Stephen C. Smith | The George Washington University (original) (raw)

Papers by Stephen C. Smith

SANDEE research reports are the output of research projects supported by the South Asian Network ... more SANDEE research reports are the output of research projects supported by the South Asian Network for Development and Environmental Economics. The reports have been peer reviewed and edited. A summary of the findings of SANDEE reports are also available as SANDEE Policy Briefs.

Any opinions expressed here are those of the author(s) and not those of IZA. Research published i... more Any opinions expressed here are those of the author(s) and not those of IZA. Research published in this series may include views on policy, but the institute itself takes no institutional policy positions. The IZA research network is committed to the IZA Guiding Principles of Research Integrity. The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn is a local and virtual international research center and a place of communication between science, politics and business. IZA is an independent nonprofit organization supported by Deutsche Post Foundation. The center is associated with the University of Bonn and offers a stimulating research environment through its international network, workshops and conferences, data service, project support, research visits and doctoral program. IZA engages in (i) original and internationally competitive research in all fields of labor economics, (ii) development of policy concepts, and (iii) dissemination of research results and concepts to the intereste...

This paper addresses a basic question: how sustainable are benefits from agricultural extension p... more This paper addresses a basic question: how sustainable are benefits from agricultural extension programs? In doing so it introduces a novel research method-the reverserandomized control trial. The context is the phase-out of a program for smallholder women farmers operated in Uganda since 2009 by the NGO BRAC. The program had two components, broadly targeting farmer knowledge and market development. BRAC stimulated demand for improved seeds by giving free samples for model farmer (MF) trainings; and stimulated supply by training community agricultural promoters (CAPs), who sold BRAC's improved seeds in villages. In addition, MFs taught improved practices. We present comparative evidence that this program had some positive impacts; for example improved farming practices. Due to loss of funding BRAC scheduled this program to be phased-out. The sustainability (or persistence) of the program was tested through a reverse-RCT. In early 2013 villages were randomly assigned to one of three arms: to continue the program without change (the Control), or be phased-out of one intervention component (either MF or CAP). One year later, remaining treatments (sponsorship of CAPs in the MF phase-out arm and of MFs in the CAP phase-out arm) were ended. In this way, we examine also whether one of the components, or the sequence of phase-outs, matters more for sustainability. After three growing seasons improved farming practices continued: the phaseouts had no statistically significant impact on use of crop rotation, intercropping, mixed cropping, line sowing, zero-tillage, weeding, irrigation, pest and disease management, or post-harvest management. Effects of phase-outs on improved seed use are complex. In phase-out villages fewer CAPs sold seeds; among CAPs who carried on, quantities fell and prices rose; evidence points to CAPs' post-phase-out transport costs as a key reason. On the other hand, purchases by smallholders from local input dealers rose substantially. Direct purchase of seeds from BRAC area offices also rose, by some five percentage points; this response was more common among farmers who viewed BRAC seeds as superior. Moreover, results suggest that there is a lag between discontinuation of the program and farmers connecting to alternative sellers of seed. This is one reason that it takes time to see if a program has been sustainable-some practices may hold on longer than others before being dropped; in addition, an effective transition itself may take time, possibly resulting in a U-shape response as input use falls until the farmer finds a viable alternative source.

T chapter examines two types of fragility, environmental and governmental, and their interactions... more T chapter examines two types of fragility, environmental and governmental, and their interactions. Increasing environmental fragility, resulting from both external climate change impacts and domestic activities, is a worsening problem in many developing countries. Climate adaptations include large-scale migration and accelerated exploitation of natural resources, leading to heightened risks of conflict. Examples from experiences in such countries as Bangladesh, Kenya, Nigeria, Sudan, and Uganda illustrate the conflict risks of maladaptation by individuals and communities. In addition, maladaptation by governments, such as shortsighted or interest-group-dominated environmental resource mismanagement, can also increase conflict risk and undermine development prospects. Violent conflict can also lead to significant environmental degradation,

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2019

of BRAC Uganda for their assistance with field visits and many helpful discussions about the prog... more of BRAC Uganda for their assistance with field visits and many helpful discussions about the program and suggestions for its analysis. Financial support from USAID through BASIS Assets & Market Access Collaborative Research Support Program AID-OAA-L-12-00001, award No.201121454-07, is gratefully acknowledged. All errors are our own.

