Cette thèse étudie l'impact à long terme de politiques menées en Tanzanie et en URSS sur le développement économique et les représentations sociales et culturelles. Les deux premiers chapitres s'intéressent aux politiques de développement tanzaniennes connues sous le nom d'ujamaa. Le troisième aux déportations ethniques ordonnées par Staline pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Le chapitre 1 s'intéresse à l'impact à long terme du statut "en développement" d'un village. Le chapitre 2 étudie l'impact de la diversité ethnique sur la confiance inter-ethnique, toujours en utilisant les ujamaa en Tanzanie. Le chapitre 3 étudie la propagation des valeurs et des cultures entre des populations différentes mises en contact par les déportations ethniques ordonnées par Staline. / This dissertation studies historical experiments and their impact on contemporaneous economic development and attitudes. The first chapters explore different aspects of the big-push policies known as the ujamaa in Tanzania. The third chapter focuses on the ethnic deportations that were carried out under Stalin's orders during WWII. Chapter 1 studies the long-term impact of having been designated as developmental during the time of the ujamaa on local economic development, as proxied by night light luminosity. Chapter 2 examines the effect of ethnic diversity on inter-ethnic trust, exploiting the ujamaa-induced exposure of groups as part of the policy's villagization program. Chapter 3 studies cultural diffusion using an episode in history in which close co-existence of different cultural groups was exogeneously imposed in a real-word setting without constraints on the interaction between them: Stalin's ethnic deportations during WWII.

Low agricultural productivity is a persistent challenge in developing economies. In the first chapter of the dissertation, I study the concurrent but independently implemented expansion of rural roads and extension in Ethiopia to examine how access to markets and technologies affect agricultural productivity. Using geospatial data combined with large surveys and exploiting the staggered roll-out of the two programs, I show that there are strong complementarities between roads and extension. While ineffective in isolation, access to both a road and extension increases productivity. I find that roads and extension improve productivity by facilitating the take up of agricultural advice and modern inputs. Furthermore, households adjust crop choices and shift across occupations in response to their changing comparative advantages in access to markets and technologies. In the second chapter of the dissertation, co-authored with Samuel Bazzi and Martin Fiszbein, we study the long-run implications of the American frontier experience for culture and politics. We track the frontier throughout the 1790–1890 period and construct a novel, county-level measure of total frontier experience (TFE). Historically, frontier locations had distinctive demographics and greater individualism. Long after the closing of the frontier, counties with greater TFE exhibit more pervasive individualism and opposition to redistribution. We provide suggestive evidence on the roots of frontier culture: selective migration, an adaptive advantage of self-reliance, and perceived opportunities for upward mobility through effort. Overall, our findings shed new light on the frontiers persistent legacy of rugged individualism. In the third chapter of the dissertation, I use plant level census data to examine the effects of two policies designed to support prioritized sub-sectors and regions on the productivity of the Ethiopian manufacturing sector. The first policy, implemented during 1996-2002, was an activist industrial policy favoring import substitution while the second policy, active during 2003-2012, emphasized export promotion. I find that there is severe misallocation in Ethiopian manufacturing sector, but it has subsided over the studied period. The results suggest that the priority sector support policies have exacerbated the misallocation, and the within-sector variations of the policies largely account for the dispersion in revenue productivity.

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This dissertation consists of three essays, each covering very distinct topics under the broad umbrella of Development Economics, each set in a different region of the developing world (Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia). The one element that loosely ties them together is that they each seek to add, in a small way, to our understanding of factors that contribute to, and in some cases may entrap people in, poverty: factors such as (lack of) geographic mobility, hunger, and disease. In the first chapter, I use the natural experiment of military conscription in Argentina, which randomly assigned not only military service, but also the location of service, to study the effect of this temporary displacement on long-run migration rates. I then use a rich source of administrative earnings and employment data to investigate the labor-market implications of conscription and, in particular, displacement. I find that conscription on the whole caused a small increase in the likelihood of appearing in the formal labor force, and a small increase in earnings particularly for those who were assigned to serve in the Navy. Assignment to military service outside of one's province of origin increased the likelihood of living outside the province of origin by 2.5 percent, and while the net effects of this displacement on earnings and employment are imprecisely estimated, the evidence suggests that there are modest long-term benefits of conscription in Argentina that are not fully attributable to displacement. In the second chapter, I investigate the effects of Ramadan on calorie consumption and labor supply among Muslim households in rural Malawi. Across four rounds of household survey data, I find no evidence of a decrease in calorie consumption during Ramadan on average. I do, however, find evidence that working-age people reduce their weekly work by about three hours, or nearly 20 percent, on average. This finding on calories shows substantial variation across the different rounds of data. The evidence presented calls into question the hypothesis that consumption during Ramadan should fall more dramatically when the holiday overlaps with the harvest (when baseline consumption levels are relatively high compared to the rest of the year), compared to when Ramadan falls near the annual hunger season (when baseline consumption levels tend to be much lower). I discuss potential implications of this variation for our understanding of seasonal consumption patterns. The third and final chapter, which is authored jointly with Kaivan Munshi and Nancy Luke, discusses a randomized intervention conducted in rural South India aimed at improving rates of treatment completion for tuberculosis. Tuberculosis (TB), despite being a highly treatable disease, kills well over 1 million people every year, with 95 percent of cases and deaths appearing in developing countries. India bears the largest TB burden of any country, with more than 25 percent of the world's total yearly cases. A key factor for successful management of TB is ensuring that patients complete the full six-month (or more) treatment regimen: missing even a few doses of the prescribed medications increases the likelihood of relapse and development of a drug-resistant strain of TB, which is much more difficult and costly to treat effectively. We conduct an intervention allowing patients to select a community member to serve as a Directly Observed Treatment (DOT) provider to help ensure compliance with the full treatment regimen. Although patients assigned a Community DOT provider report significantly more frequent visits and higher rates of satisfaction compared to our control group, we do not find any significant improvement in treatment outcomes among those assigned this intervention. We explore several potential explanations for this finding and suggest potential avenues for future research.

