at the same time learning from my mentor how to conduct a proper research project in a rigorous way. Little did I know that, after being selected, I would have been given the opportunity to contribute to the realization of a research project in the place where I was born, where I have always lived until last year and that will always represent my roots: Napoli. Little did I know, moreover, that I would have conducted an effective field work in order to promote the project I was working at.

The Internship program turned out to be one of the most formative and rewarding experiences of my life.

The Project

The internship program consisted in the support to the realization of a project among middle schools in Napoli and in the neighboring areas. In particular, the project aims at improving and strenghtening the relationship between students and professors, thus reducing students’ drop-out rates.

My role in the Project

When I started the internship, the project was at the very beginning. One of the most urgent tasks was to contact roughly 80 schools in Napoli and another 60 schools in neighboring areas in order to make them aware of the existence of this project and induce them to take part into it – this task was not easy at all!

At the beginning, this process of recruitment was carried out trough e-mails and phone calls, but we soon realized that it was not being effective. That’s when my mentoring Professor, Selene Ghisolfi, suggested that it would have been more effective to go around those schools in person, in order to be able to talk about the scope of the project, the idea behind it and the benefits that it could bring to the school community.

For a bit more than two weeks I have been going to schools in different neighbourhoods of Napoli, some of them very familiar, some that I had only heard about but I had never been to. Discovering areas of my city was incredibly interesting, and talking to people about the work that we were carrying out made me feel proud and it made me realize that we were going in the right direction.

At the same time, going in different areas of my city made me realize, one more time, how privileged I have always been. When you grow in a wealthy neighbourhood, you hang out with people from the same area and you go around in beautiful places of your city, it looks like there is nothing else apart from it – you grow in a bubble. Experiences like the one I have done through my internship give you the possibility to break the bubble and get out from it.

During my field work I have been in areas that are well-known, even outside Napoli, for being difficult and disadvantaged places, such as Scampia, Secondigliano, Ponticelli. Even though progresses have been made and there is often a mystification of the condition of security of those areas, it is indubitable that there is still a lot to be done in some neighborhoods.

Going to these places had a huge impact on me. One day, for instance, I went visiting a school right in front of some of the most famous places in Napoli linked to Mafia: the ”Vele di Scampia” (Sails of Scampia). These popular buildings (which used to be eight, now are three, two of which are going to be demolished) are a symbol of degradation and fear associated to Camorra.

Figure 1: Vele di Scampia, Picture taken during my field work experience

Surprisingly enough, I had never seen them in person, and I only had a vague knowledge about their story. As soon as I got home, I started reading about them and watching videos telling their stories – this was fundamental to broaden my knowledge about the history of that area.

When you see the places where you are going to start a project that might, in its small way, bring a positive contribution, you gain a totally different awareness of what it means. Moreover, when you meet people that make you feel their interest and their appreciation for the project you are proposing them, making you feel that it is indeed needed, you feel a sense of reward and satisfaction that you can only get if you work directly on field.

Figure 2: ”If you cannot see happiness, search for it inside of yourself”, Scampia, Picture taken during my field work experience

The process of recruitment was not always easy and, of course, not all people I met were enthusiastic about the project. Despite that, it has been key in order to make me realize the importance of the work we were carrying out and the potential impact of similar initiatives. Moreover, it had a significant impact in increasing the participation rate of schools to the project. As regards myself, it was something I will keep in my wealth of experience forever and that has enriched me hugely.

Conclusions

My internship experience at the Laboratory for Effective Anti-Poverty Policies has been hugely formative and inspiring. Not only has it represented an opportunity to gain useful knowledge about how to carry out tasks related to a research project, but it has also proved to be an opportunity to meet the people that will possibly benefit from the project and see the places where it will take place. The possibility to carry out field work and the opportunity to do it in my birth place have boosted even more my motivation to work in the area of Development Economics, with the aim of being able to contribute, in my own small way, to the realization of projects that are oriented towards the improvement of disadvantaged people’s conditions. For this reason, I am extremely thankful to LEAP, for this opportunity that has been given me, and to the people I have been working with: Selene Ghisolfi, Giovanna Marcolongo, Noemi Facchetti and Diletta Savoldi. I really hope in the future I will be able to go through other experiences like this and that I will have the opportunity to work again with incredibly supportive and motivated people like them.

What makes us prosocial?

Classic economic theory rests on two main assumptions about human behavior: people want to get as much as possible for themselves (self-interest), and are quite clever in getting what they want (rationality). Given that standard models leave little or no room for prosocial motivations, one might be tempted to conclude that economics does not have much to say about it and it would be better stop reading and just go for a more interesting post. Bear with me a few lines more.

In real life, people commonly engage in prosocial activities, meaning actions that are costly to themselves and mostly benefit others such as volunteering, helping strangers, giving to charitable organizations or donating blood. Why do we observe cooperation and altruistic behavior in daily life? Does this contrast with the economic assumption of self-interested and rational individuals? Indeed, the fact that people are mainly self-interested does not prevent them from performing actions that may benefit others, but rather this questions whether people would engage in prosocial behavior out of a true concern for other people’s welfare. To try to answer these questions, we mainly rely on behavioral economics which tries to incorporate psychological, cognitive, cultural and social factors into classic economic theory, drawing from other disciplines to supplement the notion of self-interest as being the main driver of human decisions.

