Publications des chercheurs de PSE

I study whether the parental perception of a newborn's health affects their investments in the child and their health outcomes later in childhood. I use the medical cutoff of low birth weight (<2.5kg.), a historically standard cutoff used to identify infants at high mortality risk. While the economic literature has already studied the implications similar cutoffs (<1.5kg.) have on children's development, most of it has focused on medical treatments as the primary mechanism. In this paper, I investigate whether parents also respond to this label by adapting their investment decisions. To answer this question, I use the French Longitudinal Study of Children ( Étude Longitudinale Française depuis l'Enfance-ELFE ). Using a regression discontinuity design approach, I find an improvement in nutritional outcomes for those that, on top of being low birth weight, are premature. I do not find strong evidence of direct medical intervention at birth based only on the cutoff. Conversely, I encounter that parents respond to children being labeled low birth weight. This is particularly so when looking at parental investments in pre-term children. While doctors might have an indirect role-through advice and recommendations to parents-ignoring parental responses at birth could lead to an under/overestimation of the returns of early-life interventions by the medical community.

After 1850, mortality began its long-term fall in most industrialized countries, a process that has been linked to rising incomes and improved water infrastructure. The problem, however, is that these contribution are jointly determined and feedback into each other. Here we estimate their impact using a longitudinal data set on mortality and income for each of Paris' 80 neighborhoods. Income and sanitation both contributed to the decrease in mortality, a standard deviation increase in either variable produces a two years gain in life expectancy. These results give insights on the determinants of the health transition but also on the long-term evolution of health inequality.

This paper provides strong evidence that adult mortality has a negative impact on children educational outcomes, both over the short and the long run, in rural Madagascar. The underlying longitudinal data and the difference-in-differences strategy used overcome most of the previous cross-sectional study limitations, such as failure to control for child and household pre-death characteristics and unobserved heterogeneity. This paper also pays special attention to the heterogeneity, robustness, and long-run persistence of effects. Results show that orphans are on average 10 pp less likely to attend school than their nonorphaned counterparts, this effect being even more pronounced for girls and young children from poorer households. Results on adults further show that those orphaned during childhood eventually completed less education. These findings suggest that not only do households suffering unexpected shocks resort to schooling adjustments as an immediate risk-coping strategy, but also that adversity has long-lasting effects on human capital accumulation.

Cash transfer programs have become extremely popular in the developing world. A large literature analyzes their effects on schooling, health and nutrition, but relatively little is known about possible impacts on child development. This paper analyzes the impact of a cash transfer program on early childhood cognitive development. Children in households randomly assigned to receive benefits had significantly higher levels of development nine months after the program began. There is no fade-out of program effects two years after the program ended. Additional random variation shows that these impacts are unlikely to result from the cash component of the program alone.

This article analyzes whether the large scale provision of non-contributory health services encourages workers to move away from jobs that pay contributions to social security (formal employment). Using a difference-in-differences design, that exploits the variation generated by the municipal level roll-out of an intervention of this kind in Mexico, this paper finds that contemporaneous program exposure has no impact on the ratio of formal to total employed and that lagged exposure leads only to a small (0.78 percentage points) decrease. Two proxies of spillover effects further reveal that this estimate is robust and that the upper-bound of program effect is only moderately larger (1.5 percentage points).

This paper analyzes the effect of malaria prevalence and indoor residual spraying on the probability of sleeping under an insecticide-treated bed net in nine Sub-Saharan countries. Specifically, it examines whether bed net usage is elastic with respect to malaria prevalence and whether indoor residual spraying, which is a public intervention, crowds out bed net usage, which is a private behavior. Using data on individual bed net usage and household indoor residual spraying combined with local malaria prevalence, we show that malaria prevalence has a positive effect on bed net usage, but that bed net usage is inelastic with respect to malaria prevalence, with elasticity ranging from 0.42 for adult women to 0.59 for older children, in our preferred model. We also find that indoor residual spraying does not crowd out bed net usage. Instead, individuals who live in houses that were recently sprayed are more likely to use a bed net.

