Essays on welfare and debt : From impact evaluation in Kenya to Canadian housing markets

This thesis is comprised of two independent essays on the topics of impact evaluation, and one essay on the housing wealth-effect. The essays address key questions on welfare and spending decisions made by households when subject to government assistance programs and increases in housing prices. The first essay deals with a large scale pro-poor government assistance program in Kenya. It studies the impact of extension services on rural households, to understand whether the SIDA-funded program led to sustainable improvements in the treated households’ livelihoods. The results suggest that the treated households increased fertilizer dosage, and had higher household expenditures. However, the treatment did not impact farming revenues and output. The second essay investigates a novel labelled cash transfer program in agriculture in Kenya. This essay documents the impacts of the program to draw a relationship between the treatment and farm output and revenue, as well as basic welfare indicators at the household level. The results show that while household expenditures were higher following the reception of the labelled cash transfer, farm yields and revenues were not improved by the intervention. The third essay analyses the relationship between housing prices and consumer debt in the Canadian province of British Columbia. Using administrative data and an implementation of the Arellano-Bond estimator, this essay shows that, even as residential property values climbed very rapidly, consumers did not engage in additional non-mortgage debt, in particular consumers who planned to stay in their home for the following twelve months