The first interesting insight comes from evolutionary theories which bring reciprocity into play. Direct reciprocity (A→ B, B→ A) refers to the idea that cooperation between non-relatives may emerge if cooperation at one time is reciprocated at a later time. So, why would people donate to charities that could not directly return the favor? Such behaviors can be explained through indirect reciprocity (A→ B, B→ C) which instead relies on reputation effects that can support altruistic behavior in large groups (i.e., people may gain a positive reputation if they cooperate). However, one might still ask why reciprocity should be linked to prosociality rather than selfish or neutral behavior: costly punishment of those who do not cooperate, such as the exclusion from the group, has proven a reason for the evolution of cooperation, even among non-kin. Therefore, in the context of repeated interactions, reciprocity does not necessarily require actors to be endowed with pure altruism and cooperation might constitute the most effective behavior even for a fully selfish actor.

So far, so good. It seems that we might still be happy with the idea of a self-interested actor who acts in a prosocial way. Indeed, based on this discussion, one might expect that prosocial behavior in one-shot encounters would rarely be observed. But guess what? Evidence shows that also in these settings behavior deviates significantly from that predicted for self-interested players: individuals make non trivial donations even when the theory predicts they should not. Therefore, this behavior does constitute a challenge to the picture of people being only self-interested. Yet people seem somewhat rational: they do not seek uniformly to help others; rather, they do so according to how generous these other people are being in turn. Literature shows that people help others according to the expectations they hold about others’ altruism. The interesting implication of this is that even an altruistic individual might choose not to cooperate if she believes that other actors would not do the same.

All this being said, why should this discussion be of any relevance for real life? Well, the way I like to think about it, it is that economics can give us some insights on how to effectively incentivize prosocial behavior. When it comes to promoting some type of actions, economists like to think about the right incentive to provide (i.e., money, rewards, tax exemptions). The problem with prosocial behavior is that incentives have proven to have mixed results, not affecting or in some cases reducing the amount of prosocial behavior exhibited. What does explain these inconsistencies? Tirole and Bénabou (2006) develop an image-based theoretical framework where the basic idea is that people want to appear as prosocial or as intrinsically motivated as possible. In this model, when rewards or punishment create doubt about the true motive for which good actions are performed this can reduce prosocial behavior. Therefore, which incentives apply better to which contexts? What is the role that social norms play? What if we bring social networks into the picture?

As complex (and fascinating) as this debate might seem, we have just scratched the surface of a huge literature which extends far beyond what I presented here. I could go on with an endless list of interesting and still open questions, but I bet (and maybe hope) you can’t wait to finish reading and add your own to the list!

Giuliana Ghia is an incoming Ph.D. student in Economics at Stockholm University and Research Assistant at the IIES. This post draws from a book chapter available here. For comments and feedback: giulianaghia318@gmail.com

Field Work? An amazing learning opportunity for aspiring development economist.

by Cécile Pierre

In January 2022 I started working as RA and Field Coordinator for Prof. Lucia Corno, on the Project Breast-Ironing Breastfeeding and Child Mortality. This study investigates a harmful tradition common in Cameroon called “Breast Ironing”. It is a traditional practice that involves scarifying, massaging or pressing the breast of adolescent girls and is usually performed by close relatives such as mothers, grandmothers and aunts in order to reverse and thwart the development of the breast. As part of this position, I moved to Yaoundé, Cameroun for 6 months. My job was to set up and supervise the intervention phase of the project, it followed a baseline data collection, and another data collection would come afterward.  

This was not my first job as a RA, but it was my first time in the field and it has probably been the most enriching experience of my life. First of all, it gave me an unrivaled opportunity to understand the issue I was working on. I met victims and perpetrators of breast ironing, I had the chance to witness their testimonies and grasp better the logic behind this practice. Secondly, this project brought me to Central Africa, with all the adaptive challenges this entails, but the core value of this experience is, I think, present in any kind of fieldwork, no matter how far from your home and your culture this field is. What I mean by this is that, yes, a big share of what made this experience so salient for me is linked to being in a completely new country, new culture, and learning to adapt to new standards of life. But what I‘ll remember and carry with me for the rest of my working life are the skills I acquired during this time.

As an aspiring development economist, I have worked with complex datasets, learned to code, and followed advanced theoretical classes during my studies and previous RA position. But even though I thought I already had a clear understanding of the challenges and logistics embedded in the rollout of an RCT, it was not until I found myself actively in the middle of one, that I could properly measure the extent of it. You’re taught about the rules of a good experiment, you probably also can imagine that data collection is not an easy task, and that there is a practical side to consider in every project. But it is also so easy to forget that this line in your dataset is a person, with a life, a job, a family to feed and only 24 hours in her day. I have learned that a perfect design in your office has no value if it does not take into consideration the reality of the people and the contexts in which you are working. This may sound evident, I also thought I knew this already, but there is nothing like a first-hand experience to really understand something.

