Essays in development economics

Abstract

This dissertation is related to the Development Economics literature, studying the short and long-run effects of historical events and public policies on several development outcomes. In the first chapter, I show that contemporary differences in domestic labor markets within Brazil trace their origins to female slavery’s prevalence more than 120 years ago. I test the hypothesis that the colonial period culture of having enslaved women in the house doing domestic work persisted after slavery abolition until modern days. Consistent with existing hypotheses, leveraging detailed data on slave occupations, I document a positive and robust statistical association between the share of women domestic slaves in 1872 and the contemporary share of female labor force occupied as housemaids. I also show that these results cannot be fully explained by current development, inequality, or human capital accumulation levels and find suggestive evidence that culture may be an important channel of persistence. The second chapter studies the long-term effects of a long-lasting agricultural shock on Brazilian individuals’ educational achievement and earnings. I explore the witches’ broom outbreak in cocoa farms in the Bahia state in Brazil. I leverage information about people born in municipalities affected and not affected by the disease and explore the difference in educational attainments between cohorts older and younger than eighteen years old at the time of the witches’ broom outbreak. The main results show that the witches’ broom outbreak negatively impacted the long-term education and earnings of individuals living in affected municipalities. I show evidence that the increase in child labor may drive our results. I discuss that our setting provides a better test of the luxury axiom of child labor theory. The third chapter uses a difference-in-differences research design to evaluate the impact of a water policy in Brazil that distributed cisterns for water storage to poor families in rural areas on labor market outcomes. The findings show that receiving a cistern had a positive impact on the probability of getting formal jobs and increased the wages of beneficiaries. The effect was stronger for jobs with longer commuting times, indicating that access to clean water can help reduce time spent on daily chores and increase labor force participation. The results provide evidence of the important role that water policies can play in reducing poverty and promoting economic development, particularly in rural areas with limited access to clean water.