Essays on Development Economics

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2020This dissertation is a collection of essays that study women’s labor market decisions and outcomes in developing countries. Chapter 1 studies how fear of sexual assault limits women’s labor supply. Numerous criminology survey studies show that women, much more than men, are afraid of being a victim of sexual assault. In response to this fear, women adjust their lives and their behavior in a way to minimize the risk of sexual victimization. I exploit the variation created by the sampling framework of Bangladesh’s Quarterly Labor Force Survey (QLFS) to see how individuals in the labor force react to news reports on sexual violence within a small time frame of their survey interview. My results show that women decrease their labor hours and the probability of working on a particular day if there is a high level of reporting on rape that day or one day ago. Women decrease the hours they work 0.0539 hours and 0.0625 hours on a day of and the day after both newspapers have articles on sexual violence, respectively. There is a 0.4 percentage point (PP) reduction in the likelihood a woman works at all on the day of and a 1 PP decrease on the day after both newspapers report on sexual assault. I find that these effects are largely driven by women who work outside the home. Women who must commute to work decrease hours worked by 0.0975 hours and 0.1025 hours on the day of and day after. They decrease the likelihood of working at all by 1.5PPs and 1.76PPs the day of and day after, respectively. Women who work from home marginally increase their hours. Women begin to increase their hours two days after the headlines are released. However, in aggregate, the total effect on hours is still negative. Interestingly, I also find effects on men. Men increase their labor supply, in terms of hours and the probability of working that day, in response to a news report shock. It may be that men compensate for the reduced work from women. However, men increase their hours and likelihood of working even on two and three days after reports when women are also increasing their hours. The increase in men’s labor supply, both in hours and likelihood of working, does not strictly coincide with women’s decreasing their supply. This does not seem to be driven by men in households where women work outside of their home. Chapter 2 presents joint work with Aneesh Mannava, Elizaveta Perova and Alana Teaman and explores the effects of women participating in a Laotian public work program (PWP) on their exposure to gender based violence (GBV) and intimate partner violence (IPV). We find that treatment increases women’s employment in wage work and their household earnings. Their increase in earnings account for nearly 83- 86% of household earnings. We do not find that participation in the program changes their exposure to GBV or IPV but does increase her performance on a decision making index by 1.06 to 1.24 standard deviations. This is a particularly interesting result, since although increasing women’s economic opportunities have shown to improve their human capital accumulation, reduce early marriage, delay fertility and generally increase female empowerment, the effect on GBV, and more specifically, intimate partner violence (IPV) is unclear. To our knowledge, we are the only study exploring the causal relationship between workfare programs and gender-based violence. Chapter 3 is joint work with Aneesh Mannava, Elizaveta Perova and Alana Teaman and it evaluates the impacts of the same Laotian work-fare program on household income, investments and expenditure. Despite significant increases in a woman’s own earned income and household income we do not find any evidence of increased investments, savings or large purchases. This suggests that much of this extra income was used to for consumption. Despite the success of the program in increasing employment and income, it is unlikely that this program will increase income in the long term