In a nutshell, the main takeaways for me have been the following: The importance of timing, especially in agricultural settings. People have rhythms, work, and cultural rhythms, that you cannot ignore. This also concerns weather, being in the field during dry or rainy seasons is not the same, this affects your budget and the quality of your output. One week later, or one week earlier is not the same. Secondly, there is a delicate balance between knowing when to listen to your local team and when to push for your way of doing things. Especially when you work in a context like I did, where cultural norms are very strong and different from yours. Naturally, you care for the quality of data you’re collecting, or of the intervention you are rolling out, so you always have in mind all the criteria that should be met for them to be theoretically valid. You should push for such criteria to be respected and know that you’ll face opposition because sometimes your collaborators do not understand the value of doing things a certain way. But you should also value their inputs, they know the people and the culture you are working with and really often there are things you would have never imagined that can have an enormous impact on your work, no matter how open-minded you are or how aware you think you are, you’ll be surprised. To give you an example, there is a part of Cameroun in which we collected data were giving 1 item of something, in our case 1 piece of soap, is a sign of witchcraft. It is hard to take this as a serious issue, however, it is. Communication is also a key element of course, you have to adapt to the communication standard of where you are. In my case it was the speed of speech, people in Cameroun no matter how educated and smart they are, speak slowly, much slower than what I do. I realized that the speed at which I was speaking was an obstacle to efficient communication with my colleagues. Moreover, and a guess this is true for every partnership, speak to your collaborators in terms that make sense to them, and emphasize what has value for them, and sometimes you’ll have to explain things that seem so evident for you.

I believe this is addressed to recent graduates that, as I did, contemplate the idea of applying for a field RA position. My advice to you is: do it. It might be the hardest thing you’ll ever do or the most amazing time of your life, but the amount of knowledge you will retrieve from it is invaluable. For me, it has been such a great time. On top of the learning opportunity it has represented, my stay in Cameroun was a blast. Of course, it has been hard, I had my share of difficulties, but nothing compared to the good side of it. I met amazing people, learned so much about myself, and discovered that I was much stronger than I thought I was. I also witnessed that you really don’t need much to be happy, cliché I know, but so true.

As I am writing this, from my apartment in Kigali, Rwanda, where I just started a new field coordinator job, I realize how much I have learned and grown over the past 6 months, both as a young adult and as an aspiring development economist. I am deeply grateful to have the opportunity to do what I do.

Cécile Pierre

If you want to connect with me write me an email at cecile.j.pierre@gmail.com I’ll be happy to have a chat with you!

A demain, inch’Allah. Fieldwork in a not-so-easy country

During the last two months, as a LEAP student, I had the privilege to follow the first steps of the project Peers in Action in Ouagadougou, the capital city of Burkina Faso.

The project’s aim is to study the impact of peer pressure in changing attitudes towards harmful traditional practices among adolescent girls, with a specifical focus on female genital mutilations (FGM) and child marriage. The intervention, which will start in September 2022, is in partnership with the local branch of the NGO Children Believe, who will be in charge of setting up girls’ clubs, in order to create a safe space for them to share their thoughts and also to learn new skills that will boost their self-confidence.

Burkina Faso is not an easy place to work in. The country’s history has been marked by frequent episodes of political instability (the last significant political event is a coup d’etat at the start of this year, which has left the power in the hands of the military), and the central government is not currently able to control vast areas of the country, leaving the local population prey of continuous terrorist attacks perpetrated by jihadist groups.

Here in Ouaga I mainly worked to coordinate the works of the baseline data collection, based in the offices of the local data collection firm IHfRA (Innovative Hub for Research in Africa). Unfortunately, I was not able to personally go in the field (it is highly discouraged for foreigners to leave the capital) due to the security risk, but I participated in all the other steps of the data collection, such as programming the questionnaires and other materials, training and selecting of enumerators,  checking the quality of the data that we collected and cleaning it.

 Although I already worked as a research assistant, and even did fieldwork in Italy, taking part to this project in the last few months taught me many important lessons about what conducting research in a developing country feels like, and about what actually goes on in the field, with its challenges and its issues.

One of the things that I learned is the importance of being flexible, and of being able to come up rapidly with alternatives to what was previously planned. Countless times we had to rearrange aspects of the research once we faced the reality of the field. Even after discussing for weeks, or even months, central points of the projects such as which should be the relevant population to be surveyed, or the list of villages in which to conduct the analysis, these aspects needed constant readjustments, due to the ever-changing security situation, or more in general as we started to get a better idea of the reality of the villages in which we were working in.

At times we also had to adopt a flexible approach due to the lack of data available that we had. Even basic information such as rough estimations of the population living of an area, or the position of villages in which we planned to do the data collection were not always available, or had not been updated in so many years that they were of no use for the design our analysis.

