“Eliminating Uncertainty in Market Access: The Impact of New Bridges in Rural Nicaragua,” W. Brooks & K. Donovan (2018)

It’s NBER Summer Institute season, when every bar and restaurant in East Cambridge, from Helmand to Lord Hobo, is filled with our tribe. The air hums with discussions of Lagrangians and HANKs and robust estimators. And the number of great papers presented, discussed, or otherwise floating around inspires.

The paper we’re discussing today, by Wyatt Brooks at Notre Dame and Kevin Donovan at Yale SOM, uses a great combination of dynamic general equilibrium theory and a totally insane quasi-randomized experiment to help answer an old question: how beneficial is it for villages to be connected to the broader economy? The fundamental insight requires two ideas that are second nature for economists, but are incredibly controversial outside our profession.

First, going back to Nobel winner Arthur Lewis if not much earlier, economists have argued that “structural transformation”, the shift out of low-productivity agriculture to urban areas and non-ag sectors, is fundamental to economic growth. Recent work by Hicks et al is a bit more measured – the individuals who benefit from leaving agriculture generally already have, so Lenin-type forced industrialization is a bad idea! – but nonetheless barriers to that movement are still harmful to growth, even when those barriers are largely cultural as in the forthcoming JPE by Melanie Morton and the well-named Gharad Bryan. What’s so bad about the ag sector? In the developing world, it tends to be small-plot, quite-inefficient, staple-crop production, unlike the growth-generating positive-externality-filled, increasing-returns-type sectors (on this point, Romer 1990). There are zero examples of countries becoming rich without their labor force shifting dramatically out of agriculture. The intuition of many in the public, that Gandhi was right about the village economy and that structural transformation just means dreadful slums, is the intuition of people who lack respect for individual agency. The slums may be bad, but look how they fill up everywhere they exist! Ergo, how bad must the alternative be?

The second related misunderstanding of the public is that credit is unimportant. For folks near subsistence, the danger of economic shocks pushing you near that dangerous cutpoint is so fundamental that it leads to all sorts of otherwise odd behavior. Consider the response of my ancestors (and presumably the author of today’s paper’s ancestors, given that he is a Prof. Donovan) when potato blight hit. Potatoes are an input to growing more potatoes tomorrow, but near subsistence, you have no choice but to eat your “savings” away after bad shocks. This obviously causes problems in the future, prolonging the famine. But even worse, to avoid getting in a situation where you eat all your savings, you save more and invest less than you otherwise would. Empirically, Karlan et al QJE 2014 show large demand for savings instruments in Ghana, and Cynthia Kinnan shows why insurance markets in the developing world are incomplete despite large welfare gains. Indeed, many countries, including India, make it illegal to insure oneself against certain types of negative shocks, as Mobarak and Rosenzweig show. The need to save for low probability, really negative, shocks may even lead people to invest in assets with highly negative annual returns; on this, see the wonderfully-titled Continued Existence of Cows Disproves Central Tenets of Capitalism? This is all to say: the rise of credit and insurance markets unlocks much more productive activity, especially in the developing world, and it is not merely the den of exploitative lenders.

Ok, so insurance against bad shocks matters, and getting out of low-productivity agriculture may matter as well. Let’s imagine you live in a tiny village which is often separated from bigger towns, geographically. What would happen if you somehow lowered the cost of reaching those towns? Well, we’d expect goods-trade to radically change – see the earlier post on Dave Donaldson’s work, or the nice paper on Brazilian roads by Morten and Oliveria. But the benefits of reducing isolation go well beyond just getting better prices for goods.

Why? In the developing world, most people have multiple jobs. They farm during the season, work in the market on occasion, do construction, work as a migrant, and so on. Imagine that in the village, most jobs are just farmwork, and outside, there is always the change for day work at a fixed wage. In autarky, I just work on the farm, perhaps my own. I need to keep a bunch of savings because sometimes farms get a bunch of bad shocks: a fire burns my crops, or an elephant stomps on them. Running out of savings risks death, and there is no crop insurance, so I save precautionarily. Saving means I don’t have as much to spend on fertilizer or pesticide, so my yields are lower.

