Publication Type

PhD Dissertation

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

7-2025

Abstract

This dissertation explores policy-relevant questions through three empirical studies on issues related to education, human capital formation, and consumer protection in developing countries. The first two chapters focus on education policies in India and examine their intended and unintended impacts on children’s schooling and labour-market outcomes. The third chapter evaluates a new approach to tackle consumer protection issues in digital finance in Uganda and Bangladesh. Across all three, this dissertation reflects an interest and understanding in advancing evidence-based policymaking in developing countries, be it in education or consumer protection.

In the first chapter, we evaluate the impact of the midday meal programmeme in India on the prevalence of child labour among upper-primary school children. The staggered implementation of the world's largest school feeding programmeme across states provides exogenous variation in exposure. Using nationally representative National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) data, we find that exposure to the programme reduced the prevalence of child labour by 47 percent relative to children in never-treated states, with no significant difference in impact between boys and girls. The effects were primarily driven by a decline in household labour supply, especially in the performance of household chores. We also find evidence of perverse effects on siblings of children impacted by the programme, suggesting changes in work allocation at the household level. Our findings are robust to a battery of sensitivity analyses and placebo tests, and shed important insights on unintended consequences of a school feeding programme.

The second chapter studies the effect of the Right to Education Act, 2010 (RTE) on educational attainment. The RTE was a nationwide educational policy reform that introduced sweeping changes to the elementary education system in India and enshrined the provision of elementary education as a fundamental right. We find that the RTE led to an increase in primary and upper-primary school completion, but no increase in secondary school completion. We also find evidence of a reduction in the quality of education, as evidenced by a decline in test scores. Furthermore, we unpack the effects of various provisions of the RTE, and an investigation into possible mechanisms points towards negative peer effects due to changes in classroom composition as a plausible channel.

The third chapter explores a crowdsourced data collection approach to unpack different types of overcharging by Mobile Financial Services (MFS) agents in Uganda and Bangladesh. By comparing the citizen science method with the mystery shopping approach, similar patterns of overcharging emerge across different types of transactions in both countries. This suggests that the citizen-science approach could be a promising avenue for data collection for consumer protection and other areas of social science research.

Degree Awarded

PhD in Economics

Discipline

Growth and Development | Public Affairs, Public Policy and Public Administration

Supervisor(s)

FUJII, Tomoki

First Page

1

Last Page

145

Publisher

Singapore Management University

City or Country

Singapore

Copyright Owner and License

Author

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