Essays in Development Economics and Social Inclusion

Abstract

This dissertation presents three essays in development economics that address the relationship between social exclusion and poverty. Chapter one asks: What are the causal effects of new social relationships, and do returns to link formation vary within versus across social class? I conduct a field experiment among women in rural Malawi who, due to patrilocality, relocate to their husband’s home village, thereby disrupting their preexisting social ties. I randomly assign low socioeconomic status (SES) female migrants to receive a list of neighboring women willing to receive meal invitations and the opportunity to send them invitations. I experimentally vary whether the names appearing on the list are all low-SES, all high-SES, or both. I cross-randomize the invitation-sending arms with an in-kind meal subsidy, which weakens financial constraints to meal-sharing. I find a substantial response to the invitation list: 81% of women send invitations across all treatment arms, suggesting that information and effort frictions are important barriers to building networks in this setting. The meal subsidy encourages sending invitations to both high- and low-SES women among participants who can send invitations to both, instead of only inviting low-SES women. I show that there are substantial but differential returns to cross- and same-SES linkages: participants with the opportunity to invite higher-SES guests report being 50% more likely to earn income from self-employment and a 0.21 SD improvement in food security, while women with the opportunity to invite guests within-SES experience a 0.23 SD (30%) reduction in depression one year later. This highlights a trade-off in network formation, where social ties that offer economic advancement may come at the expense of relationships that improve psychological well-being. Chapter two studies experiential and social learning in the context of health technology adoption. Behavioral change can arise from learning through personal experience or learning from others, but how do these forms of learning interact? We conduct a field experiment on household water chlorination in Pakistan, where a randomized group learns through experience by tracking their children’s diarrhea before and after chlorine distribution. Learning-arm households with learning arm neighbors chlorinate their water at a significantly higher rate for one year after the learning intervention. Their children’s health improves by 0.10 SD relative to all other households receiving chlorine. Neither learning households without learning-arm neighbors, nor non-learning households with learning-arm neighbors, exhibit sustained behavioral change. Chapter three asks: Why are people willing to pay for things that are symbolic? We analyze reactions to the renaming of U.S. geographic landmarks to argue that people lose utility through the way that symbolic change is enacted, even when they are indifferent to the symbols themselves. Descriptively, people living in zip-codes that experience geographic landmark name changes initiated by a Democratic administration are more likely to donate to Republican political candidates and less likely to donate to Democratic political candidates after name removals are announced, but not when the replacement names themselves are announced. In a 2024 survey experiment, all respondents express much more conservative policy preferences when we frame the 2015 (Democratic administration) renaming of Mt. McKinley to Mt. Denali as a process enacted by and benefiting groups of people, rather than a passive occurrence. Emphasizing the Indigenous origins of the name “Denali” does not generate the same response. In a 2025 survey experiment, White respondents behave similarly, reporting weakly more conservative policy preferences when we frame the 2025 (Republican administration) renaming of Mt. Denali to Mt. McKinley as an active rather than passive process, while non-White respondents express much more liberal policy preferences in 2025 than 2024, flipping the sign of the “active voice” treatment effect. These results suggest that how people interpret the process of symbolic change depends on the interaction between personal identity and the identity represented by the symbolic change.