An aspect that I thought was particularly interesting was the importance of a good knowledge of the context in which we were going to work. Information such as in which season it would be better to conduct the intervention in order to find more people available to attend the clubs (it is autumn, since in summer, which is the rainy season here in Burkina, many people are too busy with work in the fields), or which ones of the local languages the enumerators to be sent in a certain area should be able to speak, are all essential components that will guarantee a good output for the research, that are lost by looking at data alone.

Understanding that the researchers’ culture might be different from the local one is another thing that should be taken into account when preparing the materials that will be used in the data collection. Concepts and words that to us might have a clear meaning might not have the same one for the population that will be surveyed. For example, while discussing with the enumerators about the questionnaire translations, we discovered that the question we asked about how many times the interviewee played with her friends in the last week hid an unintended sexual double meaning, which could lead respondents to give us a different answer to the one we actually wanted to know. Similarly,we realized that we had to explicitly state in the questionnaires to list in the same household children from different marriages of fathers in polygamous relationships if they were living together, or else enumerators would have listed them as belonging to different households.

Furthermore, culture can change across different groups of people even in the same country. This became apparent when we had to identify objects or colors related to the FGM ceremony, and every person we spoke to gave us a different answer, since each culture had its own symbols that were used in the ceremony!    

Being able to coordinate this data collection in Burkina Faso has been a great opportunity to learn new things and to broaden my horizons both from an academic and personal point of view, and I would strongly encourage everyone considering a career as a researcher in development economics to engage in something similar. I believe that getting a first-hand idea of the necessary practical actions that need to be undertaken and of all the issues that might show up in the field will be crucial when planning to do your own research, and that this experience can not be replaced by coursework alone.

I conclude by wishing the best of luck for the implementation phase of Peers in Action, and for the future of Burkina Faso in general! These months have been so formative and I will always bring memories of them with me.

Alessandro Palucci

If you want to connect with me write me an email at alessandro.palucci1@gmail.com, I’ll be happy to have a chat with you!

Can a 1-minute self-recorded video boost children’s aspirations?

By Raffaella Dimastrochicco

Aspiration trap

There is large evidence in the literature that low aspirations are a common issue among people coming from fragile socio-economic backgrounds. This tendency to under-aspire is detrimental for poor people, as it prevents them from investing in education and ultimately condemns them to lower wages, thereby reinforcing their poverty status (Appadurai, 2004; Ray, 2006; La Ferrara, 2019).

Several interventions have been tested and implemented to break this vicious circle – known as “aspiration trap” – and increase aspirations, which range from organizing tutoring programs and academic counselling (Carlana et al., 2017) to institutional changes in the political rules (Beaman, 2012) and the provision of statistical information on the benefits of investing in education (Nguyen, 2008). One further option involves the exposure of children to role models, with both in-person interventions (Porter and Serra, 2019) and showcasing inspirational movies (Riley, 2017). This latest option, in particular, is a cheap and easy to replicate treatment. To which extent can the length and complexity of the video be reduced while still generating a significant treatment effect?

Experimental setting

To answer this question, we conducted a RCT in Naples (Italy) in May 2021, on a sample of 295 primary and secondary school students from fragile families. We showed a very short (1 minute) self-recorded motivational video, in which a young immigrant adult who grew up in Naples told the story of how, starting from a situation of difficulty, they eventually managed to find their passion and this led to happiness and satisfaction with their lives, against all odds. The video was shown on a tablet during face-to-face interviews conducted by trained enumerators. The main goal of the video is to boost self-confidence and encourage students to find their passion, by aiming at what they really wanted to do in life regardless of their precarious conditions.

Face-to-face interview

Aspirations were measured by asking the students two open questions: “Which school, if any, would you like to attend when you grow up?” and “What would you like to become when you grow up”. Self-confidence was measured through a series of closed questions on a 4-level agreement scale. Data on students’ self-confidence and school and career aspirations were collected right after they watched the video.

Results

Results from the experiment are promising: we detect a significant increase in the self-confidence measure among the treated students by 29% s.d.. When looking at school aspirations, the video treatment increases the likelihood the respondent chooses the “academic track” by 28.5% a s.d., as hoped for. At the same time, there is also a positive effect of the video on career aspirations: among treated students, significantly more children aspire to the most prestigious of the 7 categories of jobs we identified; this category includes jobs as sportsmen, politicians, artists, etc. These results are robust to controls on gender, school level, and nationality.

Limitations and conclusion

There are two main limitations. First, by design, collected data allow us to measure only the short-term effects of the treatment; it would be interesting to measure whether these effects persist over the medium- to long-term.

Second, there may be a form of Hawthorne effect. One other interpretation suggests that children update their aspirations based on the role model experience, without tailoring it to their own situation and passion. Both qualitative and quantitative data collected during the interviews point out in this direction: children seem to lack information to make informative choices, and when provided with an example of a career path that goes beyond their everyday experience, they tend to follow it. In light of these results, it emerges the importance of providing children with a variety of examples about available career paths that are not those they can encounter in their everyday life.

Nonetheless, results suggest that the treatment is effective in boosting aspirations and self-confidence.

