Person: Field, Erica Marie
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Erica Marie
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Field, Erica Marie
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Publication Household Bargaining and Excess Fertility: An Experimental Study in Zambia(American Economic Association, 2014) Ashraf, Nava; Field, Erica Marie; Lee, JeanWe posit that household decision-making over fertility is characterized by moral hazard due to the fact that most contraception can only be perfectly observed by the woman. Using an experiment in Zambia that varied whether women were given access to contraceptives alone or with their husbands, we find that women given access with their husbands were 19% less likely to seek family planning services, 25% less likely to use concealable contraception, and 27% percent more likely to give birth. However, women given access to contraception alone report a lower subjective well-being, suggesting a psychosocial cost of making contraceptives more concealable.Publication Globalization, Crop Choice and Property Rights in Rural Peru, 1994-2004(United Nations University, 2002) Field, Alfred J.; Field, Erica MarieThis paper describes the results of initial work analyzing a panel of rural households in Peru between 1994 and 2004 to determine household responses to changes in relative prices of traditional versus export-oriented products. Our principal interest was to better understand how household responses to external economic shocks influenced rural welfare, income distribution and poverty. Since a large percentage of Peruvians living in poverty are located in rural areas, learning more about how these households respond to a changing external environment provides insights into the factors that influence their ability to improve their absolute and relative economic position. The results of our analysis indicate that changes in relative prices had a significant impact on the adoption of new agricultural products, and the magnitude of response was mitigated by households’ degree of tenure security and access to regional and local markets. Analysis of household expenditures over the period indicate that those who adopted export crops experienced a significant growth in consumption proportional to the change in acreage devoted to exportable products, and were less likely to be classified as impoverished at the end of the period. Instrumental variables estimates suggest that this association is causal.Publication Property Rights and Investment in Urban Slums(MIT Press, 2005) Field, Erica MarieThis paper examines the effect of changes in tenure security on residential investment in urban squatter neighborhoods. To address the endogeneity of property rights, I make use of variation in ownership status induced by a nation-wide titling program in Peru. In a difference-in-difference analysis, I compare the change in housing investment before and after the program among participating households to the change in investment among two samples of non-participants. My results indicate that strengthening property rights in urban slums has a significant effect on residential investment: the rate of housing renovation rises by more than two-thirds of the baseline level. The bulk of the increase is financed without the use of credit, indicating that changes over time reflect an increase in investment incentives related to lower threat of eviction.Publication Early Marriage, Age of Menarche, and Female Schooling Attainment in Bangladesh(University of Chicago Press, 2008) Field, Erica Marie; Ambrus, AttilaUsing data from rural Bangladesh, we explore the hypothesis that women attain less schooling as a result of social and financial pressure to marry young. We isolate the causal effect of marriage timing using age of menarche as an instrumental variable. Our results indicate that each additional year that marriage is delayed is associated with 0.22 additional year of schooling and 5.6 percent higher literacy. Delayed marriage is also associated with an increase in use of preventive health services. In the context of competitive marriage markets, we use the above results to obtain estimates of the change in equilibrium female education that would arise from introducing age of consent laws.Publication Building Social Capital Through Microfinance(John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2010) Feigenberg, Benjamin; Field, Erica Marie; Pande, RohiniA number of development assistance programs promote community interaction as a means of building social capital. Yet, despite strong theoretical underpinnings, the role of repeat interactions in sustaining cooperation has proven difficult to identify empirically. We provide the first experimental evidence on the economic returns to social interaction in the context of microfinance. Random variation in the frequency of mandatory meetings across first-time borrower groups generates exogenous and persistent changes in clients' social ties. We show that the resulting increases in social interaction among clients more than a year later are associated with improvements in informal risk-sharing and reductions in default. A second field experiment among a subset of clients provides direct evidence that more frequent interaction increases economic cooperation among clients. Our results indicate that group lending is successful in achieving low rates of default without collateral not only because it harnesses existing social capital, as has been emphasized in the literature, but also because it builds new social capital among participants.