My website has moved here: https://kensukemaeba.github.io/

Contact Information

Department of Economics
Northwestern University
2211 Campus Drive
Evanston, IL 60208

Email: kensukemaeba2022@u.northwestern.edu

Phone: (+1) 312-874-9284

Education

Ph.D., Economics, Northwestern University, 2023 (Expected)

MA, Economics, Northwestern University, 2018

MA, Economics, The University of Tokyo, 2017

BA, Economics, Keio University, 2015

Primary Fields

Development Economics

Secondary Fields

Industrial Organization, Economics of Education

Curriculum Vitae

Download Vita (PDF)

Job Market Paper

Extrapolation of Treatment Effect Estimates Across Contexts and Policies: An Application to Cash Transfer Experiments

• Download Draft (PDF) & Download Slides (PDF)
• Predicting the effects of a new policy often relies on existing evidence of the same policy in other contexts. However, when those contexts are not comparable, one might want to make predictions based on similar policies in one’s own context. This paper compares the performance of these approaches in the case of conditional cash transfers (CCTs). Using cash transfer programs in Malawi and Morocco, I predict the average treatment effects of Moroccan CCTs on school enrollment rates based on either Malawi CCTs or Moroccan labeled cash transfers (LCTs). I show that predictions based on the Moroccan LCTs (across policies) are more accurate than the Malawi CCTs (across contexts). To shed light on what causes the difference, I estimate a dynamic model of schooling decisions under each of these interventions separately and compare the estimated parameters across the interventions. I find that the perceived returns to schooling relative to outside options explain the differential predictions. I suggest that the perceived relative returns to schooling are context-dependent so that it is difficult to predict schooling decisions across the contexts.

Working Papers

Is Workfare a Good Anti-Poverty Policy? An Assessment Based on Household Welfare, School Enrollment, and Program Expenditures

• Download Preliminary Draft (PDF)
• A workfare program is a common anti-poverty policy in developing countries, which hires the unemployed for public construction work. While other anti-poverty policies such as cash transfer programs select participants based on a proxy-mean test, participants self-select into a workfare program, which could improve the efficiency of the program and participants’ welfare by reducing inclusion and exclusion errors. On the other hand, a workfare program induces school dropout among the participants’ children, which would potentially increase poverty rates in the future. This paper evaluates a large workfare program in India against hypothetical cash transfer programs by quantifying these aspects. Our empirical results show that under the equivalent program expenditures, the workfare program increases household welfare and enrollment rates less than the cash transfer programs. We further show that to achieve the levels of household welfare under the cash transfer programs, the workfare program needs to yield unreasonably high rates of social returns, suggesting that the cash transfer programs are preferred in terms of our evaluation metrics.

Work in Progress

How the Political Power of Teacher Unions Affects Education (joint with Eduardo Campillo Betancourt)

• Download Preliminary Slides (PDF)
• This project studies the clientelism between corporatist teacher unions and their members, and this relationship’s impact on education outcomes. Focusing on the biggest teacher union in Mexico around the 2006 presidential election, we compare schools in municipalities before and after the election, and use cross-sectional variation in the degree of the union’s support for the winning party. Our difference-in-differences estimates show an increase in the number of public school teachers both incorporated into and promoted within a pay-for-performance program, a known patronage tool that the union uses to reward teachers for their grass-roots political campaign. We also show evidence of lower test scores on national standardized exams among public schools in more affected municipalities after the election, consistent with the fact that only public school teachers were eligible for the program. These results present evidence of the deleterious consequences of large, politically-motivated unions in the Mexican context.

Net Influences from Polling Officers

• Download Preliminary Slides (PDF)
• In developing countries, election officers can influence voting outcomes, which deteriorates the value of democracy. However, little is known about to what extent they change voting outcomes. This paper proposes a way to quantify such an influence using voting outcomes in the 2019 India’s national parliamentary election and administrative data on polling station officers. I construct a discrete choice model of voting, where a voter chooses a candidate based on his characteristics, including the influence of polling officers as an unobserved trait. The identification of the influence exploits a random assignment of the officers to polling stations. I argue that conditional on voters’ and candidates’ characteristics, the residual variation in vote shares at the polling station level captures the influence of the polling officers. I show the robustness of this measure by controlling for a local political environment and granular location fixed effects.

Other Papers

Birth Order Effect Under a Cash Transfer Program, Available at SSRN, July 2019, pre-doctoral thesis

References

Prof. Seema Jayachandran (Committee Co-Chair)

Prof. Lori Beaman (Committee Co-Chair)

Prof. Christopher Udry

Prof. Vivek Bhattacharya