Exploiting original data from a Senegalese household survey, we provide evidence that fertility choices are partly driven by women's needs for widowhood insurance. We use a duration model of birth intervals to show that women most at risk in case of widowhood intensify their fertility, shortening birth spacing, until they get a son. Insurance through sons might entail substantial health costs since short birth spacing raises maternal and infant mortality rates.

Cet article évalue l’effet de différentes politiques de lutte contre le paludisme, et en particulier de la politique dite de « mise à l’échelle » de la distribution de moustiquaires, sur la probabilité d’anémie des enfants en Afrique subsaharienne. Les données combinent des informations individuelles sur plus de 150000 enfants et leur famille, et des informations régionales sur l’intensité du paludisme avant le lancement des campagnes, pour 16 pays, entre 2000 et 2014. La méthode utilisée est celle des différences-en-différences, qui teste si les politiques ont entraîné une baisse plus forte de l’anémie dans les régions où l’intensité du paludisme était plus élevée. Les résultats indiquent que la mise à l’échelle a un effet faible ou négligeable sur la probabilité d’anémie modérée ou sévère, tandis que les autres politiques n’ont pas d’effet significatif.

This paper aims at shedding light on the relationship between women's empowerment and domestic violence. For this, we explore different ways to measure women's empowerment and domestic violence, and analyze whether the relation depends on the definitions used. We take advantage of a rich data set collected in rural Colombia, including several measures of self-esteem, disagreement towards domestic violence, participation in household decisions and social capital; and analyze the relationship with both aggressive and controlling ways of domestic violence. The results indicate that the different measures of women's empowerment help explain much better the aggressive ways of domestic violence than the controlling ones. Our results show a positive correlation between women's empowerment and domestic violence. This goes in line with the theories that argue that men use violence as a way to leverage their power within the household. Among the different latent measures of women's empowerment we used, we found that social capital and self-esteem are significantly correlated with aggressive domestic violence. We do not find that more common proxies, such as women's participation in household decisions, are significantly correlated to domestic violence.

Does democracy help Kenyan citizens to struggle against the HIV epidemic? Yet, very little attention has been devoted to establish whether political regimes react differently to the HIV infection. Using an electoral definition of democracy makes a contribution in understanding which aspects of political rules matter to manage the disease. Using a difference-in-difference design that draws upon pre-existing variations in HIV intensity and cohort's exposure to democracy, we find that a person living under democracy is less likely to have a HIV infection. Further, we present some evidence of ethnic favoritism and gender disparities during periods of non-democracy.

Cet article évalue l’effet de différentes politiques de lutte contre le paludisme, et en particulier de la politique dite de « mise à l’échelle » de la distribution de moustiquaires, sur la probabilité d’anémie des enfants en Afrique subsaharienne. Les données combinent des informations individuelles sur plus de 150 000 enfants et leur famille, et des informations régionales sur l’intensité du paludisme avant le lancement des campagnes, pour seize pays, entre 2000 et 2014. La méthode utilisée est celle des doubles différences, qui teste si les politiques ont entraîné une baisse plus forte de l’anémie dans les régions où l’intensité du paludisme était plus élevée. Les résultats indiquent que la mise à l’échelle a un effet faible ou négligeable sur la probabilité d’anémie modérée ou sévère, tandis que les autres politiques n’ont pas d’effet significatif.

Food price volatility has drawn much attention from the international community in the beginning of the 21st century, in the aftermath of the 2008 and 2010 food riots. One strand of the literature aimed at identifying the economic origins of the increased variability of prices (supply shocks, underinvestment in the agricultural sector, financial speculation and increased demand from the emerging markets), while several articles were trying to assess whether there had actually been a change in the volatility regime in the first place. Yet another strand of the literature focused on the consequences of food price shocks and volatility. This paper provides a comprehensive review of this extensive literature on the impacts of food price shocks and food commodity volatility. The consequences are assessed both in micro- and macroeconomic terms, from the consumer’s and producer’s sides, as well as from the theoretical and empirical points of view. If the vast majority of studies points to a detrimental impact of food price shocks on the livelihood of many in the developing world, and on potentially dire consequences on production, growth and political stability, this literature review reveals, above all, the lack of proper investigation about the consequences of food price volatility in itself. The hype around the excessive volatility of the food markets did not translate into an academic focus on the consequences of this price instability.