This dissertation consists of three essays in development economics. The first chapter studies the effects of migrant remittances on economic development and education investments. The second chapter examines the drivers of charitable donations on an online charity platform. The third chapter studies the political economy of education in Indonesia, where the state competes with religious schools to provide education services.
In the first chapter, I study the effects of remittances on development indicators and education investments in Indonesian districts. I use the interaction between local outmigration patterns and country-specific exchange rate shocks to identify the effects of remittances. I find that remittances increase household consumption, reduce poverty, and stimulate growth. Remittance recipients are able to send more children to school, thereby prompting district governments to increase public schools at the primary and junior secondary levels. The state also increases provisions of other public goods that complement household investments. These responses to remittances are not driven by electoral concern or the capture of economic gain through taxation, but rather pre-existing policy commitments and changes in government accountability.
In the second chapter (joint with Gedeon Lim and Yohanes Eko Riyanto), we study the optimal way to elicit online donations in a developing country setting. We investigate the impact of randomizing choice set size and the randomization of beneficiary characteristics on the propensity and size of donations in the context of a Covid-19 mutual aid platform in Indonesia. We find that users assigned to a smaller choice set of potential beneficiaries are more likely to make a donation. This leads to higher average donations in smaller choice set groups as compared to larger choice set groups. Remarkably, we find no significant decrease in the amount transferred per donation. Our results suggest that donors are susceptible to choice overload.
In the third chapter (joint with Samuel Bazzi and Benjamin Marx), we study the competition in the education market between the state and Islam community in Indonesia. We develop a new theoretical framework to understand how states take over education markets at the expense of alternative providers. We apply this model to a primary school expansion policy in 1970s Indonesia that aimed to homogenize and secularize education, at odds with a longstanding and largely informal Islamic school system. Using novel administrative data, we identify dynamic effects of the policy on education markets. Funded through growth in charitable giving and informal taxation, Islamic schools entered new markets, formalized, and introduced more religious curriculum to compete with the state. While primary enrollment shifted towards state schools, religious education increased overall as Islamic secondary schools absorbed increased demand for continued education. Exposed cohorts are not more attached to secular values and instead report greater religiosity. Our findings offer a new perspective on the consequences of education reforms and the persistence of dual institutional systems across numerous settings.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/49076 |
| Date | 16 July 2024 |
| Creators | Hilmy, Masyhur A. |
| Contributors | Bazzi, Samuel |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
| Rights | Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ |
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