Paul Gertler
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 1454650 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Paul Gertler |
| NOMBRES | Paul |
| APELLIDO | Gertler |
| FIRMA | GERTLER P |
| AFILIACIONES | University of California, Berkeley |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0280-7513 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 50 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 413 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 50 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1988 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 9 |
Economic costs of TB and HIV in high-TB-burden countries
INTRODUCTION: Tuberculosis (TB) remains a significant health burden in 25 low- and middle-income countries. Despite TB being more cost-effective to prevent and treat its funding is disproportionately lower than that of HIV. This study aims to assess the economic costs of TB versus HIV and evaluate the returns on investment in TB prevention compared to HIV. METHODS: The study uses a microfoundations behavioural model to estimate the economic costs…
Financing Municipal Water and Sanitation Services in Nairobi’s Informal Settlements
We test two ways to improve revenue collection efficiency for water and sanitation utilities: (i) face-to-face engagement between utility staff and customers and (ii) contract enforcement for service disconnection due to nonpayment in the form of transparent and credible disconnection notices. Engagement has no effect, while enforcement significantly increases payment. We find no effect on access to water, perceptions of the utility, relationship…
Does Combating Corruption Reduce Clientelism
Does combating corruption reduce clientelism? To investigate this question, we focus on a policy that has been widely used across the world: anti-corruption audits. We examine the impact of Brazil’s prominent audit programme on clientelism using a novel survey of rural citizens. Randomised audits reduce politicians’ provision of campaign handouts, decrease citizens’ demands for private goods, and reduce requests fulfilled by politicians. We inves…
Gender Differences in Early Child Development
Some evidence suggests that there are significant gender gaps in early child development in low- and middle-income countries, with girls generally outperforming boys. However, few studies have tested for the existence of such gaps at a large scale. Our objective is to examine gender disparities in early child development in Brazil, Chile, Colombia, India, Indonesia, Nicaragua, Peru, Senegal, and Uruguay, with 26,055 children aged 7 to 48 months. …
Road maintenance and local economic development
This paper estimates the local welfare impacts of highway maintenance investments. We instrument road quality exploiting Indonesia’s two-step budgeting process for allocating funding to local road authorities. Using comprehensive data on road quality from 1990–2007, we find evidence that better roads help manufacturers create new jobs, enabling worker transitions out of informal employment, and increasing labor income. Road quality also changes t…
Can a private sector engagement intervention that prioritizes pro-poor strategies improve healthcare access and quality? A randomized field experiment in Kenya
Private sector engagement in health reform has been suggested to help reduce healthcare inequities in sub-Saharan Africa, where populations with the most need seek the least care. We study the effects of African Health Markets for Equity (AHME), a cluster randomized controlled trial carried out in Kenya from 2012 to 2020 at 199 private health clinics. AHME included four clinic-level interventions: social health insurance, social franchising, Safe…
The dirty business of eliminating open defecation
We examine the impacts of a sanitation program designed to eliminate open defecation in at-scale randomized field experiments in four countries: India, Indonesia, Mali, and Tanzania. The programs - all variants of the widely-used Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) approach - increase village private sanitation coverage in all four locations by 7-39 percentage points. We use the experimentally-induced variation in access to sanitation to identi…
Trust and saving in financial institutions by the poor
Air conditioning and global inequality
As global temperatures go up and incomes rise, air conditioner sales are poised to increase dramatically. Recent studies explore the potential economic and environmental impacts of this growth, but relatively little attention has been paid to the implications for inequality. In this paper we use household-level microdata from 16 countries to characterize empirically the relationship between climate, income, and residential air conditioning. We sh…
Associations of a national tax on non-essential high calorie foods with changes in consumer prices
Aspiration adaptation in resource-constrained environments
The Effects of Noncontributory Pensions on Material and Subjective Well-Being
Public expenditures on noncontributory pensions are equivalent to at least 1% of gross domestic product in several countries in Latin America and are expected to increase. We explore the effect of noncontributory pensions on well-being by studying the Pension 65 program in Peru, which uses a poverty eligibility threshold. Households with a beneficiary increased their level of consumption by 40%. The program improved subjective well-being by 0.17 …
Heat exposure and global air conditioning
Investing in the foundation of sustainable development
Shelter from the storm
Impact Evaluation in Practice, Second Edition
The second edition of the Impact Evaluation in Practice handbook is a comprehensive and accessible introduction to impact evaluation for policy makers and development practitioners. First published in 2011, it has been used widely across the development and academic communities. The book incorporates real-world examples to present practical guidelines for designing and implementing impact evaluations. Readers will gain an understanding of impact …
Contribution of air conditioning adoption to future energy use under global warming