I am a MSc student in Economic and Social Sciences, and this article draws from a larger study constitutes my master thesis. If interested in the topic, do not hesitate to get in touch at raffaella.dimastrochicco@unibocconi.it, I will be happy to have an exchange with you.

References

Appadurai, A. (2004). “The Capacity to Aspire: Culture and the Terms of Recognition” . Culture and Public Action, edited by V. Rao and M. Walton. World Bank, pp. 59-84.

Beaman, L., E. Duflo, R. Pande, and P. Topalova (2012). “Female Leadership Raises Aspirations and Educational Attainment for Girls: A Policy Experiment in India.” Science, 335, 582–586.

La Ferrara, E. (2019). “Aspirations, Social Norms and Development”. European Economic Association Presidential Address. Cologne.

Nguyen, T. (2008). “Information, Role Models and Perceived Returns to Education: Experimental Evidence from Madagascar”. MIT Job Market Paper.

Porter, C. and D. Serra (2019). “Gender Differences in the Choice of Major: The Importance of Female Role Models”. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 12(3): 226-54, 2020

Ray, D. (2006). “Aspirations, Poverty and Economic Change”. Understanding Poverty, edited by A. Banerjee, R. Benabou, and D. Mookherjee. Oxford University Press.

Riley, E. (2017). “Increasing students’ aspirations: the impact of Queen of Katwe on students’ educational attainment”. In CSAE Working Paper WPS/2017-13.

The Impact of Networks on Integration and Social Norms of Migrant Women in Denmark

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is prevalent worldwide even when measures of gender disparity are considered. For example, despite Denmark having the second-lowest Gender Inequality Index score in the UNDP ranking, IPV is still prevalent: in 2014, national rates were not distinctly different from global proportions of 1/3 (FRA, 2014). Immigrant women disproportionately composed this statistic. While only 11.8% of women were classified as immigrants nationally, 42% of women’s shelter stays were non-Danish in 2019 (LOKK, 2020). In March 2021, we are awarded the LEAP student grant to explore these differences further and understand the role of norms in driving these statistics.

The research that motivates our proposal is by Alesina, Brioschi and La Ferrara (2021). Specifically, this paper showed that contemporaneous rates of IPV acceptance were higher amongst women that descended from historically patrilocal ethnicities, suggesting information and social protection influence incidences of violence. Our proposal aims to build on the emphasized persistence of IPV in Alesina et. al (2021) to understand whether attitudes, and subsequently incidences, are malleable when exposed to a contrasting perspective. The aim of our research is to develop on the economic and anthropological literature to understand to what extent social networks influence the norms of native and non-native women victim of IPV.

Hypotheses on the benefits of support networks are manyfold. Native-to-native and migrant-to-migrant bonds could help connect women with someone who has similar experiences, and background, which they can relate to and share. For the latter, if these women are less integrated in Danish society, there is likely a higher risk of being marginalized, leaving fewer means to cope with and overcome domestic violence. The relationship between migrants and natives could help migrants integrate into Denmark, providing legal, economic and social guidance to help them assimilate with the local culture, markets and processes. On the other hand, natives could also benefit by diversifying their social networks outside of those that her perpetrator is familiar with. We then plan to study the impact of such networks on a multitude of socio-economic outcomes, such as employment and job search, social security and health, both mental and physical and aim to conduct a survey through the registry to collect information on norms.

In order to analyse the causal effect of interactions among women of a matching or a different ethnicity, we exploit several sources of exogenous variation in the ethnic composition of the shelter population. At the national level, a variety of measures have been imposed to increase contact between natives and non-natives, and, in particular, we focus on a refugee dispersal policy introduced in the 1980s that allocated migrants as evenly as possible throughout the country to reduce formation of “ethnic enclaves”. At the shelter level, we plan to leverage the fact that women are randomly assigned to different floors, so that the “ethnic composition” of each floor is exogenous. Hence exposure to co-nationals or to women of different ethnicity, and consequently the likelihood of bonding with them, is also randomly determined. As there may be endogenous room switches, we have reached out to several shelters across the country about the possibility of a more robust experimental design to explore how contact with different perspectives can shape social norms.

Given shelters collect the social security numbers of residents, the shelter stays can be combined with the national administrative data. This has provided us access to a rich dataset, which we have purchased through our LEAP grant, containing information on a plethora of dimensions, including health-related information, criminal records, job market outcomes, and social security benefits, about all women between 18 and 65 years old living in Denmark for the last 15 years, along with eventual partners and children.

We have recently received the data and are in the process of cleaning them. We have started conducting a preliminary analysis to understand the socio-economic correlates of shelter stays. We look forward to disseminating our results in due course.

References:

European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, 2014. Violence against Women: An EU-wide Survey. Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union.

Alesina, A., Brioschi, B., & La Ferrara, E. (2021). Violence against women: a cross‐cultural analysis for Africa. Economica, 88(349), 70-104.

