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Jesse Cunha
Job Market Candidate
Stanford University
Department of Economics
579 Serra Mall
Stanford, CA 94305
650.492.0381
jcunha@stanford.edu
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Research
Testing Paternalism: Cash vs. In-kind Transfers in Rural Mexico
(Job Market Paper)
Welfare programs are often implemented in-kind to promote outcomes that might not be chosen under cash transfers. I use a randomized controlled trial of the Mexican government's Food Assistance Program (`PAL') to test whether this form of paternalism is necessary, comparing precisely measured consumption and health outcomes under both in-kind food and cash transfers. Importantly, I find that households do not indulge in the consumption of vices when handed cash. Furthermore, there is little evidence that the in-kind food transfer induced more food to be consumed than did an equal-valued cash transfer. This result is partly explained by the fact that the in-kind transfer was infra-marginal in terms of total food. However, the PAL in-kind basket contained 10 individual items, and these transfers indeed altered the types of food consumed for some households. While this distorting effect of in-kind transfers must be a motivation for paternalism, I find that households receiving cash consumed equally nutritious foods. Finally, there were few differences in child nutritional intakes, and no differences in child height, weight, sickness, or anemia prevalence. While other justifications for in-kind transfers may certainly apply, there is minimal evidence supporting the paternalistic one.
Information and the Decision to Attend College: Evidence from the Texas GO Center Project
(with Darwin Miller)
Students who otherwise would benefit from attending college may choose not to attend if they
are unaware of all costs and benefits involved. Therefore, public intervention may help
achieve optimal attendance decisions if the relevant information is cheap enough to provide.
Evidence from such an intervention - the Texas “GO Center” program - suggests that this may
indeed be the case. GO Centers are high-school information and awareness centers, usually
a dedicated classroom, that provide many of the traditional guidance counseling services –
with the exception that they are run by student peers. They target academically-prepared
students who might not otherwise choose to attend college, providing motivation and information
on all aspects of the college-going process. We use the roll-out of the program to identify
its impact, using data on the universe of Texas public school students. The program
significantly increased applications which led to increased enrollment rates, especially
amongst Hispanic and low-income students. One-year college persistence rates also increased
significantly, suggesting that the program will lead to meaningful increases in human capital.
These results have important policy implications, suggesting that a relatively cheap
intervention can induce meaningful increases in human capital by reducing informational asymmetries.
Using Competition to Elicit Cooperation in a Political Public Goods Game: A Field Experiment
(with Edward Augenblick)
This paper presents evidence from a field experiment on the impact of inter-group competition
on intra-group contributions to a public good. We sent political solicitations to
potential donors to a congressional campaign that contained either information about
the past donations of those in the same party (cooperative treatment), those in the
competing party (competition treatment), or no reference (the control group).
The competitive and cooperative treatment groups contributed at a rate 85% and
42% above that of the control, respectively. Furthermore, while the cooperative
treatment induced more contributions concentrated near the mentioned reference point,
the competitive treatment induced more contributions at nearly twice the level of the
given reference point, leading to a higher total contributed amount. This suggests that
appealing to competitive motivations can be more profitable than eliciting "pro-social"
motives in certain fundraising situations.
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Research In Progress
Financial Literacy and Development: Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial in Rural Mexico
(with G. Calderón and G. De Giorgi)
Small enterprises are crucial in the development process; however they
are often run inefficiently in the developing world due to a lack of
basic business skills, such as knowledge of proper accounting practices
and an inability to account for costs when pricing output. In an ongoing
field experiment we first examine the extent to which these deficiencies
exist amongst women micro-entrepreneurs in the rural Mexican state of
Zacatecas. Second, we will assess whether business practices and profits
can be increased through targeted business training. We chose a
representative sample of 1200 women micro-entrepreneurs in 25 villages
and administered a baseline survey in July 2009. Women were randomized
at the village and within-village levels to receive training courses by
a local NGO in the fall and winter of 2009/10. We will re-survey all
women in the spring of 2010. This randomization strategy will facilitate
identification of program effects, as well as potential spill-overs to
untreated women in treated villages. As the sample was selected from the
universe of women micro-entrepreneurs – and not just those who already
selected into micro-finance or other business related associations – the
results of this intervention should be externally valid for a broad population.
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Teaching
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