If I can access the outside world, then when my farm gets bad shocks and my savings runs low, I leave the village and take day work to build them back up. Since I know I will have that option, I don’t need to save as much, and hence I can buy more fertilizer. Now, the wage for farmers in the village (including the implicit wage that would keep me on my own farm) needs to be higher since some of these ex-farmers will go work in town, shifting village labor supply left. This higher wage pushes the amount of fertilizer I will buy down, since high wages reduce the marginal productivity of farm improvements. Whether fertilizer use goes up or down is therefore an empirical question, but at least we can say that those who use more fertilizer, those who react more to bad shocks by working outside the village, and those whose savings drops the most should be the same farmers. Either way, the village winds up richer both for the direct reason of having an outside option, and for the indirect reason of being able to reduce precautionary savings. That is, the harm is coming both from the first moment, the average shock to agricultural productivity, but also the second moment, its variance.

How much does this matter is practice? Brooks and Donovan worked with a NGO that physically builds bridges in remote areas. In Nicaragua, floods during the harvest season are common, isolating villages for days at a time when the riverbed along the path to market turns into a raging torrent. In this area, bridges are unnecessary when the riverbed is dry: the land is fairly flat, and the bridge barely reduces travel time when the riverbed isn’t flooded. These floods generally occur exactly during the growing season, after fertilizer is bought, but before crops are harvested, so the goods market in both inputs and outputs is essentially unaffected. And there is nice quasirandom variation: of 15 villages which the NGO selected as needing a bridge, 9 were ruled out after a visit by a technical advisor found the soil and topography unsuitable for the NGO’s relatively inexpensive bridge.

The authors survey villages the year before and the two years after the bridges are built, as well as surveying a subset of villagers with cell phones every two weeks in a particular year. Although N=15 seems worrying for power, the within-village differences in labor market behavior are sufficient that properly bootstrapped estimates can still infer interesting effects. And what do you find? Villages with bridges have many men shift from working in the village to outside in a given week, the percentage of women working outside nearly doubles with most of the women entering the labor force in order to work, the wages inside the village rise while wages outside the village do not, the use of fertilizer rises, village farm profits rise 76%, and the effect of all this is most pronounced on poorer households physically close to the bridge.

All this is exactly in line with the dynamic general equilibrium model sketched out above. If you assumed that bridges were just about market access for goods, you would have missed all of this. If you assumed the only benefit was additional wages outside the village, you would miss a full 1/3 of the benefit: the general equilibrium effect of shifting out workers who are particularly capable working outside the village causes wages to rise for the farm workers who remain at home. These particular bridges show an internal rate of return of nearly 20% even though they do nothing to improve market access for either inputs and outputs! And there are, of course, further utility benefits from reducing risk, even when that risk reduction does not show up in income through the channel of increased investment.

November 2017 working paper, currently R&R at Econometrica (RePEc IDEAS version. Both authors have a number of other really interesting drafts, of which I’ll mention two. Brooks, in a working paper with Joseph Kaposki and Yao Li, identify a really interesting harm of industrial clusters, but one that Adam Smith would have surely identified: they make collusion easier. Put all the firms in an industry in the same place, and establish regular opportunities for their managers to meet, and you wind up getting much less variance in markups than firms which are induced to locate in these clusters! Donovan, in a recent RED with my friend Chris Herrington, calibrates a model to explain why both college attendance and the relative cognitive ability of college grads rose during the 20th century. It’s not as simple as you might think: a decrease in costs, through student loans of otherwise, only affects marginal students, who are cognitively worse than the average existing college student. It turns out you also need a rising college premium and more precise signals of high schoolers’ academic abilities to get both patterns. Models doing work to extract insight from data – as always, this is the fundamental reason why economics is the queen of the social sciences.

