UMD Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3
New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.
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Item The Demand for Aid and the Supply of Development(2020) Billing, Trey; McCauley, John F.; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Though citizens in developing countries are the ostensible beneficiaries of international development, projects and policies are designed well above those on the ground. This dissertation collects three papers on the consequences of international development from the perspective of these intended beneficiaries. In the first paper, I argue that citizens in societies inundated with foreign aid have preferences for different types aid projects, favoring certain donors, certain sectors, and certain implementation styles over others. I develop a model in which the political returns to satisfying voter preferences motivate the distribution of aid by a recipient government. The results of this model correspond to the optimal distribution of aid projects given citizen demand. I estimate the demand for many types of aid projects using a conjoint experiment fielded in Uganda and compare this demand to the observed allocation of aid. In the second paper, I focus on the unintended political consequences of internal displacement during civil war, a decision prioritized by domestic governments but made possible with the help of international donors. Using a randomized response experiment, I show that returned internally displaced peoples in Northern Uganda are often the targets of vote buying in post-conflict elections and suggest that the removal of citizens from their land causes a severe economic shock, making the displaced particularly susceptible to vote buying. In the final paper, I explore the unintended economic consequences of government fragmentation. While the creation of new subnational administrative units intends to bring the government "closer to the people", I argue that many fragmented units lack the requisite administrative capacity to fulfill the provision of public goods. Combining remote-sensed development data in Burkina Faso with a difference-in-differences design, I show that communities within newly created units are often left behind.Item The Influence of Place Attachment, Aspirations, and Rapidly Changing Environments on Resettlement Decisions(2016) Strong II, Michael Lee; Silva, Julie; Geography; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Resettlement associated with development projects results in a variety of negative impacts. This dissertation uses the resettlement context to frame the dynamic relationships formed between peoples and places experiencing development. Two case studies contribute: (a) the border zone of Mozambique’s Limpopo National Park where residents contend with changes to land access and use; and (b) Bairro Chipanga in Moatize, Mozambique where a resettled population struggles to form place attachment and transform the post-resettlement site into a “good” place. Through analysis of data collected at these sites between 2009 and 2015, this dissertation investigates how changing environments impact person-place relationships before and after resettlement occurs. Changing environments create conditions leading to disemplacement—feeling like one no longer belongs—that reduces the environment’s ability to foster place attachment. Research findings indicate that responses taken by individuals living in the changing environment depend heavily upon whether resettlement has already occurred. In a pre-resettlement context, residents adjust their daily lives to diminish the effects of a changing environment and re-create the conditions to which they initially formed an attachment. They accept impoverishing conditions, including a narrowing of the spaces in which they live their daily lives, because it is preferred to the anxiety that accompanies being forced to resettle. In a post-resettlement context, resettlement disrupts the formation of place attachment and resettled peoples become a placeless population. When the resettlement has not resulted in anticipated outcomes, the aspiration for social justice—seeking conditions residents had reason to expect—negatively influences residents’ perspectives about the place. The post-resettlement site becomes a bad place with a future unchanged from the present. At best, this results in a population in which more members are willing to move away from the post-resettlement site, and, at worse, complete disengagement of other members from trying to improve the community. Resettlement thus has the potential to launch a cycle of movement- displacement-movement that prevents an entire generation from establishing place attachment and realizing its benefits. At the very least, resettlement impedes the formation of place attachment to new places. Thus, this dissertation draws attention to the unseen and uncompensated losses of resettlement.Item Shocks and Human Capital in Developing Countries(2015) Szott, Aaron; Hellerstein, Judith K; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)I begin my dissertation by introducing the following two chapters. I start out by describing the basic theory underlying economists' historical interest in the effects of shocks in developing countries. I then briefly review the empirical literature on household responses to shocks and outline how it is reasonable to expect that even recurring, non-exotic shocks have substantial permanent effects on affected young peoples' completed human capital stocks. Next, I describe the contributions that the following two chapters of this dissertation make and how they are similar with respect to their use of nationally representative household survey data, their policy relevance, and the way they use basic economic theory and contextual knowledge to uncover meaningful impacts of shocks on different groups of young people. Finally, I conclude this introductory chapter by considering whether or not it should be regarded as a surprise that shocks in developing countries can be allowed by households to impact affected children's human capital stocks the way they do, despite the large returns associated with human capital investments. The second chapter considers the permanent effects of rainfall shocks on adults' completed human capital stocks. Existing research suggests that health and education investments in children are affected by aggregate income shocks, but there is considerably less evidence on what the effects of many years' worth of such shocks are on individuals' completed human capital stocks. I contribute to this literature by studying the effects of the number and timing of all the unusually wet and dry years over the first 21 years of rural West African individuals' lives on their likelihood of being literate and their completed educational attainment. I use historical rainfall data merged with nationally representative household surveys conducted in 12 countries, and I find that both wet and dry years have substantial negative impacts on women's human capital and smaller positive impacts on men's: The average effect of wet and dry rainfall shocks over the first 21 years of life is a 22 percent decrease in females' likelihood of being literate and a 10 percent increase in males'. I argue that this pattern of results is consistent with existing research on how West African females and males work and acquire human capital. The third chapter provides evidence on how children in different types of households are affected by food price shocks. While people in poor countries report that inflation is one of their primary concerns, there is not much evidence on how they are actually affected by it. In particular, it is not clear how food (along with other) price inflation affects individuals in net food producing and net food consuming households. I use four highly comparable household surveys collected in Egypt to examine how children's weights-for-height evolved over time and in the face of the food price crisis of 2008, and I utilize data on region of residence and parents' occupation to examine how changes over time differed by household net food consumption status. I find that despite several years' worth of solid economic growth in the run-up to 2008, most region- and parental occupation-based groups of Egyptian children's weights-for-height had not increased at all since 2005 (for example). Quantile regression results reveal that the lightest children in 2008 were considerably lighter than the lightest children in 2005, and also that children in those households most likely to have been net food producing seem to have been more negatively affected by high food prices than children in most other kinds of households. High food prices seem to have offset any possible beneficial effects of growth for children in the poorest households.