The psychological dimension of gender inequality

By Sveva Vitellozzi

In March 2021 I was awarded with the LEAP Student Grant to conduct a lab-in-the-field experiment in Kenya, with the aim of assessing the impact of women’s mental load on cognitive functions and labor productivity.

The idea for this experiment came during my first year of Ph.D. during the class on Behavioral and Experimental Economics while we were asked to write a research proposal of a hypothetical lab experiment. Throughout this course, we talked about the strand of academic literature on the “psychology of poverty”, according to which poverty reduces cognitive functions as it causes daily stress about financial needs (Mani et al. 2013; Schilbach, Schofield, e Mullainathan 2016). The idea of writing my research proposal on women’s mental load, cognitive functions, and productivity was inspired by a comic by Emma, a French author that explains in a very enjoyable and accessible way what mental load is and what it entails (click here to read the article).

Why should we care about mental load?

Mental load refers to the total sum of responsibilities related to the management of household activities. Consequently, women spend not only more “physical” time than men in household’s chores, but also more “mental” time, which constitutes an important psychological burden for them. In developing countries, this burden risks being even more pronounced because of the strict gender roles defined in many traditional societies.

Being an invisible phenomenon, mental load has been long neglected. Only in recent years social media and the press, mostly in Western societies, have started paying more attention to it but it has not been properly addressed in the economic literature yet, nor have its consequences  on economic outcomes. Even though the nature of mental load may differ across countries, as the household’s needs women take care of change across contexts and cultures, its burden is carried mostly by women worldwide.

Hypothesis and design

The main hypothesis of the study is that mental load, by inducing daily and pressing thoughts about household management, negatively affects women’s labor productivity by reducing their attention, which is a limited cognitive resource. In developing countries, and especially in Africa, important gender productivity gaps are observed (Kilic, Palacios-López, e Goldstein 2015; Backiny-Yetna e McGee 2015), but we still do not know whether and to what extent the psychological dimension plays a role in widening this gap. In contexts where the informal labor market is well established, workers are usually paid with a piecework scheme: the more you produce, the more you are paid. The basic assumption is that having the mind occupied by other thoughts can reduce a subject’s attention at the workplace and, consequently, their productivity. This can in turn entail a series of other important consequences for women’s empowerment and for gender equality more broadly.

To test this hypothesis, I plan to run a lab-in-the-field experiment in Kenya in February 2022. Even though the design of the experiment still needs to be finalized, the aim is to trigger thoughts related to household management among participants within the treatment group. They will then be asked to perform an effort task that requires both care and attention, to control for the causal mechanism being tested. The task needs to be sufficiently unrelated to those daily activities usually carried out by the participants, to isolate at best the confounding effects of individual ability. Women in the treatment group are expected to exhibit a lower score in the effort task than those in the control group. 

Pathways for the future

Mental load represents just the tip of the iceberg of the psychological dimension of gender (in)equality. While mental load risks entailing a series of negative effects, such as increased stress and anxiety, it is not the only psychological factor that can contribute to widening gender inequalities worldwide. For instance, women are more likely than men to suffer from depression (Nolen-Hoeksema 2001), which can in turn affect a series of economic outcomes such as labor supply and employment, saving and investment decisions, and labor productivity (Ridley et al. 2020). Especially in developing countries, studies focusing on gender inequalities do not pay particular attention to these psychological dimensions. However, psychological well-being constitutes a crucial dimension of women’s empowerment and is essential to understand to what extent it shapes women’s daily lives and decisions. Further research is needed in this direction to inform at best policymakers and development practitioners to help them design more effective gender-driven programs and policies.

References

Backiny-Yetna, Prospere, e Kevin McGee. 2015. Gender Differentials and Agricultural Productivity in Niger. Policy Research Working Papers. The World Bank. https://doi.org/10.1596/1813-9450-7199.

Kilic, Talip, Amparo Palacios-López, e Markus Goldstein. 2015. «Caught in a Productivity Trap: A Distributional Perspective on Gender Differences in Malawian Agriculture». World Development 70 (giugno): 416–63. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2014.06.017.

Mani, Anandi, Sendhil Mullainathan, Eldar Shafir, e Jiaying Zhao. 2013. «Poverty Impedes Cognitive Function». Science 341 (6149): 976–80. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1238041.

Nolen-Hoeksema, Susan. 2001. «Gender Differences in Depression». Current Directions in Psychological Science 10 (5): 173–76. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8721.00142.

Ridley, Matthew, Gautam Rao, Frank Schilbach, e Vikram Patel. 2020. «Poverty, Depression, and Anxiety: Causal Evidence and Mechanisms». Science 370 (6522): eaay0214. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aay0214.

Schilbach, Frank, Heather Schofield, e Sendhil Mullainathan. 2016. «The Psychological Lives of the Poor». The American Economic Review 106 (5): 435–40.

Accelerating poverty elimination through the Poverty Stoplight program — Experience at Fundación Paraguaya

By Fabrizio Cabrera

Last winter, I did an internship at the Fundación Paraguaya, where I collaborated within the department of research and methodology. My role was to support the senior researcher Katharina Hammler, with quantitative and qualitative analysis in order to write a report on the preliminary evaluation findings of an ongoing study: the “add-on” impact of the Poverty Stoplight (PS) program for Fundación Paraguaya’s microfinance clients.