This dissertation contains three chapters in the field of development economics and applied microeconomics. The first chapter studies the effect of higher education on an individual’s life outcomes and how the effect evolves over her life cycle. The second chapter examines how a woman-centered, preference-based counseling procedure shapes women’s contraceptive preferences and behavior. The third chapter investigates the impact of construction activities of transportation infrastructure on local economic outcomes. Chapter 1 examines the effect of higher education on an individual’s life outcomes, and how the effect evolves over her life cycle. I use as a natural experiment the most ambitious educational reform in Chinese history, the reinstatement of the National College Entrance Examination (the Gaokao) following the end of the Cultural Revolution. Using Census data in 1990 and 2000, I find discontinuous changes in the likelihood of completing high school and attending college around a cutoff birth date, which are shown to be induced by the policy shock. Through a combination of regression discontinuity and difference-in-difference methods, this chapter finds that cohorts that were more likely to complete high school and obtain a college education as a result of the reform were more likely to have a high-socioeconomic (SES) occupation in their early 30s, and the effect becomes smaller in their 40s. More educated cohorts, and in particular women, tend to marry later. Individuals with higher education were less likely to be ever married in their 40s. Finally, individuals with higher education tend to delay childbearing and migrate more in both their 30s and 40s, plausibly due to greater returns to migration for the more educated. Chapter 2 (with Mahesh Karra) examines how a woman-centered, preference-based approach to family planning counseling shapes women's contraceptive preferences and behavior. By implementing a randomized controlled trial in urban Malawi, we explore how a woman's decision-making may be shaped by: 1) the number and types of contraceptive methods presented to her based on her stated preferences for contraception (targeted counseling); and 2) the presence of her husband / male partner at the time of counseling. Women were subsequently offered free transport and access to family planning methods and services at a clinic for one month. We find that women who received targeted counseling were 15.6 percent less likely to be using their stated ideal contraceptive method at follow-up and were 17.5 percent more likely to exhibit discordance between their stated and ideal method at follow-up. On the other hand, women who were encouraged to invite their husbands to the counseling session were 13.5 percent less likely to change their stated ideal method from counseling to follow-up but 16.6 percent more likely to be using their stated ideal method at follow-up. While both approaches aim to achieve the goal of ``helping women make informed choices on family planning'', neither seems to yield strictly preferred outcomes for women. Chapter 3 investigates how the construction of the three earliest high-speed railway (HSR) lines in mid-Southern China affects economic activity. By formulating a set of counterfactual railway lines following the HSR planbook (MLTRP) issued by the central government, and by utilizing nighttime light data (NTL) from 1992 to 2013, I implement an event-study analysis to quantify how HSR construction transforms the local economic activity as proxied by the NTL. Furthermore, I employ county-level data on economic indicators to pin down the channels at work underlying the effects. I find that: 1) the grid-level NTL significantly increased compared to the counterfactual regions one year after the HSR construction, but there is no significant impact following the operation of the HSR lines; 2) the positive construction impacts can be explained by the provisions of associated local amenities, temporary clearing of households, as well as structural transformation from agricultural towards non-agricultural sectors.

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Cluster Organizations, as a means of promoting competition and innovation in industrial clusters, have become increasingly popular over the world. Cluster organizations aim to increase growth and competitiveness of clusters within a region, and have become a central part of economic policy-making across the world. Recently, the concept has been used to a larger extent as a tool for economic development and poverty alleviation. This thesis seeks to examine the cluster organizations that are part of the Sida funded program Innovation Systems and Cluster development in Tanzania (ISCP-Tz), by evaluating performance, goals and development of the program based on cluster facilitators perceptions, and assess linkages and actor collaborations between clustered actors. The data in this thesis is collected through a telephone-administered questionnaire, as well as interviews and visits to cluster sites. The results show a positive impact on cluster firms performance as assessed by cluster facilitators, but show that actor collaborations in many cases are inadequate and need to be improved.

Thesis advisor: Christopher Maxwell / The questions that this paper intends to answer are: 1) Is there a U-shaped relationship between the female labor force participation (FLFP) rate and development in the present day? And 2) If we group countries geographically, will we see the U-shaped function outlined as development occurs over time? The U-shaped function is important because it allows us to predict the direction that the FLFP rate will move, dependent on a country's level of development. This prediction is crucial because there are endless gains of increased FLFP to both women and to society at large. Previous research has shown that in a snapshot in time (1985), there was evidence of the U-shaped function. However, there has been little research on how the function has played out throughout the past 30+ years. This paper finds that the U- shaped function remains robust to present day data. However, grouping countries geographically does not always produce results that support movement along the U-shaped function. Having a clearer understanding of the trends that FLFP follows through development will allow us to more successfully monitor and create policy to help women and society at large reap the benefits of increased women in the workforce. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2019. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Departmental Honors. / Discipline: Economics.

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