Rajeev H. Dehejia

• PhD
• Professor at New York University

Romanian households could choose schools with one standard deviation worth of additional value added. Why do households leave value added “on the table”? We study two possibilities: (i) information and (ii) preferences for other school traits. In an experiment, we inform randomly selected households about schools' value added. These households choo...

Does financial development facilitate micro-entrepreneurship? Using randomized surveys of over 1 million Indian households and bank-branch location as predetermined by government policy, we find that access to finance shifts workers from informal micro-entrepreneurship into formal employment. Financial access reduces the likelihood of being self-em...

A large and growing literature has identified several conditions, including exporting, that contribute to plant survival. A prevailing sentiment suggests that anti‐sweatshop activity against plants in developing countries adds to the risk of closure, making survival more difficult by imposing external constraints that may interfere with optimizing...

Using a compiled dataset of 441 censuses and surveys between 1787 and 2015, representing 103 countries and 51.4 million mothers, we find that: (1) the effect of fertility on labour supply is typically indistinguishable from zero at low levels of development and large and negative at higher levels of development; (2) the negative gradient is stable...

We study issues related to external validity for treatment effects using over 100 replications of the Angrist and Evans (1998) natural experiment on the effects of sibling sex composition on fertility and labor supply. The replications are based on census data from around the world going back to 1960. We decompose sources of error in predicting tre...

We study issues related to external validity for treatment effects using over 100 replications of the Angrist and Evans (1998) natural experiment on the effects of sibling sex composition on fertility and labor supply. The replications are based on census data from around the world going back to 1960. We decompose sources of error in predicting tre...

We derive a formal, decision-based method for comparing the performance of counterfactual treatment regime predictions using the results of experiments that give relevant information on the distribution of treated outcomes. Our approach allows us to quantify and assess the statistical significance of differential performance for optimal treatment r...

The current study draws on the motivational model of achievement which has been guiding research on the growth mindset intervention (Dweck & Leggett, 1988) and examines how this intervention interacts with incentive systems to differentially influence performance for high- and low-achieving students in Indian schools that serve low-SES communities....

This paper evaluates the conjecture that factory managers may not be offering a cost-minimizing configuration of compensation and workplace amenities by using manager and worker survey data from Better Work Vietnam. Working conditions are found to have a significant positive impact on global life assessments and reduce measures of depression and tr...

We investigate the external validity of local average treatment effects (LATEs), specifically Angrist and Evans’s use of same sex of the two first children as an instrumental variable for the effect of fertility on labor supply. We estimate their specification in 139 country-year censuses using Integrated Public Use Microdata Sample–International d...

We use five rounds of two large-scale surveys conducted in Tanzania to explore the two-way relationship between household resources and human development. Several indicators for household resources have been used in the exercise. We find systematic evidence of a relationship in both directions, with household resources enhancing human development a...

In an experiment in non-formal schools in Indian slums, a reward scheme for attending a target number of school days increased average attendance when the scheme was in place, but had heterogeneous effects after it was removed. Among students with high baseline attendance, the incentive had no effect on attendance after it was discontinued, and tes...

Rajeev Dehejia and Arvind Panagariya discuss the link between manufacturing growth and accelerated services growth in India. The critical role of manufacturing growth, especially in the labor-intensive sectors, in the early stages of development in the labor-abundant economies is widely recognized. The authors test two hypotheses aimed at linking g...

We study issues related to external validity for treatment effects using 166 replications of the Angrist and Evans (1998) natural experiment on the effects of sibling sex composition on fertility and labor supply. The replications are based on census data from around the world going back to 1960. We find that macro covariates dominate over micro co...

This paper surveys six widely-used non-experimental methods for estimating treatment effects (instrumental variables, regression discontinuity, direct matching, propensity score matching, linear regression and non-parametric methods, and difference-in-differences), and assesses their internal and external validity relative both to each other and to...

In an experiment in non-formal schools in Indian slums, an incentive for attending a target number of school days increased average attendance when the incentive was in place, but had heterogeneous effects after it was removed. Among students with high baseline attendance, the post-incentive attendance returned to previous levels and test scores we...