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2015

Person Equivalent Headcount Measures of Poverty * Headcount measures of poverty are by far the mo... more Person Equivalent Headcount Measures of Poverty * Headcount measures of poverty are by far the most common tools for evaluating poverty and gauging progress in global development goals. The headcount ratio, or the prevalence of poverty, and the headcount, or the number of the poor, both convey tangible information about poverty. But both ignore the depth of poverty, so they arguably present distorted views of the spatial distribution of poverty as well as the extent of progress against poverty over time. Additionally, headcount measures can provide incentives for policymakers and NGOs to focus their efforts on the least poor, an observation well understood among policymakers themselves. While other poverty measures mitigate these problems by capturing the intensity as well as the prevalence of poverty, they are often not central to policy discourse because they are perceived to be too "unintuitive" to have traction. There is a need for poverty measures that go beyond traditional headcount measures, but retain their direct interpretation. This paper presents person equivalent (p. e.) headcount measures, which do just that. Our approach draws on the logic of full-time equivalent jobs, adult equivalent incomes, and other constructs in economics. An initial period is used to calibrate the average depth of poverty among the poor, which then becomes the "person equivalent" underlying the p. e. headcount and the p. e. headcount ratio. We illustrate our methods using $1.25 a day poverty data from 78 countries as provided by the World Bank, and show how the new measures map out different pictures of poverty and progress than traditional headcount measures. Overall, the picture is one of a more rapid decline in global poverty, but with significant redistributions of its burden across regions and countries. For example, p. e. headcounts are much higher than traditional headcounts in Latin America and the Caribbean and Sub Saharan Africa; in South Asia and East Asia and the Pacific the reverse is true. In Kenya the traditional headcount rose by 8 million and the p. e. headcount rose by 11 million; in South Africa the p. e. headcount fell by more than the traditional headcount. We discuss properties of the new measures, outline some generalizations and conclude with recommendations for using this approach in development goals to track progress and direct policy.

Economic and Industrial Democracy, 2021

From a theoretical viewpoint, there can be market failures and organizational failures resulting ... more From a theoretical viewpoint, there can be market failures and organizational failures resulting in an underprovision of occupational health and safety. Works councils may help mitigate these failures. Using establishment data from Germany, the empirical analysis in this article confirms that the incidence of a works council is significantly associated with an increased likelihood that the establishment provides more workplace health promotion than required by law. This result also holds in regressions accounting for the possible endogeneity of works council incidence. Furthermore, analysing potentially moderating factors such as collective bargaining coverage, industry, type of ownership, multi-establishment status and product market competition, the article finds a positive association between works councils and workplace health promotion for the various types of establishments examined. Finally, this study goes beyond the mere incidence of workplace health promotion and shows tha...

Annals of Public and Cooperative Economics, 2018

ABSTRACTTheories of how nonunion employee representation impacts firm performance, affects market... more ABSTRACTTheories of how nonunion employee representation impacts firm performance, affects market equilibria, and generates externalities on labor and society are synthesized. Mandated works councils in Germany provide a particularly strong form of nonunion employee representation. A systematic review of research on the German experience with mandated works councils finds generally positive effects, though these effects depend on a series of moderating factors and some impacts remain ambiguous. Finally, key questions for empirical research on nonunion employee representation, which have previously been little analyzed in the literature, are reviewed.