The PS program

The Poverty Stoplight (PS) is an interactive survey and coaching model that complements Fundación Paraguaya’s microfinance program, broadening the focus to multidimensional poverty. The Stoplight is characterized by three key features:

1. Multidimensional snapshot of lived experience: Program staff work directly with participants to complete an easy-to-use, picture-based survey to represent their quality of life across six dimensions (Income & Employment, Health & Environment, Housing & Infrastructure, Education & Culture, Organization & Participation, and Interiority & Motivation). These indicators are self-assessed by clients as red (severe poverty), yellow (moderate poverty), or green (out of poverty). The approach is designed to center the lived experience of participants, creating data from the bottom up.
2. Solutions that start from the participant: After the survey is facilitated, participants choose which specific indicators of poverty they want to change from red or yellow to green, as well as the action they think is most likely to produce change. Sometimes this involves taking action as individuals; sometimes it means utilizing community resources or peer-to-peer support; in other cases, it involves accessing government programs.
3. Personalized coaching to support solution implementation: Program staff take an individualized approach to support participants as they pursue change. Supports include collaborative identification of core challenges, as well as reflection exercises to support continuous improvement of poverty alleviation approaches. 

The PS is applied across a broad range of contexts, ranging from poverty alleviation programs to assessments of quality of work life in professional contexts. The report focused on the application to microfinance, seeking to elucidate the “add-on” impact generated on top of the microfinance program. As a growing number of ever more diverse organizations implement the Poverty Stoplight model around the world, the need for robust evidence on the model’s impact is increasing, and so is the need for evidence on how to best implement the program.

Critical questions of the RCT

To support evidence-based scaling of the model, we deployed a rigorous randomized controlled trial design to engage three critical questions:

1. What is the impact potential for this model?
2. What types of participants are most likely to benefit?
3. What programmatic features are most likely to optimize impact?

Summarized findings of the report

Our results show that the PS accelerated multidimensional poverty reduction by about half of a standard deviation, which corresponds to turning two or three PS indicators from red or yellow to green. While financial indicators showed the greatest poverty reduction, benefits also materialized in non-financial dimensions of poverty.

There were important nuances in program effects for participants with different baseline incomes. While we observed reductions in multidimensional poverty for participants across the income spectrum, suggestive evidence indicates that the microfinance program alone drove the lionshare of multidimensional poverty reduction for lower-income participants, while the PS survey and coaching model drove impact for higher-income participants. 

The results also revealed the impacts of mentoring could be increased slightly by 0.05 standard deviations (or about half a PS indicator) by providing coaches with explicit contact targets that guided how often they contact families). Qualitative follow-up suggests that the regular contact may have contributed to a critical trust-building process between coaches and participants. Notably, the study did not find evidence of impact for a group that just received the PS survey (without follow-up coaching).

Even though the findings are specific to the study context, some general recommendations arise, including (a) targeting participants across the spectrum of multidimensional and monetary poverty; (b) considering  the potential of attending to a broad range of multidimensional poverty indicators, even outside of an organization’s core area of competence; (c) providing follow-up support to participants; and (d) investing in relationship building, and considering setting explicit targets or guidelines around regularity of communication.

Reflections on the experience

My experience within this institution suggests that this program represents real hope for the less disadvantaged people in our community. By doing the field work and monitoring the progress of households in their way out of poverty, the institution is able to add value to design better policies in favor of the people whose voice we do not usually hear. Thus, the quantitative and qualitative analysis of this program not only gave us tools to help the households, but the analysis also empowered the households themselves. The recurrent meetings were a proof for this improvement. From the experience of visiting the households at their homes, I can tell that the program not only made them aware of the type of poverty they were having, i.e., their red dots, but it got them motivated to improve their quality of life by tackling specific aspects of their poverty. At the end of the day, their dedication was something so contagious that fueled the passion of the team  inside and outside the project. With projects like this, the Fundación helps more than 86.000 families and as households that join the different programs keep growing, the challenge is to meet the large scale demand without sacrificing the unique add-ons that the institution offers: providing follow-up support to participants; investing in relationship building; considering setting explicit targets or guidelines around regularity of communication; etc.

Fabrizio is a Fulbright Fellow that is currently doing an MA program in economics at New York University. Please feel free to contact him if you need any further information or you have any questions: fc2250@nyu.edu

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Leveraging pro-social behavior to tackle educational poverty: some takeaways and future perspectives

By Gaia Gaudenzi

There is evidence around the world (two examples here and here) telling us that COVID-19 and the decision to close schools during the lockdown had negative effects on pupils’ educational attainments and well-being. In most cases, students who are in “cognitive” educational poverty (meaning that they are not achieving minimum proficiency levels in math and reading) come from socio-economically and culturally disadvantaged backgrounds (For more information and data about educational poverty in Italy, please the Save The Children’s report here).

