Research

Nathan Barker, C. Austin Davis, Paula López-Peña, Harrison Mitchell, Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak, Karim Naguib, Maira Reimão, Ashish Shenoy, and Corey Vernot, Migration and Resilience during a Global Crisis. Accepted: European Economic Review.

This study explores the relationship between migration and household resilience during a global crisis that eliminated the option to migrate. We link prior data from four populations in Bangladesh and Nepal to new phone surveys conducted during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. While earnings fell universally, pandemic-induced declines were 14–25% greater among previously migration-dependent households and urban migrant workers, with household remittance losses far exceeding official statistics. Heightened economic exposure during the pandemic erased prior gains achieved by transnational migrants and caused fourfold greater prevalence of food insecurity among domestic subsistence migrants. Economic distress spilled over onto non-migrants in high-migration villages and labor markets. We show that migration contributed to economic contagion independent of its role in disease transmission. Losing the option to migrate differentially increased the vulnerability of migration-dependent households during a crisis.

Edward Jee, Anne Karing, and Karim Naguib. Optimal Incentives in the Presence of Social Norms: Experimental Evidence from Kenya.

Reputational incentives interact with economic incentives and may mitigate or amplify their effects (Bénabou and Tirole, 2012). We test this prediction in the context of a new deworming program that offers free treatment to 200,000 adult in Kenya. We experimentally vary the cost and ability to credibly signal program participation by assigning communities to different travel distances to treatment points and providing a bracelet or ink on the thumb as a sign of take-up. Our reduced-form results show that (1) bracelets significantly increase deworming take-up, outperforming a material incentive; (2) adults are highly sensitive to distance cost and the signaling treatments have a greater impact on participation at far distances. We build a structural model that mirrors the theoretical framework outlined by Bénabou and Tirole (2012) and explicitly model latent variables such as the private benefit of incentives, the visibility of the signals and the reputational returns to signaling. The model allows us to estimate counterfactuals in response to manipulations infeasible to conduct in the experimental setting and investigate how changes in the community level of deworming take-up change the returns to signaling. We show that reputational returns increase at lower levels of take-up, and that these increases mitigate the negative impact of cost on take-up. We show that–accounting for these interactions–it is optimal to set treatment locations further apart, allowing for an expansion of the program.

Karim Naguib. The Funder’s Meta-Problem.

This study utilizes a simulation model to examine the impact of planning policies over time for an Effective Altruism funder focused on maximizing welfare through intervention selection. The results reveal a significant disparity in accumulated welfare between naive policies, such as relying on a single study to form beliefs about effectiveness, and more advanced probabilistic policies that optimize re-evaluation timing. This gap is more pronounced in sequential decision-making scenarios. Despite considering multiple factors and relying on a simplified model of the funder’s environment, the disparity between the best-performing policy and the hypothetical optimal policy remains substantial, indicating potential areas for improvement.

Harrison Mitchell, A. Mushfiq Mobarak, Karim Naguib, and Maira Reimão. Delegation Risk and Implementation at Scale: Evidence from a Migration Loan Program in Bangladesh.

Many economic policies show promising pilot results that fail to replicate at scale. We demonstrate how delegation of authority to implementing agents can threaten scalability in a randomized evaluation of a migration loan program in Bangladesh. Pilot evaluations found the loan offer to increase temporary migration by 25–40p.p., but this effect fell to 12p.p. at scale. To explain the attenuation, we introduce a theory of delegation risk that leads implementing agents to systematically mistarget intended program beneficiaries. Mistargeting occurs because benefits are concentrated among those enabled to migrate with a loan—i.e. program compliers—but capacity constraints lead effort to be directed toward those already planning to migrate—i.e. always-takers. We present evidence consistent with this theory that the characteristics that predict pre-loan migration are strongly correlated with the likelihood of remembering the loan offer in endline surveying, and we show delegation risk can quantitatively account for the diminished treatment effect. Policy impacts are further tempered by expansion to adjacent geographic regions despite participants being observably similar. We rule out two additional explanations: First, our geographically clustered randomization design reveals treatment intensity crowds in rather than crowds out migrants. Second, changes in population characteristics over time appear to have little influence. Delegation risk identified in this study has the potential to undermine a number of common development policies, and is exacerbated by management practices frequently used by development organizations.