Social Protection in the Developing World, with Abhijit Banerjee, Rema Hanna, and Benjamin Olken.
Journal of Economic Literature 64 (2), pp. 1349-1421, December 2024
Online Appendix.
Social protection programs have become increasingly widespread in low- and middle income countries, with their own distinct characteristics to match the environments in which they are operating. This paper reviews the growing literature on the design and impact of these programs. We review how to identify potential beneficiaries given the large informal sector, the design and implementation of redistribution and income support programs, and the challenges and potential of social insurance. We use our frameworks as a guide for consolidating and organizing the existing literature, and also to highlight areas and questions for future research.
The retail sector in developing countries is dominated by small firms. We explain this fact with a spatial model in which high transport costs lead to small effective market sizes and, consequently, the proliferation of smaller and lower-quality firms. We show that low costs of entry are key for this result. With a new, confidential panel of firm-level data surveying the universe of mom-and-pop shops in Mexico, we test the predictions of our model. We exploit the deregulation of the Mexican gasoline market in 2017 as an exogenous shock to consumer transport costs. Where gas prices increased, the number of mom-and-pop shops differentially increased while their average size and quality fell. We provide evidence of fragmentation as the mechanism driving these effects. With our estimated model, we evaluate the welfare consequences of a licensing program that increases costs of entry for mom-and-pop shops. We show that the presence of fewer stores in the market yields a 1.4% welfare gain
Awards: Second Place Premio Citibanamex de Economía 2022, Honorable Mention Best Student Paper Prize at 12th European Meeting of Urban Economics Association 2023
Coverage: World Bank
Spillovers of private provision of healthcare on the public sector
Draft upon request
How does the private provision of healthcare affect access and health outcomes in the public sector? In this paper, I study the implications of expanding private clinic access by leveraging a regulation change in Mexico that exogenously led to a growth of pharmacy clinics in some places relative to others. I document a decrease in visits to public primary care clinics as well as a decrease in emergency room visits. The results on which types of visits are being substituted away imply efficient sorting of patients and suggest that expanding low-cost alternatives can improve the allocation of care.
