Manipulation of the eligibility criteria of anti-poverty programs in developing countries can lead to inappropriate allocation of resources to the non-poor. Using data from Vietnam, I find that some more well-off households declare low earnings just so that they appear eligible to a generous poverty alleviation program. However, this behavior dissipates over time. To explain this declining pattern of manipulation, I use panel data and show that over time the program officers learn to rely less on self-reported income and more on housing conditions to screen households. Compared to income, housing conditions are much harder to manipulate and can easily be verified by the officers. This in turns discourages households from continuing to under-report their income. Without this learning process, the program would have misallocated about 1.7%, or equivalently 9.5-10.7 million USD, of its budget to non-poor households.

In 1990s, there were 105 male newborns for every 100 female newborns in Vietnam. This number rapidly increased since the country open to the world market in the early 2000s, reaching 112 boys for every 100 girls by 2015. We investigate whether Vietnam’s trade openness leads some households to increase their preference of sons over daughters. We use the 2001 US-Vietnam Bilateral Trade Agreement as an exogenous shock. In a difference-in-difference framework, we find that infants of mothers with greater exposure to tariff cuts are more likely to be boys compared to infants of mothers with lower exposure over the study period. More exposed mothers are also less likely to give birth in a given year and also work more hours, compared to less exposed mothers. These findings suggest that the trade policy heightens the trade-off between work and children for mothers, causing them to reduce fertility and sex-select more intensely to fulfill their son preference. 

This paper documents the (positive) effects of war experience on contemporary economic outcomes for women. As men were drafted to serve in the war, women who were left behind had to step up in local economic activities. High female labor force participation shaped the active female roles in communities where men were absent. As a result, in localities with higher male casualties during the Vietnam War, I hypothesize that female take-up of economic opportunities is higher and still visible in recent history. To test this hypothesis, I link administrative data on village-level human casualty during the Vietnam War era to recent Vietnamese survey data collected in the 2000s. Revisiting the 2001 US-Vietnam Bilateral Trade Agreement, I find that it dramatically increased formal employment for women, particularly for those living in areas with greater casualty loss from the war. I also find corroborative evidence that historical male war casualty is positively correlated with the female power within the household thirty years later.