Significance The use of air conditioning is poised to increase dramatically over the next several decades as global temperatures go up and incomes rise around the world. In this paper, we use high-quality microdata from Mexico to characterize empirically the relationship between temperature, income, and air conditioning. We describe both how electricity consumption increases with temperature given current levels of air conditioning, and how clima…
The Effect of India's Total Sanitation Campaign on Defecation Behaviors and Child Health in Rural Madhya Pradesh
BACKGROUND: Poor sanitation is thought to be a major cause of enteric infections among young children. However, there are no previously published randomized trials to measure the health impacts of large-scale sanitation programs. India's Total Sanitation Campaign (TSC) is one such program that seeks to end the practice of open defecation by changing social norms and behaviors, and providing technical support and financial subsidies. The objective…
Labor market returns to an early childhood stimulation intervention in Jamaica
Help as hungry children helps young adults Supporters of early childhood interventions follow the rule “better early than late,” but so far there's been limited evidence that the rule applies to disadvantaged children in developing countries. Gertler et al. looked at the earnings of young adults in Jamaica, 20 years after, as toddlers, they were given 2 years of help from community health workers. The earnings of the treatment group caught up to …
Investing Cash Transfers to Raise Long-Term Living Standards
Using data from a randomized experiment, we find that poor rural Mexican households invested part of their cash transfers from the Oportunidades program in productive assets, increasing agricultural income by almost 10 percent after 18 months of benefits. We estimate that for each peso transferred, households consume 74 cents and invest the rest, permanently increasing long-term consumption by about 1.6 cents. Results suggest that cash transfers …
How Will Energy Demand Develop in the Developing World
Over the next 25 to 30 years, nearly all of the growth in energy demand, fossil fuel use, associated local pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions is forecast to come from the developing world. This paper argues that the world's poor and near-poor will play a major role in driving medium-run growth in energy consumption. As the world economy expands and poor households' incomes rise, they are likely to get connected to the electricity grid, gain …
Effect on maternal and child health services in Rwanda of payment to primary health-care providers for performance
La evaluación de impacto en la práctica
La segunda edición del libro "Evaluación de impacto en la práctica" es una introducción completa y accesible a las evaluaciones del impacto para la comunidad internacional de desarrollo, universidades, y los formuladores de políticas públicas que buscan contar con una mejor evidencia en torno a lo que funciona en el desarrollo. La versión actualizada abarca las técnicas más recientes para evaluar programas e incluye consejos de implementación de …
Empowering parents to improve education
Year effect of Oportunidades, Mexico's conditional cash transfer programme, on child growth, cognition, language, and behaviour
Water for Life
While most countries are committed to increasing access to safe water and thereby reducing child mortality, there is little consensus on how to actually improve water services. One important proposal under discussion is whether to privatize water provision. In the 1990s Argentina embarked on one of the largest privatization campaigns in the world including the privatization of local water companies covering approximately 30 percent of the country…
Empowerment and Efficiency
The paper analyzes the effect of agricultural tenancy laws offering security of tenure to tenants and regulating the share of output that is paid as rent on farm productivity. Theoretically, the net impact of tenancy reform is shown to be a combination of two effects: a bargaining power effect and a security of tenure effect. Analysis of evidence on how contracts and productivity changed after a tenancy reform program was implemented in the India…
How Economic Development and Family Planning Programs Combined to Reduce Indonesian Fertility
This paper examines the contributions of family planning programs, economic development, and women’s status to Indonesian fertility decline from 1982 to 1987. Methodologically we unify seemingly conflicting demographic and economic frameworks into a single “structural” proximate-cause model as well as controlling statistically for the targeted (nonrandom) placement of family planning program inputs. The results are consistent with both frameworks…
Risky Business
While condoms are an effective defense against the transmission of HIV, large numbers of sex workers are not using them. We argue that some sex workers are willing to take the risk because clients are willing to pay more to avoid using condoms. Using data from Mexico, we estimate that sex workers received a 23 percent premium for unprotected sex. The premium represents a value of one life year of between $14,760 and $51,832 or one to five times a…
Learning from exporting revisited in a less developed setting
Shelter from the storm
Empowering parents to improve education
Air conditioning and global inequality
As global temperatures go up and incomes rise, air conditioner sales are poised to increase dramatically. Recent studies explore the potential economic and environmental impacts of this growth, but relatively little attention has been paid to the implications for inequality. In this paper we use household-level microdata from 16 countries to characterize empirically the relationship between climate, income, and residential air conditioning. We sh…
Quality-adjusted Cost Functions and Policy Evaluation in the Nursing Home Industry
Proper evaluation of cost-quality trade-offs inherent in regulatory policy requires identifying the structure of production from the behavioral response of quality to the policy change. However, estimating the structure of production with endogenous quality is difficult because of both measurement problems and data availability. The authors develop a simple method for identifying and estimating cost functions in the presence of endogenous and uno…
