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Category: Policy

Published September 24, 2012

Mobile Phones: Does the Intrahousehold Allocation of Technology Matter?

There are good reasons to believe it does.

At least, that is the answer my coauthor Ken Lee and I come up with in a new article titled “Look Who’s Talking: The Impacts of the Intrahousehold Allocation of Mobile Phones on Agricultural Prices,” forthcoming in the Journal of Development Studies.

More specifically, in a sample of onion farmers in the Philippines, we look at whether there is a statistically significant relationship between whether anyone in a household owns a mobile phone and the price received by that household for its onions.

Failing to find any statistically significant association between the two, we then look at whether there is a statistically significant relationship between whether (i) the household head owns a mobile phone, (ii) the household head’s spouse owns a mobile phone, or (iii) any of the children in the household own a mobile phone and the price received by that household for its onions.

Continue readingMobile Phones: Does the Intrahousehold Allocation of Technology Matter?
Published September 20, 2012

Organic Food: Confirmation Bias or Ambiguity Aversion?

A reader writes:

This might be interesting for you: people are annoyed/unhappy with NPR’s coverage about a report out of Stanford that said organic food isn’t really any healthier than conventional food. Clear case in point showing when people are faced with data and facts that counter their beliefs, they will more often than not completely shut it out and continue with their original belief. It’s much easier to continue believing what you thought before than stretch your mind and possibly acknowledge that you’re wrong or at least don’t have the full story. And we wonder why things don’t get accomplished?

What the reader has in mind is confirmation bias, the cognitive bias that makes people give more weight to empirical evidence that support their beliefs and less weight to empirical evidence that contradicts their beliefs, and about which I have written before in the context of development policy.

Continue readingOrganic Food: Confirmation Bias or Ambiguity Aversion?
Published August 16, 2012

How and When Is Poverty Transmitted from One Generation to the Next?

That’s the theme of a special issue of the Development Policy Review, published last month. The special issue contains papers on:

  1. Widowhood and asset inheritance in Sub-Saharan Africa, by Amber Peterman,
  2. How inheritance is a gendered and intergenerational dimension of poverty, by Elizabeth Cooper and Kate Bird,
  3. Inheritance practices and gender differences affect poverty and well-being in Ethiopia, by Neha Kumar and Agnes Quisumbing,
  4. Women, marriage, and asset inheritance in Uganda, by Cheryl Doss et al.,
  5. Intergenerational poverty traps in India, by my Sanford School colleague Anirudh Krishna, and
  6. Women and inheritance in Sub-Saharan Africa, by Elizabeth Cooper.

This is a very important topic considering that up until recently, we did not have good datasets tracking people over time. We had even fewer datasets tracking people and their children over time.