Essays on economics of inequality: early childhood development and ethnic favoritism
- Autores: Augustin Tapsoba
- Directores de la Tesis: Joan Llull (dir. tes.), Hannes Mueller (dir. tes.)
- Lectura: En la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona ( España ) en 2019
- Idioma: español
- Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Pamela Jakiela (presid.), Daniel Montolio (secret.), Owen Ozier (voc.)
- Programa de doctorado: Programa de Doctorado en Análisis Económico por la Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona
- Materias:
- Enlaces
- Tesis en acceso abierto en: TESEO
- Resumen
In this dissertation, I investigate the causes and consequences of economic inequality along two dimensions: early childhood development for inequality among individuals and ethnic favoritism for inequality among social groups. In three separate essays, I specifically study the consequences on child development of shocks experienced early in life on one hand, and the prevalence and determinants of ethnic favoritism around the world on the other.
Chapter 1 studies the impact of conflict risk on child health and it shows that insecurity in conflict-prone areas can affect child health even in absence of immediate violence. Beyond the damage caused to direct victims of iolence, behavioral responses to insecurity can lead to major health setbacks for young children. The fear of exposure to conflict events often triggers such responses even before/without any manifestation of violence in a given area. This generates a treatment status (exposure to conflict risk) that goes beyond violence incidence. In this chapter, I investigate the impact of conflict on child health using a new metric that captures perceived insecurity at the local level through a statistical model of violence. In this model, violence is a space-time process with an unknown underlying distribution that drives the expectations of agents on the ground. Each observed event is interpreted as a random realization of this process, and its underlying distribution is estimated using adaptive kernel density estimation methods. The new measure of violence risk is then used to evaluate the impact of conflict on child health using data from Ivory Coast and Uganda. The empirical evidence suggests that conflict is a local public bad, with cohorts of children exposed to high risk of violence equally suffering major health setbacks even when the risk does not materialize in violent events around them.
Chapter 2 of the thesis is joint work with Bruno Conte Leite and Lavinia Piemontese. It investigates the impact on child health of the 2004 locust plague invasion in the Sahel region of Africa. It argues that locust invasions in these agricultural economies generate first a speculative/anticipatory price effect during the plague itself followed by a local crop failure effect that could constitute a food supply shock for local markets and an income shock for farmers. Using a Difference-in-Differences identification strategy, we show that children exposed in utero to the adverse effects of locust plagues suffer major health setback. Exposed children have, on average, a Z-score 0.25 points and 0.48 points lower than non-exposed children in Mali and Senegal respectively. Children exposed to the speculative price effect suffer as much as those exposed to the crop failure effect.
Finally, chapter 3 of this thesis is joint work with Hannes Mueller and studies the prevalence and determinants of ethnic favoritism around the world. It uses a dataset which codes executive power for 564 ethnic groups in 130 countries on a seven-point scale to show that ethnic groups that gain political power benefit economically. This effect holds for groups that enter government, the extensive margin, and for groups that concentrate more power onto themselves, the intensive margin. Both these effects disappear in the presence of strong political constraints on executive power. Institutional constraints are even effective in preventing favoritism when groups concentrate all power in the executive onto themselves.