Empowering women to obtain high quality care
OBJECTIVES: To evaluate the impact of Mexico's conditional cash transfer programme on the quality of health care received by poor women. Quality is measured by maternal reports of prenatal care procedures received that correspond with clinical guidelines. METHODS: The data describe retrospective reports of care received from 892 women in poor rural communities in seven Mexican states. The women were participating in an effectiveness study and ran…
Does Industrialization Build or Destroy Social Networks
This article estimates the relationship between changes in industrialization and changes in social networks measures in Indonesia during 1985–97 using repeated cross sections of nationally representative surveys. We analyze a rich set of social interaction measures, including various measures of voluntary associational activity, levels of trust, and informal cooperation. Districts that experienced rapid industrialization showed significant increa…
Determinants of pregnancy outcomes and targeting of maternal health services in Jamaica
The Effects of Noncontributory Pensions on Material and Subjective Well-Being
Public expenditures on noncontributory pensions are equivalent to at least 1% of gross domestic product in several countries in Latin America and are expected to increase. We explore the effect of noncontributory pensions on well-being by studying the Pension 65 program in Peru, which uses a poverty eligibility threshold. Households with a beneficiary increased their level of consumption by 40%. The program improved subjective well-being by 0.17 …
Consumer information and biased selection in the demand for coverage supplementing medicare
The dirty business of eliminating open defecation
We examine the impacts of a sanitation program designed to eliminate open defecation in at-scale randomized field experiments in four countries: India, Indonesia, Mali, and Tanzania. The programs - all variants of the widely-used Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) approach - increase village private sanitation coverage in all four locations by 7-39 percentage points. We use the experimentally-induced variation in access to sanitation to identi…
Road maintenance and local economic development
This paper estimates the local welfare impacts of highway maintenance investments. We instrument road quality exploiting Indonesia’s two-step budgeting process for allocating funding to local road authorities. Using comprehensive data on road quality from 1990–2007, we find evidence that better roads help manufacturers create new jobs, enabling worker transitions out of informal employment, and increasing labor income. Road quality also changes t…
Trust and saving in financial institutions by the poor
Heat exposure and global air conditioning
On the road to social health insurance
Are clinical criteria just proxies for socioeconomic status? A study of low birth weight in Jamaica
OBJECTIVE: To determine if the clinical risk factors for low birth weight are independent of socioeconomic risk factors in a population based sample from a developing country. DESIGN: Survey data from patient reported socioeconomic measures and their most recent pregnancy history. SETTING: A national sample of randomly selected households in Jamaica. SUBJECTS: All women aged 14-50 in the household who had a pregnancy lasting seven months in the p…
A Latent-Variable Model of Quality Determination
Because of data difficulties, there has been little empirical work analyzing the determination of the quality of a firm's output. This article constructs a latent variable model for this problem that uses easily obtainable data. The model is developed from the relationship between the firm's input demand functions and reduced-form output functions, and it has a novel multiple indicator multiple cause (MIMIC) interpretation. The model also allows …
Medicaid and the Cost of Improving Access to Nursing Home Care
In this paper I show that the Medicaid program can improve the access of financially indigent patients to nursing home care by raising the rate of return paid on Medicaid patients' care, but only at the cost of lower quality of care. To quantify the policy tradeoff, I derive expressions for the elasticity of access with respect to total Medicaid expenditures and the elasticity of access with respect to quality. These elasticities expressions are …
Quality-adjusted Cost Functions and Policy Evaluation in the Nursing Home Industry
Proper evaluation of cost-quality trade-offs inherent in regulatory policy requires identifying the structure of production from the behavioral response of quality to the policy change. However, estimating the structure of production with endogenous quality is difficult because of both measurement problems and data availability. The authors develop a simple method for identifying and estimating cost functions in the presence of endogenous and uno…
Consumer information and biased selection in the demand for coverage supplementing medicare
Determinants of pregnancy outcomes and targeting of maternal health services in Jamaica
How Economic Development and Family Planning Programs Combined to Reduce Indonesian Fertility
This paper examines the contributions of family planning programs, economic development, and women’s status to Indonesian fertility decline from 1982 to 1987. Methodologically we unify seemingly conflicting demographic and economic frameworks into a single “structural” proximate-cause model as well as controlling statistically for the targeted (nonrandom) placement of family planning program inputs. The results are consistent with both frameworks…
Are clinical criteria just proxies for socioeconomic status? A study of low birth weight in Jamaica
OBJECTIVE: To determine if the clinical risk factors for low birth weight are independent of socioeconomic risk factors in a population based sample from a developing country. DESIGN: Survey data from patient reported socioeconomic measures and their most recent pregnancy history. SETTING: A national sample of randomly selected households in Jamaica. SUBJECTS: All women aged 14-50 in the household who had a pregnancy lasting seven months in the p…