This paper investigates the impact of income and non-income shocks on child labor using a model in which the household maximizes utility from consumption as well as human capital development of the child. We also investigate if access to credit and household assets act as buffers against transitory shocks. Our results indicate significant effects o...

Efforts to improve working conditions in developing countries participating in global supply chains have generated a large and growing literature (Elliott and Freeman 2003; Harrison and Scorse 2010). Much of this literature is motivated by the common perception of very poor conditions in developing country factories (the term ‘sweatshop’ appears of...

One of the more vexing dilemmas in the area of labour standards and well-being is the frequent disconnect between legislated standards and actual working conditions. The standard economic model for thinking about enforcement (Chapter 6, this volume) posits that the plant manager (the ‘employer’ in Willborn’s terminology) will comply with legal stan...

Theory suggests that access to finance facilitates entrepreneurship. However, evidence from randomized surveys of over one million individuals in India show instead that financial access shifts workers away from entrepreneurship into wage employment. Identifying access to finance using bank branch location determined by government policy, we find t...

Public disclosure of labor conditions has been suggested as one way to encourage compliance with labor law and improvements in working conditions. Analyzing labor law compliance data in the apparel industry from Better Factories Cambodia, this paper finds that after the elimination of public disclosure of factory‐level noncompliance the rate of inc...

“Best practice” in microfinance holds that interest rates should be set at profit-making levels, based on the belief that even poor customers favor access to finance over low fees. Despite this core belief, little direct evidence exists on the price elasticity of credit demand in poor communities. We examine increases in the interest rate on microf...

This paper examines whether there is a counter-cyclical pattern in the quality of children. In particular, we study the relationship between the unemployment rate and several measures of parental characteristics, parental behavior behavior, and child health. Using data from the Natality files, including panel level data of mothers, we find evidence...

No abstract available.

Despite the extensive literature on the determinants of child labor, the evidence on the consequences of child labor on outcomes such as education, labor, and health is limited. We evaluate the causal effect of child labor participation among children in school on these outcomes using panel data from Vietnam and an instrumental variables strategy....

This paper investigates how fertility responds to changes in the price of a marginal child. We construct a large, individual-level panel data set of over 300,000 Israeli women during the period 1999–2005 with comprehensive information about their fertility histories, education, religious affiliation, ethnicity, and income. We exploit variation in I...

Despite the extensive literature on the determinants of child labor, the evidence on the consequences of child labor on outcomes such as education, labor, and health is limited. We evaluate the causal effect of child labor participation among children in school on these outcomes using panel data from Vietnam and an instrumental variables strategy....

This article demonstrates that minimum wage laws need not induce unemployment even under the classic labor supply-and-demand paradigm. As a result, minimum wage laws can be welfare-enhancing under the basic labor supply and demand model, suggesting the presence of an optimal minimum wage. We discuss conditions under which the optimal minimum wage l...

This paper exploits a unique longitudinal data set from Tanzania to examine the consequences of child labor on education, employment choices, and marital status over a 10-year horizon. Shocks to crop production and rainfall are used as instrumental variables for child labor. For boys, the findings show that a one-standard-deviation (5.7 hour) incre...

Programs are typically evaluated through the average treatment effect and its standard error. In particular, is the treatment effect positive and is it statistically significant? In theory, programs should be evaluated in a decision framework, using social welfare functions and posterior predictive distributions for outcomes of interest. This chapt...

This paper investigates empirically whether financial incentives, and in particular governmental child subsidies, affect fertility. We use a comprehensive, nonpublic, individual-level panel dataset that includes fertility histories and detailed individual controls for all married Israeli women with two or more children from 1999-2005, a period with...

In this paper, we develop an econometric model to estimate the impacts of Electronic Vehicle Management Systems (EVMS) on the load factor (LF) of heavy trucks using data at the operational level. This technology is supposed to improve capacity utilization by reducing coordination costs between demand and supply. The model is estimated on a subsampl...

This paper studies the effect of state-level banking regulation on financial development and on components of state-level growth in the United States from 1900 to 1940. We use these banking laws to assess the findings of a large recent literature that has argued that financial development contributes to economic growth. We contend that the institut...

