Firm Responses to Uncertainty and Implications for Workers: Experimental Evidence from Uganda During the Pandemic
joint with Livia Alfonsi (HBS), Vittorio Bassi (USC) and Elena Spadini (UCL)
July 2025
Abstract The Covid-19 pandemic represents one of the most rapid and severe shocks to hit global labor markets. We study how firms reacted to the heightened uncertainty and consequences for workers, in a developing country economy: Uganda. Our analysis is based on a panel of firms and workers, tracked from 2012 to 2022, including high frequency surveys during the pandemic. We find that firms' common response to the heightened uncertainty of the pandemic was to immediately lay off the highest earning workers, that is, the most experienced or skilled employees. We then study the differential impacts of such firm survival strategies on workers' labor market dynamics across the skills distribution, exploiting the fact that we randomly assigned individuals to the offer of vocational training in 2013. We find that high skill trained workers, who enjoyed better labor market outcomes pre-pandemic, were more likely to be laid off early in the pandemic given firm's survival strategies. However, trained workers recovered from this job loss and were resilient to the shock. Cumulatively over the pandemic, trained workers spend 61% more time employed than untrained controls, and earn 17% more. Hence, the returns to training survive the pandemic. The mechanisms driving the resilience of trained workers are the certifiability of their skills and their greater accumulation of sector-specific experience, both of which enable them to switch employers within the same sector during the crisis. Our findings provide new insights on firm responses to fast-moving aggregate shocks in low-income settings, consequences for workers' labor market trajectories, and drivers of the returns to training in good times and bad.
Ideas Generation in Hierarchical Bureaucracies: Evidence from a Field Experiment and Qualitative Data
joint with Margherita Fornasari (World Bank), Daniel Rogger (World Bank)
and Martin J.Williams (Michigan)
June 2025
Abstract We study innovation and ideas generation in bureaucracies, combining qualitative and quantitative evidence on workplace cultures, workplace climate and bureaucratic performance. We study these issues at-scale in a developing country, using data from bureaucrats in all ministries staffed by the Ghanaian Civil Service. Our qualitative evidence shows these organizations have strong hierarchical cultures, where juniors feel unable to raise innovative ideas, and a lack of resources and systemic Civil Service-wide issues are cited as key bottlenecks for improving organizational productivity. Our quantitative evidence comes from a field experiment training bureaucrats how to break down problems into simple solutions and raise these new ideas with colleagues. We implemented training at the individual level, and at the division-level to bureaucrats working together day-to-day. Our key finding is that individual trainings were more effective in shifting workplace climate towards fostering new ideas, measured 6-18 months post-training. This led individuals to be more likely to raise and discuss new ideas, ultimately improving administrative processes and public service delivery. Division-level training was less effective because divisions failed to integrate in core features of the intervention in terms of the nature of innovations proposed and collective steps to implementation. Rather, division-level plans reflected pre-existing hierarchical workplace cultures that stifle bottom-up incremental innovations and instead, fall back on unrealistically aiming for resource intensive Civil Service-wide change.
Legacies of Conflict: Self-efficacy and the Formation of Conditional Trust
joint with Niklas Buehren (World Bank), Markus Goldstein (World Bank) and Andrea Smurra (UCL)
June 2025
Abstract Exposure to armed conflict in early life is a traumatic experience, affecting 400 million children worldwide. We combine theory, measurement and evidence to study how psychological legacies of conflict mediate the relationship between exposure to conflict and the long-term formation of trust preferences. Our analysis is based on a sample of 3900 women born during the Sierra Leonean civil war and surveyed 14 years later. We first develop a framework describing the link between exposure to conflict and trust. This makes precise what individuals have in mind when expressing conditional trust in others, and establishes the role of self-efficacy in linking conflict and trust. Our empirical analysis then shows that exposure to conflict significantly increases self-efficacy, and through this channel, conflict leads conditional trust to rise and for outright trust of others to fall, relative to those never exposed to conflict. To further microfound how exposure to conflict translates into psychological legacies, we construct a granular typology of experiences of conflict, combining information on exposure to conflict, recall of victimization, and ages of exposure to conflict. We use this to show how direct exposure, memories and trauma, and narratives of conflict from others each distinctively shape self-efficacy. Finally, we show how our model can help reconcile heterogeneous findings across conflict scenarios, and suggest avenues for future work on the more general role of psychological legacies from traumatic shocks early in life on the long-term formation of economic preferences.
Revised and resubmitted (second round), Journal of Political Economy: Micro.