On the road to social health insurance
Insuring Consumption Against Illness
One of the most sizable and least predictable shocks to economic opportunities in developing countries is major illness. We investigate the extent to which families are able to insure consumption against major illness using a unique panel data set from Indonesia that combines excellent measures of health status with consumption information. We find that there are significant economic costs associated with major illness, and that there is very imp…
Empowerment and Efficiency
The paper analyzes the effect of agricultural tenancy laws offering security of tenure to tenants and regulating the share of output that is paid as rent on farm productivity. Theoretically, the net impact of tenancy reform is shown to be a combination of two effects: a bargaining power effect and a security of tenure effect. Analysis of evidence on how contracts and productivity changed after a tenancy reform program was implemented in the India…
Do Conditional Cash Transfers Improve Child Health? Evidence from PROGRESA′s Control Randomized Experiment
Do Conditional Cash Transfers Improve Child Health? Evidence from PROGRESA's Control Randomized Experiment by Paul Gertler. Published in volume 94, issue 2, pages 336-341 of American Economic Review, May 2004
Schooling and Parental Death
Loss of a parent is one of the most traumatic events a child can face. If loss of a parent reduces investments in children, it can also have long-lasting implications. This study uses parametric and seminonpara-metric matching techniques to estimate how one human capital investment, school enrollment, is affected by a parent's recent death. We analyze data from 600,000 households from Indonesia's National Socioeconomic Survey (Susenas) during 199…
Learning from exporting revisited in a less developed setting
Does Social Capital Promote Industrialization? Evidence from a Rapid Industrializer
A new stylized fact in development economics is the importance of social capital in promoting economic growth. This paper examines the effect of social capital on industrialization in Indonesia. We analyze a rich set of social capital and social interaction measures, including voluntary associational activity and levels of trust and informal cooperation. The main finding is that initial social capital does not predict subsequent industrial develo…
Depressive Symptoms Are Associated With Blunted Cortisol Stress Responses in Very Low-Income Women
OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this study was to examine the association between depressive symptoms and salivary cortisol responses to stress in a high-risk population of very poor Mexican women. METHODS: Adult women (N = 1109) between the ages of 18 and 44 years (mean age, 29) were identified in a house-to-house survey in low-income areas (income <20th percentile nationally) of urban Mexico. An interview containing the Spanish version of the Center …
Risky Business
While condoms are an effective defense against the transmission of HIV, large numbers of sex workers are not using them. We argue that some sex workers are willing to take the risk because clients are willing to pay more to avoid using condoms. Using data from Mexico, we estimate that sex workers received a 23 percent premium for unprotected sex. The premium represents a value of one life year of between $14,760 and $51,832 or one to five times a…
Water for Life
While most countries are committed to increasing access to safe water and thereby reducing child mortality, there is little consensus on how to actually improve water services. One important proposal under discussion is whether to privatize water provision. In the 1990s Argentina embarked on one of the largest privatization campaigns in the world including the privatization of local water companies covering approximately 30 percent of the country…
Parallel deficits in linear growth and mental development in low-income Mexican infants in the second year of life
Objective To explore anthropometric indicators and mental development in very-low-income children in the second year of life. Design Cross-sectional survey. Setting Low-income areas (income Subjects Eight hundred and ninety-six children aged 12.5–23.5 months surveyed from September to December 2001. Methods Questionnaire survey and anthropometric survey of households. Multivariate regression models evaluated differences across age in anthropometr…
Does Industrialization Build or Destroy Social Networks
This article estimates the relationship between changes in industrialization and changes in social networks measures in Indonesia during 1985–97 using repeated cross sections of nationally representative surveys. We analyze a rich set of social interaction measures, including various measures of voluntary associational activity, levels of trust, and informal cooperation. Districts that experienced rapid industrialization showed significant increa…
Strategies to avoid the loss of developmental potential in more than 200 million children in the developing world
Role of cash in conditional cash transfer programmes for child health, growth, and development
School decentralization
Welfare gains from Foreign Direct Investment through technology transfer to local suppliers
Empowering women to obtain high quality care
OBJECTIVES: To evaluate the impact of Mexico's conditional cash transfer programme on the quality of health care received by poor women. Quality is measured by maternal reports of prenatal care procedures received that correspond with clinical guidelines. METHODS: The data describe retrospective reports of care received from 892 women in poor rural communities in seven Mexican states. The women were participating in an effectiveness study and ran…
Year effect of Oportunidades, Mexico's conditional cash transfer programme, on child growth, cognition, language, and behaviour
Economics (39 obras) · Economic growth (27 obras) · Business (25 obras) · Medicine (24 obras) · Poverty, Education, and Child Welfare (17 obras) · Demographic economics (14 obras) · Environmental health (14 obras) · Population (14 obras) · Child Nutrition and Water Access (12 obras) · Demography (12 obras)