This paper examines the relationship between household income shocks and child labor. In particular, we investigate the extent to which transitory income shocks lead to increases in child labor and whether household asset holdings mitigate the effects of these shocks. Using data from a household panel survey in Tanzania, we find that both relations...

It is suggested that there has been and continues to be, a deep interrelationship between religious thought and economic activity in India. This claim is evaluated, first in the context of ancient India (the Mauryan empire), where self-reliance was stressed, both economically and religiously, In the context of medieval India, the ossification of th...

If the demand for credit by the poor changes little when interest rates increase, lenders can raise fees to cost-covering levels without losing customers. This claim is at the core of sustainable microfinance strategies that aim to provide banking services to the poor while eschewing long-term subsidies, but, so far, there is little direct evidence...

This paper examines whether involvement with religious organizations can help insure consumption and happiness. Using data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey (CEX), we find that households who contribute to a religious organization are better able to insure their consumption against income shocks. Using the National Survey of Families and Househo...

IntroductionIdentifying and estimating the average treatment effectThe NSW dataPropensity score estimatesConclusions

This paper discusses propensity score matching in the context of Smith and Todd's (Does matching overcome Lalonde's critique of nonexperimental estimators, J. Econom., in press) reanalysis of Dehejia and Wahba (J. Am. Statist. Assoc. 97 (1999) 1053; National Bereau of Economics Research working Paper No. 6829, Rev. Econom. Statist., 2002, forthcomi...

I argue for thinking of program evaluation as a decision problem. There are two steps. First, a counselor determines which program (treatment or control) each individual joins, based for example on maximizing the probability of employment or expected earnings. Second, the policymaker decides whether: to assign all individuals to treatment or to con...

This paper evaluates a pilot program run by a company called OPOWER, previously known as Positive Energy, to mail home energy reports to residential utility consumers. The reports compare a household’s energy use to that of its neighbors and provide energy conservation tips. Using data from randomized natural field experiment at 80,000 treatment an...

In this article, we examine the link between child labor and financial development using cross-country data. We show that child labor and financial development display a significant negative relationship, which is particularly strong in the sample of low-income countries and is robust for a wide range of specifications and estimators, including fix...

This paper examines whether involvement with religious organizations insures an individual's stream of consumption and of happiness. Using data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey (CEX), we examine whether households who contribute to a religious organization are able to insure their consumption stream against income shocks and find strong insuran...

We study the relationship between the unemployment rate at the time of a baby's conception and parental characteristics, parental behaviors, and babies' health. Babies conceived in times of high unemployment have a reduced incidence of low and very low birth weight, fewer congenital malformations, and lower postneonatal mortality. These health impr...

This paper investigates the incentive effects of automobile insurance, compulsory insurance laws, and no-fault liability laws on driver behavior and traffic fatalities. We analyze a panel of 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia for 1970-98, a period in which many states adopted compulsory insurance regulations and/or no-fault laws. Using an...

This paper examines the structure and direction of developing Asia’s trade over the past two decades. The impacts on developing Asia of the economic slowdown in 2009–2010 in high-income countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which includes the European Union (EU), Japan, and United States (US) are projected t...

This paper documents a counter-cyclical pattern in the health of children, and examines whether this pattern is due to selection of mothers choosing to give birth or due to behavioral changes. We study the relationship between the unemployment rate at the time of a baby's conception and parental characteristics (which we often refer to as quality),...

Although a growing theoretical literature points to credit constraints asan important source of inefficiently high child labor, little work has been done to assess its empirical relevance. Using panel data from Tanzania, the authors find that households respond to transitory income shocks by increasing child labor, but that the extent to which chil...

This article discusses the evaluation of programs implemented at multiple sites. Two frequently used methods are pooling the data or using fixed effects (an extreme version of which estimates separate models for each site). The former approach ignores site effects. The latter incorporates site effects but lacks a framework for predicting the impact...

This paper examines the relationship between child labor and access to credit at a crosscountry level. Even though this link is theoretically central to child labor, so far there has been little work done to assess its importance empirically. We measure child labor as a country aggregate, and credit constraints are proxied by the extent of financia...