Majority Perceptions of Minority Groups: Economic Inequalities, Their Causes, and Policy Solutions
joint with Lucinda Platt (LSE) and Pratyush Tiwari (UCL and IFS)
March 2025
Abstract How does the majority population view the societal contributions, economic outcomes and opportunities available to specific ethnic minority groups, root causes of ethnic disadvantage, and policy solutions to address them? We answer these questions in the UK context, a multi-ethnic society where some minorities outperform the majority in economic outcomes, while others underperform. We use an online survey fielded to 3200 White British individuals, into which we embed a survey experiment that presents respondents with narratives about the economic success or disadvantage of specific minority groups. The experiment was purposefully implemented in the run up to the 2024 UK General Election, that saw the rise of populist anti-immigration parties. We find that even in such charged times, light-touch narratives can correct majority misperceptions of the economic outcomes of specific minorities, and shift views on policies to address ethnic inequalities. Views on the opportunities available to minorities and root causes of disadvantage, such as luck or effort, are harder to shift irrespective of the minority outgroup. By considering perceptions towards their ingroup, we document that narratives about the economic success of minorities can shift majority perceptions in ways consistent with zero sum thinking. Given strong political differences in perceptions of minorities, we examine heterogeneous responses to the narratives by political leaning. Narrative treatments can shift perceptions, including those of right-leaning individuals, with zero sum mindsets being independent of political leaning. We conclude by examining how perceptions across domains shape the reasoning behind support for policies targeted to specific minorities to address ethnic inequalities.
Accelerating Birth Timing to Access Cash Transfers? Evidence from Households in Extreme Poverty
joint with Pedro Carneiro (UCL), Lucy Kraftman (IoE), Francesca Salvati (Essex)
and Molly Scott (Cabinet Office)
March 2025
Abstract There has been a sustained rise in cash transfer programs to the poor, and burgeoning interest in interventions promoting early childhood development. We draw together these trends to study whether open enrolment interventions targeting cash transfers to pregnant mothers unintentionally induce those not pregnant to accelerate birth timing in order to start receiving cash transfers. Our study context is rural Northern Nigeria, where households have high demand for liquidity because the majority reside in extreme poverty, are credit constrained, and are reliant on volatile earnings streams from agriculture. Our evidence comes from a four-year evaluation of an intervention providing high-valued unconditional cash transfers to pregnant mothers, with open enrolment into the program. We examine how this impacts pregnancy timing and birth spacing among 1700 women not pregnant at baseline. We document relatively weak distortionary impacts on pregnancy timing and birth spacing. The reasons are women retain full control over the use of cash transfers, they have available productive investment opportunities in their own businesses, and they choose to invest in those rather than transfer cash to husbands. This constellation of factors allows women to internalize the marginal benefits and marginal costs of accelerating birth timing, and so place a brake on the incentives households otherwise have to accelerate birth timing. On external validity, we draw together 45 DHS surveys to classify countries into those more or less likely to see distortionary effects on birth timing from open enrolment interventions targeting cash transfers to pregnant mothers.
Race-related Research in Economics
joint with Arun Advani (Warwick), Elliott Ash (ETH Zurich), Anton Boltachka (ETH Zurich)
and David Cai (LSE)
January 2025
Abstract Issues of racial justice and economic inequalities between racial and ethnic groups have risen to the top of public debate. Economists' ability to contribute to these debates is based on the body of race-related research. We study the volume and content of race-related research in economics. We base our analysis on a corpus of 225,000 economics publications from 1960 to 2020 to which we apply an algorithmic approach to classify race-related work. We present three new facts. First, since 1960 less than 2% of economics publications have been race-related. There is an uptick in such work in the mid 1990s. Among the top-5 journals this is driven by the American Economic Review, Quarterly Journal of Economics and the Journal of Political Economy. Econometrica and the Review of Economic Studies have each cumulatively published fewer than 15 race-related articles since 1960. Second, on content, while over 50% of race-related publications in the 1970s focused on Black individuals, by the 2010s this had fallen to 20%. There has been a steady decline in the share of race-related research on discrimination since the 1980s, with a rise in the share of studies on identity. Finally, we apply our algorithm to NBER and CEPR working papers posted over the last four decades, to study an earlier stage of the research process. We document a balkanization of race-related research into a few fields, and its continued absence from many others -- a result that holds even within the subset of research examining issues of inequality or diversity. We discuss implications of our findings for economists' ability to contribute to debates on race and ethnicity in the economy.
Revisions requested, Economica.
Big Push Pro-poor Policies and Economic Circumstances: Reality, Perceptions and Attitudes
joint with Adnan.Q.Khan (LSE), Nicolas Cerkez (UCL) and Anam Schoaib (CERP)
May 2024
Abstract Are large and persistent changes in economic circumstances caused by big push pro-poor policies actually perceived by households, and do they result in changed attitudes or voting behaviors? We study the issue using a partial population experiment tracking 15,000 rural households in Punjab, Pakistan. Villages are randomly assigned to receive an intervention where the poor are either offered a one-time asset transfer of value $620 or an equivalent valued one-off unconditional cash transfer. Within treated villages, we randomize which of the poor receive the transfer. We track treated poor, not treated poor and not poor households over four years. The interventions cause the treated poor to have large and persistent economic gains, and lead to persistent reductions in village consumption inequality. Perceptions of poor and non poor households are shifted similarly by the interventions, but these impacts are more muted than measurable changes in economic standing and village inequality. Most impacts on perceptions -- of own standing, village inequality, and towards rich and poor classes more generally -- also fade four years post-intervention. The wedge between economic reality and perceptions means that redistributive attitudes of households remain inelastic to exposure to these interventions. Finally, although the interventions increase political participation, this does not differ by political affinity. Our results highlight that even in small close-knit village economies, the experience or demonstration of welfare enhancing big push anti-poverty policies is unlikely to alter households' perceptions of economic outcomes or for them to become advocates for such interventions.