Essays in Development and Behavioral Economics

Abstract

This dissertation comprises three chapters in the fields of development and behavioral economics. Chapter 1 focuses on street vending, which is an important source of self-employment for the urban poor. I use primary observation, survey, and experimental data from Delhi to study this market. Partnering with street vendors to randomize both prices and the passersby they solicit to try to make sales, I find that even with identical goods, child vendors are 97% more likely to make a sale and earn more than twice that of adult vendors. Despite no differences in valuation for the goods, couples and female customers are 90% and 28% more likely to buy than male customers. Females and couples are also 50% more likely to be targeted by vendors than males and are charged higher prices on average (4-38%) than males. I show that these findings are consistent with a model that incorporates altruism and a cost of refusal in the buyer's decision-making. I find that passersby are more altruistic towards children than adults in an incentivized dictator game. Additionally, requesting passersby to buy, increases the purchasing probability twofold for adult vendors and fourfold for child vendors. Survey data confirms that vendors target females or couples, over males, because they consider who would find it harder to refuse. The paper demonstrates that sellers leverage insights into consumer social preferences to inform their selling strategies, which can be effective in markets with personal selling. Chapter 2, co-authored with Minahil Asim and Vatsal Khandelwal, studies whether conveying student-specific teacher expectations of high effort and achievement affects academic performance. Working with over 280 classrooms in Pakistan, we randomize whether students (a) receive individual-specific teacher expectations; (b) are additionally randomly paired with a classmate and asked to encourage each other; (c) simply receive information about their last test score, or (d) receive no message at all. We find that teacher expectations increase math scores by $0.19\sigma$. This effect is especially large for those who randomly received a more ambitious expectation and who were predicted to perform the worst. Pairing students significantly improves test scores only for those whose matched peer is similar to them in terms of baseline characteristics. Finally, information provision alone increases scores by $0.16\sigma$; this effect is statistically indistinguishable from the effect of expectations but is concentrated in schools with low parental literacy. Our findings highlight low-cost and sustainable ways of improving academic performance. Chapter 3, co-authored with Samuel Stemper, studies the impact of global expansions in mobile internet access between 2000 and 2018 on student outcomes. We link geospatial data on the rollout of 3G mobile technology with over 2 million student test scores from 82 countries. Our findings indicate that the introduction of 3G coverage leads to substantial increases in smartphone ownership and internet usage among adolescents. Changes in 3G coverage are associated with significant declines in test scores in math, science, and reading, with magnitudes roughly equivalent to the loss of one-quarter of a year of learning. We also find evidence of a reduction in the ease of making friends and a sense of belonging.