Journal of Development Studies, 2013

We introduce new approaches to research on poverty traps, focusing on changes in patterns of equi... more We introduce new approaches to research on poverty traps, focusing on changes in patterns of equilibria over time and across regions, applied to the Ethiopia Rural Household Survey. We revisit the incidence of multiple equilibria using new nonparametric techniques; we also emphasize conditions of single equilibria that remain stagnant below the poverty line. We identify a single equilibrium in our initial interval (1994-1999) but find evidence that a second, higher equilibrium is emerging in the subsequent (1999-2004) interval. One of three major regions exhibits a deeply impoverished equilibrium that does not improve despite a national environment of pro-poor growth.

This paper develops a theory of endogenous league formation and considers its implications for po... more This paper develops a theory of endogenous league formation and considers its implications for policy in developing countries. We generalize from features of the two most prominent European co-op leagues, Mondragón and La Lega, to develop the first formal ...

Climate Change Economics, 2012

Heat waves, defined as an interval of abnormally hot and humid weather, have become a prominent k... more Heat waves, defined as an interval of abnormally hot and humid weather, have become a prominent killer in recent years. With heat waves worsening with climate change, adaptation is essential; one strategy has been to issue heat wave warnings and undertake awareness campaigns to bring about behavioral changes to reduce heat stroke. Since 2002, the Indian state of Odisha has been undertaking a grassroots awareness campaign on "dos and don'ts" during heat wave conditions through the disaster risk management (DRM) program. The selection criteria for DRM districts were earthquake, flood and cyclone incidence; but subsequently, heat wave awareness also received intensive attention in these districts. We present quasi-experimental evidence on the impact of the program, taking DRM districts and periods as treatment units and the rest as controls, analyzing the impact on the death toll from heat stroke for the 1998 to 2010 period, using difference-in-difference (DID) regression...

A serious problem with financing labour-managed or employee owned firms with standard performance... more A serious problem with financing labour-managed or employee owned firms with standard performance bonds is that workers would have an incentive to make investments which do not add to value added but which do increase workers utilities. To avoid such problems it is necessary to design an asset which bears some of the risk which is out of the control of workers, but which makes payments which they cannot affect. In this paper such an asset is proposed, termed Industry-Average Performance Bonds. Each bond pays a fixed share of value added by other firms in the same industry. Since the payment depends only on the value added by other firms in the same industry, workers have no interest in reducing their liability by reducing value added. This asset would enable investors to sell insurance against general and industry specific risk to labour managed or fully employee owned firms. Use of the bonds would mitigate the well-known perverse supply responses of such firms by reducing the variance of economic rent.

Comparing domestic-and foreign-owned firms in Germany, this paper finds that foreignowned firms a... more Comparing domestic-and foreign-owned firms in Germany, this paper finds that foreignowned firms are more likely to focus on short-term profit. This influence is particularly strong if the local managers of the German subsidiary are not sent from the foreign parent company. Moreover, the physical distance between the foreign parent company and its German subsidiary increases the probability of focusing on short-term profit. These findings conform to the hypothesis that foreign owners facing an information disadvantage concerning the local conditions of their subsidiaries are more likely to favor short-term profit. However, we do not identify differences in "short-termism" between investors from "Anglo-Saxon" and other foreign countries; rather, results point in the direction of more general features of corporate globalization.

The IZA Policy Paper Series publishes work by IZA staff and network members with immediate releva... more The IZA Policy Paper Series publishes work by IZA staff and network members with immediate relevance for policymakers. Any opinions and views on policy expressed are those of the author(s) and not of IZA, which itself takes no institutional policy positions. The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn is a local and virtual international research center and a place of communication between science, politics and business. IZA is an independent nonprofit organization supported by Deutsche Post Foundation. The center is associated with the University of Bonn and offers a stimulating research environment through its international network, workshops and conferences, data service, project support, research visits and doctoral program. IZA engages in (i) original and internationally competitive research in all fields of labor economics, (ii) development of policy concepts, and (iii) dissemination of research results and concepts to the interested public. The papers often represent p...

