Research Fields
Development Economics, Public Service delivery, Non-Profit Organizations, Development projects, Field Experiments, Women Empowerment.
Work in progress
REACH, an innovative approach to foster citizen engagement in public healthcare delivery in Cote d'Ivoire.
Transaction costs, group-monitoring and investment: the impact of a financial inclusion program on agricultural income of producers in rural Togo (FNFI).
Working papers
An analytical review of the literature on the impact of transparency and accountability initiatives in Africa.
For-Profit vs. Non-Profit: Optimal Contracting in the presence of Moral Hazard and Uncertainty (submitted)
Abstract: It is common for donors to contract out the delivery of certain public goods and services to either non-profit or for-profit firms. I study the optimal contractor choice under both moral hazard and uncertainty. I suppose that both firms employ risk-averse workers from the community benefitting from the public good investment. I show that only the non-profit, because it is legally barred from redistributing profits, can credibly claim that extra output will directly benefit the community, and hence motivate workers to exert additional unobservable effort. Only the for-profit, because of its shareholders, can bear temporary losses and hence guarantee a certain level of output in the presence of random productivity shocks. In this setting, for-profits are preferred when effort cost and uncertainty are high.
Abstract: Foreign intervention in fragile states can be either bilateral aid to local governments or direct provision of public goods and services by international firms such as NGOs. This paper studies the effect of each process on the economic growth. I assume that the international NGO sector intervenes with a foreign technology and the local government may capture part of the donations as private income. Linking the level of public good produced to economic growth using Barro’s (1990) model, I show that NGO provision is more effective in the weakest countries where institutions are bad, and an association of the two types of aid channels can be growth enhancing for the fragile state. Our results also suggest that foreign technical intervention should not be allowed below a certain threshold level of initial capital per capita in the developing country.
Abstract: Empirical evidence on agricultural households in developing countries suggest that they do not maximize their output because of misallocation of inputs across individual plots (Udry, 1996). Our paper addresses the question of the determinants of this productive inefficiency using a lab-in-the-field experiment. We find that inefficient resource allocation is linked to intra-household income distribution. In addition, misallocations are exacerbated by asymmetries of information between spouses on input productivity on individual plots. We explain these findings with a theoretical framework, linking allocation of productive resources to income sharing for consumption among spouses. We show that income distribution may create intra-household specialization in contributions to household’s public goods, which itself governs the input repartition.
Other
Presentation slides, Universite de Lome, Le développement économique autrement : comment la recherche peut aider les décideurs à mettre en place des politiques sur mesure ?
Other Research Affiliations
Researcher at Center for Research and Opinion Polls, CROP-Africa.
Associate member at Aix-Marseille School of Economics