Economic Essays on Innovations for Development

Abstract

In response to pressing needs and limited resources, public and private institutions have been established to support innovations for development - new processes, technologies, and delivery methods designed to reach the poorest and most vulnerable in developing countries. But innovative development programs often require experimentation and iteration before identifying a cost-effective model, especially when serving remote areas where delivery costs are high. This dissertation applies economic analysis to operational problems faced by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) serving rural communities.

The first chapter analyzes a sanitation financing program and finds that offering rewards to village officials instead of household rebates is a cost-effective way to improve the NGO’s operations in rural Lao PDR. We then use an instrumental variables strategy to estimate the impact of village sanitation on children’s growth. We find strong evidence of sanitation externalities, and no evidence of a hypothesized sanitation coverage threshold for health effects.

The second chapter evaluates a text messaging intervention designed to reduce late payment, which is a costly operational issue for an NGO that offers joint liability agricultural loans to groups of farmers in rural Kenya. We analyze the effect of different types of nudges and find that while individual reminders increased on-time repayment, group-based reminders had a discouraging effect on lagging group members.

The third chapter is a descriptive study in which the innovation is analytical rather than programmatic. We use intra-household data on children’s time use to document a gendered gap in the incidence of time poverty (marked by a deficit in play time) across the wealth distributions of four developing countries.