Dissertation at Uppsala University to be publicly examined in Hˆrsal 2, Ekonomikum,
Tuesday June 2, 2009 at 10:15 a.m. for degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
The examination will be conducted in English. BENGTSSON, Niklas, 2009, Essays
in Development and Labor Economics; Department of Economics, Uppsala
University, Economic Studies 115, 94 pp, ISBN 978-91-85519-22-4, ISSN 0283-
7668, http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-100927.
This thesis consists of three self-contained essays.
Essay I: This essay uses time-series of rainfall to estimate the response of body
weight to transitory changes in household income in rural Tanzania. We Önd that
the response of body weight to income changes is positive on average, but that
it is highest for female children, and lower for adults. For female children, a tenpercent
increase in household income increases body weight by about 0.4 kilos. In
contrast, the body weight of adolescents and young adults is virtually invariant to
income changes.
Essay II: In this essay, the impact of a village-level assistance program run by the
Evangelical Lutheran Church of Tanzania is estimated. The results suggest that
the program increased literacy by 15-20 percentage points and educational attainment
by 10-15 percentage points, but only among Protestant children. Catholic
children living in the same targeted villages were una§ected. The results support
the concern that faith organizations might overstate their ability to aid households
of di§erent faith.
Essay III: In this essay, we exploit a rapid introduction of a large cash grant
(child support) in order to estimate the marginal propensity to earn and consume
out of a permanent change in unearned income in South Africa. The baseline
marginal propensity to earn is about ñ0.25, although there are some notable differences
across household structure. A very small fraction of the grant is saved.
All in all, the marginal propensities estimated here are similar to those reported
in comparable papers using US data. However, they stand in contrast to some
results on conditional cash transfers in other developing countries.