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“What Determines Productivity,” C. Syverson (2011)

Chad Syverson, along with Nick Bloom, John van Reenen, Pete Klenow and many others, has been at the forefront of a really interesting new strand of the economics literature: persistent differences in productivity. Syverson looked at productivity differences within 4-digit SIC industries in the US (quite narrow industries like “Greeting Cards” or “Industrial Sealants”) a number of years back, and found that in the average industry, the 90-10 ratio of total factor productivity plants was almost 2. That is, the top decile plant in the average industry produced twice as much output as the bottom decline plant, using exactly the same inputs! Hsieh and Klenow did a similar exercise in China and India and found even starker productivity differences, largely due a big left-tail of very low productivity firms. This basic result is robust to different measures of productivity, and to different techniques for identifying differences; you can make assumptions which let you recover a Solow residual directly, or run a regression (adjusting for differences in labor and capital quality, or not), or look at deviations like firms having higher marginal productivity of labor than the wage rate, etc. In the paper discussed in the post, Syverson summarizes the theoretical and empirical literature on persistent productivity differences.

Why aren’t low productivity firms swept from the market? We know from theory that if entry is allowed, potentially infinite and instantaneous, then no firm can remain which is less productive than the entrants. This suggests that persistence of inefficient firms must result from either limits on entry, limits on expansion by efficient firms, or non-immediate efficiency because of learning-by-doing or similar (a famous study by Benkard of a Lockwood airplane showed that a plant could produce a plane with half the labor hours after producing 30, and half again after producing 100). Why don’t inefficient firms already in the market adopt best practices? This is related to the long literature on diffusion, which Syverson doesn’t cover in much detail, but essentially it is not obvious to a firm whether a “good” management practice at another firm is actually good or not. Everett Rogers, in his famous “Diffusion of Innovations” book, refers to a great example of this from Peru in the 1950s. A public health consultant was sent for two years to a small village, and tried to convince the locals to boil their water before drinking it. The water was terribly polluted and the health consequences of not boiling were incredible. After two years, only five percent of the town adopted the “innovation” of boiling. Some didn’t adopt because it was too hard, many didn’t adopt because of a local belief system that suggested only the already-sick ought drink boiled water, some didn’t adopt because they didn’t trust the experience of the advisor, et cetera. Diffusion is difficult.

Ok, so given that we have inefficient firms, what is the source of the inefficiency? It is difficult to decompose all of the effects. Learning-by-doing is absolutely relevant in many industries – we have plenty of evidence on this count. Nick Bloom and coauthors seem to suggest that management practices play a huge role. They have shown clear correlation between “best practice” management and high TFP across firms, and a recent randomized field experiment in India (discussed before on this site) showed massive impacts on productivity from management improvements. Regulation and labor/capital distortions also appear to play quite a big role. On this topic, James Schmitz wrote a very interesting paper, published in 2005 in the JPE, on iron ore producers. TFP in Great Lakes ore had been more or less constant for many decades, with very little entry or foreign competition until the 1980s. Once Brazil began exporting ore to the US, labor productivity doubled within a handful of years, and capital and total factor productivity also soared. A main driver of the change was more flexible workplace rules.

Final version in 2011 JEP (IDEAS version). Syverson was at Kellogg recently presenting a new paper of his, with an all-star cast of coauthors, on the medical market. It’s well worth reading. Medical productivity is similarly heterogeneous, and since the medical sector is coming up on 20% of GDP, the sources of inefficiency in medicine are particularly important!

“Inefficient Hiring in Entry-Level Labor Markets,” A. Pallais (2012)

It’s job market season again. I’m just back from a winter trip in Central Europe (though, being an economist, I skipped the castles and cathedrals, instead going to Schumpeter’s favorite Viennese hiking trail and von Neumann’s boyhood home in Budapest) and have a lot of papers to post about, but given that Pallais’ paper is from 2011’s job market, I should clear it off the docket. Her paper was, I thought, a clever use of a field experiment (and I freely admit by bias in favor of theoretically sound field experiments rather than laboratory exercises when considering empirical quantities).

