Tobias Pfutze

Florida International University | FIU · Department of Economics

The effects of urban transport policies on household welfare are a broadly understudied topic in developing countries. This paper analyzed the distributional effects of a bus rapid transit (BRT) system in Barranquilla, Colombia. Using geocoded household survey data over 2008-15 and a difference in differences approach, it showed that, in proximity...

Providing age-based non-contributory pensions to the elderly has become a common policy in many middle-income countries. The rationale behind these programs is to protect beneficiaries, who do not qualify for a contributory pension, from extreme poverty once they are too frail to earn a living. This paper analyzes whether one such program, Mexico’s...

This paper estimates the impacts of mobile broadband coverage on household consumption and poverty in Nigeria, the largest economy and mobile broadband market in Africa. The analysis exploits a unique dataset that integrates three waves of a nationally representative longitudinal household survey on living standards with information from Nigerian m...

Better enforcement of property rights reduces the incentives to engage in violent competition over resources. At the same time, greater tenure security may disrupt a key mechanism for political and social control, the discretionary allocation of land by local authorities, also potentially affecting the level of violence. We investigate the effect o...

A large literature on Conditional Cash Transfers programs assesses the effects of becoming a beneficiary. However, the consequences of losing the benefit due to program graduation are largely unstudied. This paper replicates the eligibility score employed over 2010–15 by Mexico’s Oportunidades for a large household survey. Using a Regression Discon...

The countries of Latin American are aging rapidly. Because most countries in the region lack adequate social protection systems, many Latin American governments have introduced noncontributory pension programs to reduce poverty and food shortages. This study assessed the effects of a large national noncontributory pension program on the health and...

The effects of urban transport policies on household welfare are a broadly understudied topic in developing countries. This paper analyzes the distributional effects of a newly established bus rapid transit system in Barranquilla, Colombia. The paper uses pooled cross-sectional household survey data, analyzed by block, over 2008-15 and a difference...

This paper analyzes whether Mexico's de-facto non-contributory health insurance program Seguro Popular had an effect on the risk of miscarriage during pregnancy. Using data on pregnancies over the 2004-08 period from the 2009 round of the National Survey on Demographic Dynamics (ENADID), and employing the staggered roll-out of the program as an ide...

We estimate the effect of 70 y Más, an age-conditioned cash transfer program for individuals age 70 and older in rural Mexico, on the labor force participation of beneficiaries and of younger individuals who live with them. Using data from the 2010 Mexican census, we exploit the age and locality population thresholds to identify the effects of the...

While it is commonly understood that land is a political tool, there is surprisingly little empirical research on how insecure property rights affect political outcomes. In this paper, we show how a dominant political party can use insecure property rights to ensure politically compliant voter behavior and how this power is frustrated after the int...

This paper estimates the effects of Mexico’s Seguro Popular health insurance on infant mortality during its first 5 years of implementation. It uses data on births reported in the micro sample from Mexico’s 2010 general population census. However, births of surviving children are more likely to be observed than births of non-surviving ones. This se...

Most research on the effects of international migration on democratic institutions in sending countries focuses on how emigration changes the civic and democratic values of those left behind. Very little has been written on how the additional income provided by migrant remittances alters the incentive structure of the political actors involved, and...

An important aspect of property rights is specificity, the ability of a third party to enforce rights. The empirical literature rarely isolates the effect of specificity because exogenous changes, due to land reforms, either simultaneously change both control and specificity or exclusively change control. We investigate the effect of specificity in...

This paper presents evidence for a causal effect of international migra-tion on the functioning of democratic institutions in the sending country. It does so for the particular case of the Mexican democratization process, using data from municipal elections for the 2000-02 electoral cycle. Esti-mating an instrumental variable probit model, it is fo...

This paper does not address the issue of aid effectiveness—that is, the extent to which foreign aid dollars actually achieve their goals—but on "best practices" in the way in which official aid is given, an important component of the wider debate. First we discuss best practice for an ideal aid agency and the difficulties that aid agencies face bec...

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