The program:
The Tutoring Online Program, designed by Prof. Eliana La Ferrara (Bocconi University) and Prof. Michela Carlana (Harvard University), was born during the 2020 lockdown precisely to mitigate the negative effect of distance learning on middle school students, particularly targeting the disadvantaged ones. The program consisted of assigning a tutor (a volunteer university student) to a student in need. The tutors provided weekly individual online tutoring to the middle school students they were assigned to. The formula has been piloted during the first lockdown in Italy in 2020, where 530 students received tutoring from April to May. The program had impressive results, especially considering its short duration. Participating students showed substantial and significant improvements along four dimensions: educational performance, aspirations, socio-emotional skills, and psychological well-being (a draft of the paper is available here).

Looking back:
I had the opportunity to be the Project Manager of the second edition of the program, during which tutoring has been offered to 810 middle school students from November 2020 until May 2021.

The big challenge of this second edition was the length of the program, which would make it harder for university students to commit to the level of effort observed during the short pilot. I suspected the altruistic behavior by tutors observed in the pilot phase was the result of temporary enthusiasm, driven both by a genuine desire to help those most in need during an unprecedented crisis and by the sudden increase in free time due to home confinement. In a situation where the emergency becomes the norm (and therefore the sense of urgency decays), it would have been very hard to find enough university students  willing to give away their time for free. I was wrong. In a matter of weeks, we received enough applications to start off.

Some reflections and takeaways:
I believe this program is an example of how pro-social behavior can be leveraged to improve public service delivery (I leave the discussion on whether this might be a viable way or not for another time). I also believe that the power of the universities’ brand (Bocconi and Harvard) played a role in the success of the recruitment campaign. However, I definitely believe that the latter is unlikely to be enough to prompt university students to embark on a 7-month program that requires a tutors’ constant effort and presence. It is probable that highly motivated people, with a genuine willingness to help, were more prone to self-select into the program. At the moment, there is no solid evidence that this was the case because there was no variation in the way tutors were recruited. This would have helped us to better understand why tutors decided to participate. Some qualitative and anecdotal evidence, coming from the personal interaction of the team¹ with the tutors throughout the year, suggests that in the majority of the cases tutors experienced a boost in motivation when reminded they were doing something meaningful, even if, at that very moment, they were not getting any kind of gratitude in return. This was even more true for tutors who found it difficult to motivate their tutee to take part in the tutoring every week, as required by the program. I gladly admit that the interaction with tutors turned out to be a powerful source of inspiration also for me, managing this project 100% remotely. Their dedication in helping a student who was a stranger to them has been a continuous source of hope in these difficult and unprecedented times.

Moving forward:
The second edition of the program is officially at the end and many questions now arise about its future and the feasibility of a further scale-up. First of all, does an online tutoring program still have a role to play in a post-pandemic world, where lockdowns will (hopefully) be a distant memory and students will be sick and tired of following classes online, being traumatized by months of distance learning? My personal opinion is yes.

First of all, one might argue that the distribution of high-level tutors is very uneven across Italy, with most of them concentrated in large cities where there are more job opportunities. Thus, the supply of skilled tutors in peripheral areas could be particularly scarce. In this case, a Tutoring Online Program would allow also those living in more remote areas to have access to a larger pool of highly qualified tutors.

Second, even if there were a market for quality tutors available pretty much everywhere, some people might still find it difficult to get access to it because of their limited native network (i.e. immigrant families), lack of resources (cognitive and financial), or a mix of both. The Tutoring Online Program might be the best available option for students coming from families that cannot assist their children through their education, for instance because they have a limited amount of human capital accumulation or because they cannot afford (or are willing to pay for) a tutor.

Moreover, sometimes middle schools are not able to provide families and pupils with the appropriate information they need to take informed decisions about their future, namely the choice of which high school to attend, whether to attend university or not, and eventually which job might be right for them. Or, students might be victims of framing and prejudices within the school, and these might affect their performance and aspirations. A tutor also acts as a mentor, both by helping students understand what their interests and aspirations are and by filling the “information gap” on how to fulfil them.

For these reasons, as long as there are high-quality tutors available and willing to volunteer to help a student overcome the difficulties they encounter at school, and as long as it is possible to target the students who would benefit most from it, a Tutoring Online Program might be a relatively simple and inexpensive solution to help several students who struggle to keep up with school and are living in a context of educational poverty.

¹The amazing team of Research Assistants that helped either with the monitoring of the intervention or with the implementation of the data collection throughout this year is composed of: Alessandro Palucci, Angelica Bozzi, Antonio Cappucci, Claudio Giambrone, Cristina Perricone, Diego Faurès, Diva Barisone, Emanuele Clerico, Francesca Colombi, Gabriele Todesca, Giulio Radaelli, Matteo Fossi, Michael Massaro, Rosangela D’Erchia, Rossella De Sabbata, Simone Maria Parazzoli.

If you have comments or questions about this blog post please leave a comment here! Alternatively, you can email me at gaia.gaudenzi@unibocconi.it.