This article discusses the evaluation of programs implemented at multiple sites. Two frequently used methods are pooling the data or using fixed effects (an extreme version of which estimates separate models for each site). The former approach ignores site effects. The latter incorporates site effects but lacks a framework for predicting the impact...

We examine whether the spread of an exporting strategy can be characterized as a diffusion process using a general framework that accounts for attrition and changes in the pool of potential adopters and allows the diffusion rate to vary according to firm and market characteristics. Our findings indicate that the diffusion of exporting is described...

There is a substantial literature arguing that financial development contributes to economic growth. In this paper, we contribute to this literature by examining the effect of state-level banking regulation on financial development and economic growth in the United States from 1900 to 1940. Specifically, we make three contributions. First, drawing...

Even though access to credit is central to child labor theoretically, little work has been done to assess its importance empirically. Dehejia and Gatti examine the link between access to credit and child labor at a cross-country level. The authors measure child labor as a country aggregate, and proxy credit constraints by the level of financial mar...

This paper considers causal inference and sample selection bias in nonexperimental settings in which (i) few units in the nonexperimental comparison group are comparable to the treatment units, and (ii) selecting a subset of comparison units similar to the treatment units is difficult because units must be compared across a high-dimensional set of...

Using four rounds of panel household data from the Kagera region of Tanzania, we show that transitory income shocks ¨C measured by the value of crop lost by farming households ¨C lead to significantly increased child labor. A one standard deviation increase in the shock is associated with a 10% increase in mean child working hours. Moreover, we fin...

There is a substantial literature arguing that financial development contributes to economic growth. In this paper, we contribute to this literature by examining the effect of state-level banking regulation on financial development and economic growth in the United States from 1900 to 1940. Specifically, we make three contributions. First, drawing...

In the absence of developed financial markets, households appear to resort to child labor to cope with income variability. This evidence suggests that policies aimed at increasing households� access to credit could be effective in reducing child labor.Even though access to credit is central to child labor theoretically, little work has been done to...

We study the impact of employment quota on firms' demand for disabled workers. The Austrian Disabled Persons Employment Act (DPEA) requires firms to provide at least one job to a disabled worker per 25 non-disabled workers, a rule which is strictly enforced by non-compliance taxation. We find that, as a result of the discontinuous nature of the non...

This paper uses data from the Greater Avenues for Independence (GAIN) initiative to discuss the evaluation of programs that are implemented at multiple sites. Two frequently used methods are to pool the data or to use fixed effects (an extreme version of which estimates separate models for each site). The former approach, however, ignores site effe...

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This paper discusses the problem of evaluating and predicting the treatment impact of a program that is implemented at multiple sites. Two issues arise: is information from other sites relevant in estimating the impact at a given site? and how can we account for predictive uncertainty in the site effects? Using data from the Greater Avenues for Ind...

This paper uses propensity score methods to address the question: how well can an observational study estimate the treatment impact of a program? Using data from Lalonde's (1986) influential evaluation of non-experimental methods, we demonstrate that propensity score methods succeed in estimating the treatment impact of the National Supported Work...

This paper considers causal inference and sample selection bias in non-experimental settings in which: (i) few units in the non-experimental comparison group are comparable to the treatment units; (ii) selecting a subset of comparison units similar to the treatment units is difficult because units must be compared across a high-dimentional set of p...

Jeffrey Smith and Petra Todd's comments on Dehejia and Wahba (1999, 2002 )-Smith and Todd (2004a) and the subsequent exchange (Dehejia 2004 and Smith and Todd 2004b)-have been useful in highlighting some features of our original work and of propensity score methods more generally. However, like their original comment, their rejoinder illustrates co...

Labor market wages do not typically provide an accurate or representative measure of the economic returns to child labor in rural settings, especially for women. This paper is a first attempt to identify other outcomes that can shed light on the longer-term impact of child labor. In particular, we examine the quality of marriage matches as measured...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Harvard University, 1997. Includes bibliographical references (leaves xxx-xxx).