Helping Children Catch Up: Early Life Shocks and the Progresa Experiment

Achyuta  Adhvaryu; Anant  Nyshadham; Theresa  Molina; Jorge  Tamayo

Working Paper | 2018

Helping Children Catch Up: Early Life Shocks and the Progresa Experiment

by Achyuta Adhvaryu, Anant Nyshadham, Theresa Molina and Jorge Tamayo

Abstract

Can investing in children who faced adverse events in early childhood help them catch up? We answer this question using two orthogonal sources of variation – resource availability at birth (local rainfall) and cash incentives for school enrollment – to identify the interaction between early endowments and investments in children. We find that adverse rainfall in the year of birth decreases grade attainment, post-secondary enrollment, and employment outcomes. But children whose families were randomized to receive conditional cash transfers experienced a much smaller decline: each additional year of program exposure during childhood mitigated more than 20 percent of early disadvantage.

Keywords: children; Welfare or Wellbeing; Education; Investment; Programs;

Language: English

Format: Print

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Citation:

Adhvaryu, Achyuta, Anant Nyshadham, Theresa Molina, and Jorge Tamayo. "Helping Children Catch Up: Early Life Shocks and the Progresa Experiment." NBER Working Paper Series, No. 24848, July 2018.

We investigate the effects of job displacement, as a result of mass layoffs, on criminal arrests using a matched employer-employee-crime dataset from Medellín, Colombia. Job displacement leads to immediate and persistent earnings losses and higher probability of arrest for both the displaced worker and family members. Leveraging a banking policy reform, we find that greater access to credit attenuates the criminal response to job loss. Impacts on arrests are pronounced for property crimes and among younger men for whom opportunities in criminal enterprises are prevalent. Taken together, our results are consistent with economic incentives contributing to criminal participation decisions after job losses.

Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2020

No Line Left Behind: Assortative Matching Inside the Firm

Achyuta Adhvaryu, Vittorio Bassi, Anant Nyshadham and Jorge Tamayo

How do firms pair workers with managers, and which constraints affect the allocation of labor within the firm? We characterize the sorting pattern of managers to workers in a large readymade garment manufacturer in India and then explore potential drivers of the observed allocation. Workers in this firm are organized into production lines, each supervised by a manager. We exploit the high degree of worker mobility across lines, together with worker-level productivity data, to estimate the sorting of workers to managers. We find negative assortative matching (NAM)—that is, better managers tend to match with worse workers, and vice versa. This stands in contrast to our estimates of the production technology, which reveal that if the firm were to positively sort, productivity would increase by 1 to 4 percent across the six factories in our data. Coupling these findings with a survey of managers and with data on multinational brands and the orders they place, we document that NAM arises, at least in part, because the value of buyer relationships imposes minimum productivity constraints on each production line. Our results emphasize that suppliers to the global market, when they are beholden to a small set of powerful buyers, may be driven to allocate managerial skill to service these relationships, even at the expense of productivity.

Keywords: assortative matching; productivity; global buyers; readymade garments; Management; Employees; Performance Productivity;

Citation:

Adhvaryu, Achyuta, Vittorio Bassi, Anant Nyshadham, and Jorge Tamayo. "No Line Left Behind: Assortative Matching Inside the Firm." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 20-103, March 2020. View Details

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Canonical models of criminal behavior highlight the importance of economic incentives and employment opportunities in determining participation in crime (Becker, 1968). Yet, deriving causal corroborating evidence from individual-level variation in employment incentives has proven challenging. We link rich administrative micro-data on socioeconomic measures of individuals with the universe of criminal arrests in Medellin over a decade. We test whether increasing the relative costs to formal-sector employment led to more crime. We exploit exogenous variation in formal employment around a socioeconomic score cutoff, below which individuals receive generous health benefits if not formally employed. Our regression discontinuity estimates show that this popular policy induced a fall in formal-sector employment and a corresponding spike in organized crime. This relationship is stronger in neighborhoods with more opportunities for organized crime. There are no effects on less economically motivated crimes.

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Helping Children Catch Up: Early Life Shocks and the Progresa Experiment

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