This article evaluates causal impacts of a large-scale agricultural extension program for smallho... more This article evaluates causal impacts of a large-scale agricultural extension program for smallholder women farmers on technology adoption and food security in Uganda through a regression discontinuity design that exploits an arbitrary distance-to-branch threshold for village program eligibility. We find eligible farmers used better basic cultivation methods and achieved improved food security. Given minimal changes in adoption of relatively expensive inputs, these gains are likely attributed to improved cultivation methods that require low upfront monetary investment. These results highlight the role of information and training in boosting agricultural productivity among poor farmers.

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2017

Any opinions expressed in this paper are those of the author(s) and not those of IZA. Research pu... more Any opinions expressed in this paper are those of the author(s) and not those of IZA. Research published in this series may include views on policy, but IZA takes no institutional policy positions. The IZA research network is committed to the IZA Guiding Principles of Research Integrity. The IZA Institute of Labor Economics is an independent economic research institute that conducts research in labor economics and offers evidence-based policy advice on labor market issues. Supported by the Deutsche Post Foundation, IZA runs the world's largest network of economists, whose research aims to provide answers to the global labor market challenges of our time. Our key objective is to build bridges between academic research, policymakers and society. IZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author.

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2013

Many poverty, safety net, training, and other social programs utilize multiple screening criteria... more Many poverty, safety net, training, and other social programs utilize multiple screening criteria to determine eligibility. We apply recent advances in multidimensional measurement analysis to develop a straightforward method for summarizing changes in groups of eligibility (screening) indicators, which have appropriate properties. We show how this impact can differ across participants with differing numbers of initial deprivations. We also examine impacts on other specially designed multidimensional poverty measures (and their components) that address key participant deficits. We apply our methods to a BRAC ultra-poverty program in Bangladesh, and find that our measures of multidimensional poverty have fallen significantly for participants. This improvement is most associated with better food security and with acquisition of basic assets (though this does not mean that the cause of poverty reduction was program activities focused directly on these deficits). In general, we find that the BRAC program had a greater impact on reducing multidimensional poverty for those with a larger initial number of deprivations. We also showed how evaluation evidence can be used to help improve the selection of eligibility characteristics of potential participants.

Innocenti Working Papers, 2019

This paper provides a framework for analyzing constraints that apply specifically to women, which... more This paper provides a framework for analyzing constraints that apply specifically to women, which theory suggests may have negative impacts on child outcomes (as well as on women). We classify women's constraints into four dimensions: (i) low influence on household decisions, (ii) restrictions on mobility, (iii) domestic physical and psychological abuse, and (iv) limited information access. Each of these constraints are in principle determined within households. We test the impact of women's constraints on child outcomes using nationally representative household Demographic and Health Survey data from India, including 53,030 mothers and 113,708 children, collected in 2015-16. We examine outcomes including nutrition, health, education, water quality, and sanitation. In our primary specification, outcomes are measured as multidimensional deprivations incorporating indicators for each of these deficiencies, utilizing a version of UNICEF's Multidimensional Overlapping Deprivation Analysis index. We identify causal impacts using a Lewbel specification and present an array of additional econometric strategies and robustness checks. We find that children of women who are subjected to domestic abuse, have low influence in decision making, and limited freedom of mobility are consistently more likely to be deprived, measured both multidimensionally and with separate indicators.

American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 2018

We evaluate causal impacts of a large-scale agricultural extension program for smallholder women ... more We evaluate causal impacts of a large-scale agricultural extension program for smallholder women farmers on technology adoption and food security in Uganda through a regression discontinuity design that exploits an arbitrary distanceto-branch threshold for village program eligibility. We find eligible farmers used better basic cultivation methods, achieved improved food security. Given minimal changes in adoption of relatively expensive inputs, we attribute these gains to improved cultivation methods that require low upfront monetary investment. Farmers also modified their shock-coping methods. These results highlight the role of information and training in boosting agricultural productivity among poor farmers and, indirectly, improving food security.