Working Paper

Child Labour, Human Capital and Beliefs with Devis Decet

Job Market Paper

Public Policy Research Network 4th Graduate Workshop Best Paper Award, 2023.

Child labour is pervasive and rising in African countries. Our paper tests a novel hypothesis to explain child labour on family farms. Parents are allocating work instead of school because they view child labour as another dimension of human capital formation. Parents are not under-valuing education. They believe that working on farms is an investment in agricultural skills which can have higher returns than schooling investments if the child will be a farmer in the future. We design and implement a survey for 5,000 households in Ghana to elicit parental beliefs on the returns to child labour. Exploiting vignettes, we find that parents believe that a child who works on family farms alongside school will be 1.6 times more productive as a farmer than if they attained two more years of schooling with no farming experience.

Agricultural Incomes and Human Capital Formation

Susan Schmidt Bies Prize for Doctoral Student Research on Economics and Public Policy, 2022.

Incomes in agriculture are inherently risky. Transitory shocks during childhood can have adverse effects on human capital formation. Using high-dimensional panel data, I find that increases in household harvest income have large, positive effects on a child’s anthropometry, cognitive ability, test scores, and mental health. However, this comes at the expense of substituting away from school to meet increased labour demand on household farms. I describe two mechanisms, consumption and parental behaviour, to explain how parental income shocks translate to child outcomes.

Gender Norms and Collective Action in Ancient Societies: Theory and Evidence with Xiaoyun Qiu

We study how unequal gender norms can serve as a cultural institution to facilitate cooperation in societies facing a survival threat, such as warfare or scarce resources. We provide a game-theoretic model to study male and female incentives in the mating contest. When men face a comparative advantage in eliminating threats to the community, such as hunting animals or fighting in battles, it can create incentives for both men and women to actively pursue unequal gender norms. The model predicts a skewed sex ratio towards men in communities facing a survival threat instead of the one-to-one natural sex ratio. Using data from the Ethnographic Atlas, we find a positive relationship between a society’s dependence on hunting for subsistence and patriarchal gender norms.

Other Work

The Effect of the 1987 Education Act on Poverty in Ghana: A Nonparametric Local Polynomial Approximation Approach

Master’s Thesis (Supervisor: Professor Maitreesh Ghatak), 2019

With Distinction

Improving education systems in low-income countries has been a priority for global development agendas in recent years. Yet, research on education typically focusses on the immediate effects on attainment and test scores. I estimate the long-run, aggregated returns to education on a wider range of outcomes of occupational choice, literacy, health and migration. I exploit the Education Act of 1987 in Ghana where schooling was made more career and skills-orientated by providing technical and vocational training. Using a nonparametric local linear approximation, I exploit the discontinuity between the cohorts just before and after the 1987 Education Act. I find significant positive effects on the agents’ health outcomes. I also find that the Education Act has a persistent and profound impact on the agents’ occupational choice as the cohort affected by the reform engaged less in agriculture and services and more in managerial and professional work. This is strong evidence to indicate that the main political objective of the Act in shifting labour away from subsistence to more industrialised jobs was achieved.

A Taxing Investigation: The Effect of War on Fiscal Capacity in Post-Independence Africa

Bachelor’s Thesis (Supervisor: Professor Gerard Padro i Miquel), 2017

With First Class Honours

Fiscal capacity is the lifeblood of any well-functioning state. Empirical evidence has repeatedly shown that the monopolising of tax collection to fund wars has been the centre of state formation. With novel data on African tax collection for the post-independence period, I estimate the impact of civil and external wars on fiscal capacity. The cumulative effects of conflict show that having at least one civil war in the previous decade causes a 3.48% decrease in government revenues whilst external wars raise revenues by 6.35%. Similarly, the average country from the sample engaged in external conflict for two of the past ten years and this raises fiscal capacity by 9.36%. This result is nontrivial as it would augment Rwanda’s total revenue as a share of GDP to the current level of Australia’s. Having a large and significant effect on only tax revenues is consistent with Besley and Persson’s (2008) theory on incentives rather than the alternative “mechanical” hypothesis. I also find investment incentives in fiscal capacity is increasing in the severity of the conflict.