18/06/22 Aspirations in Rural Ethiopia – Some Findings from a Randomized Field Experiment Tanguy Bernard 1 , Stefan Dercon 2 , Kate Orkin 2 , Fanaye Tadesse 1 , Alemayehu Seyoum Taffesse 1 and Ibrahim Worku 1 1 International Food Policy Research Institute, 2 University of Oxford May 2, 2013 Africa House New York University 1
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Aspirations in Rural Ethiopia – Some Findings from a Randomized Field Experiment
Aspirations in Rural Ethiopia – Some Findings from a Randomized Field Experiment. Tanguy Bernard 1 , Stefan Dercon 2 , Kate Orkin 2 , Fanaye Tadesse 1 , Alemayehu Seyoum Taffesse 1 and Ibrahim Worku 1 1 International Food Policy Research Institute, 2 University of Oxford May 2, 2013 - PowerPoint PPT Presentation
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20/04/23
Aspirations in Rural Ethiopia – Some Findings from a Randomized Field
Experiment
Tanguy Bernard1, Stefan Dercon2, Kate Orkin2, Fanaye Tadesse1, Alemayehu Seyoum Taffesse1 and Ibrahim Worku1
1International Food Policy Research Institute, 2 University of Oxford
May 2, 2013Africa House
New York University
1
Motivation Elements of the aspirations framework Aspirations project Field experiment – design and findings
Outline
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Conceptual – ‘opportunities’
Empirical – Why do the poor not ‘invest’?
Ethiopians and fatalism?
Focus 1 - ‘external circumstances’ and ‘opportunities’.
Low returns to investments; Unexploited opportunities due to lack of information or
knowledge; Social constraints;
Focus 2 - constraints associated with the manifested attributes of decision makers
Identity issues: sense of self; Psychological issues: impatience, commitment, and psychological
barriers
Aspirations failure perspective
Motivation – why aspirations
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Aspirations:
A desire or an ambition to achieve something An aim and implied effort to reach it A set of future-regarding preferences
Related concepts
Economics : Satisficing Psychology : Self-efficacy, locus of control Anthropology : Aspiration failures
Common elements
Goals and aspirations are important determinants of success; Evolution through time in response to circumstances; Role of social comparisons and learning from relevant others,
An individual-level yet culturally (collectively) determined attribute towards exploration of individual-group symbiosis
Elements of the Aspirations Perspective
4
Elements of the Aspirations Perspective
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What are Aspirations?
Aspirations have two distinctive aspects:
• Future-oriented - are goals that can only be satisfied at some future time (differ from immediate gratifications);
• Motivators - are goals individuals are willing, in principle, to invest time, effort or money in to attain (different from idle daydreams and wishes)
Note: the ‘willingness to invest’ is ‘potential’, or ‘conditional’
Aspirations and expectations – preference vs. beliefs;
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Elements of the Aspirations Perspective
Why are aspirations important/useful?
Aspirations (or the capacity to aspire):
Reflect bounded rationality;
Are socially determined (social interaction);
Are distributed unevenly within communities.
Condition individual behaviour and well-being
Useful device in analysing and/or addressing poverty 20/04/23 6
Elements of the Aspirations PerspectiveHow do aspirations condition individual behaviour?
Aspiration window:
an individual’s cognitive world, his/her zone of ‘similar’, ‘attainable’ individuals;
Reflects the information and economic opportunities of the local environment;
Multi-dimensional (‘similarity’);
Aspiration gap:
difference between the aspired ‘state’ and current ‘state’ Conditions future-oriented behaviour - inverted U relationship
between gap and effort
A possible outcome is an aspiration failure - lack of pro-active behaviour (or ‘under-investment’) towards filling the aspiration gap
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Conceptual Schema
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Elements of the Aspirations PerspectiveMeasurement Issues
• Aspirations are not directly observable
– Revealed by observed behaviour: interpretation issues (linking aspirations and behaviour)
– Elicited using subjective questions: measurement issues
• Limits to subjective assessment:
– Subjects: subjects’ willingness to report private knowledge, evaluation apprehension, and subject role playing
– Instruments (attributes of): order of questions (anchoring), the number of categories on the rating scale (odd-even), the adjectives that are used as the endpoints of the rating scale, and the adverbs that describe scale categories.
(e.g. Delavande et al. (2009), Bertrand and Mullainathan (2001) for reviews)
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Elements of the Aspirations Perspective
Identification issues
• individual characteristics affect aspirations, aspiration windows and behaviour (e.g. schooling levels, wealth, and family background),
Particularly the endogeneity of the aspiration window a key hurdle
• aspirations ‘cause’ success – a person with higher aspirations may be more successful.
• Success ‘causes’ aspirations – a successful person may revise his/her aspiration to a higher level, or
experiment, panel data20/04/23 10
The “Aspirations” project
Step 1 – correlates of aspiration-related conceptsStep 2 – test and validate a measurement strategyStep 3 – assess validity of the “aspiration window” hypothesis
An experimentExogenous shock to aspirations: Mini-documentaries of local success stories screened to randomly selected individuals. Placebo: local TV show.3 rounds of data• Baseline pre-treatment (Sept-Dec 2010)• Aspirations retest immediately after treatment• Follow-up (Mar-May 2011)
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Field Experiment - Aspirations Measures
200,000 ETB ~ value of one harvest of chat from one hectare
100,000 ETB ~ value of one harvest of chat from half a hectare
* p<0.1; ** p<0.05; *** p<0.01; Screening site fixed effects and controls for age, age², gender and education not reported; Robust standard errors in parenthesis
Table 10 – Treatment effects on savings behaviour
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Treatment and Placebo Effects on Future-Oriented Behaviour
Table A1 - Direct and indirect treatment effect on Locus of Control LOC