Here’s the basic theoretical problem. There are a bunch of candidates for a job, some young and some old. The old workers have had their productivity revealed to some extent by their past job experience. For young workers, employers can only see a very noisy signal of their productivity. It involves a small cost to hire workers; they must be trained, etc. In equilibrium, firms will hire young workers who have expected productivity above the firm’s cost. Is this socially efficient? No, because of a simple information externality. The social planner would hire all young workers whose productivity plus the value of information revealed during their young tenure is above the firm’s cost. That is, private firms will not take into account that their hiring of a worker creates a positive externality from information that allows for better worker-firm matches in future periods. If yound workers could pay firms to work for them, then this might fix the problem to some extent, though in general such arrangements are not legal (though on this point, see my comment in the final paragraph). Perhaps this might explain the high levels of unemployment among the young, and the fact that absence from the labor market for young workers at the start of their career is particularly damaging?

How important is this? It’s tough in a lot of real world data to separate the benefits to workers of having their underlying revealed by early job experience from workers upgrading their skills during their first job. It is also tough to see the general equilibrium effects: if the government assists some young workers in getting hired, does this lead to less unemployment among young workers in future periods or do these assisted workers simply crowd out others that would have been hired in the absence of the intervention? Pallais uses an online job market similar to mechanical turk. Basically, on the site you can hire workers to perform small tasks like data entry. They request a wage and you can hire them or not. Previous hires are public, as are optional ratings and comments by the employers. Empirical data on past interventions is somewhat ambiguous.

Pallais hires a huge number of workers to do data entry. She randomly divides the applicants into three groups: those she doesn’t hire, those she hires and gives only minimal feedback, and those she hires and provides detailed comments. The task is ten hours of simple data entry with no training, so it’s tough to imagine anyone would infer the workers’ underlying human capital has improved. Other employers can see that Pallais has made a hire as soon as the contract begins, but the comments are added later; there is no effect on workers’ job offers until after the comments appear. And the effect appears substantial. Just being hired and getting a brief comment has a small impact on worker’s future wages and employment. A longer, positive comment has what looks like an enormous impact on the worker’s future employment and wages. Though the treatment does lower wages received by other people on data entry jobs by increasing the supply of certified workers, the overall increase in welfare from more hiring of young workers trumps the lower wages.

Interesting, but two comments. First, for some reason the draft of this paper I read seems to suggest some sort of idea that this sorting is good for workers, if only between the lines. But it needn’t be so! A simple model: all firms are identical, and have cost .4 of hiring a worker. Workers have skills drawn from a uniform [0,1] distribution. No signals are received in the first period. Therefore, all workers have expected skill .5, and all are hired at wage .1 (by the no profit condition in a competitive labor demand market). After the first hiring, skill level is completely revealed. Therefore, only 60% of workers are hired in the second period, at a wage equal to their skill minus .4. A policy that ex-ante would have revealed the skill of young workers would have decreased employment among young workers by 40 percent! Note that this would be the efficient outcome, so a social planner who cares about total welfare would still want to reveal the skill, even though the social planner who cares only about employment would not do so.

Second, to the extent that skill revelation is important, young workers with private information about their skills ought self-select. Those who believe themselves to be high type should choose jobs which frequently throw off public signals about their underlying quality (i.e., firms that promote good young folks quickly, industries like sales with easily verifiable output, etc.). Those who believe themselves low type should select into jobs without such signals. If everyone is rational and knows their own type, you can see some unraveling will happen here. What has the empirical career concerns literature learned about such selection?

November 2011 working paper (No IDEAS version). I see on her CV that this paper is currently R&Red at AER.