Essays on physical and financial well-being in low- and middle-income countries

Abstract

Many socio-economic factors are threatening the physical, mental, and financial well-being among the population residing in low- and middle-income countries, including financial stress, discrimination, violence, health issues, and inequalities. In the five chapters of my dissertation, I exploit experimental or quasi-experimental natures of socio-economic shocks in China, Peru and Uganda, to measure their impacts on the physical and financial well-being on individuals. The first chapter of this dissertation provides information on the study background, the data and presents an overview of each chapter. The remainder of the dissertation consists of five essays stretching out over the next chapters. China is well-known for its skewed sex ratios and huge demographic imbalance. In the first chapter, I exploit a cross-cohort spatial comparison to analyze the impact of demographic imbalance on the payment of brideprices and dowries in China. This chapter exploits the variation of sex ratios exposed to children born in the same natal family but born in different years. I use a difference-in-difference estimation and provide the very first empirical evidence that an increase in male surplus leads to higher incidence and value of brideprices, but it has no effect on dowries. Subsequent investigations reveal that brideprices and dowries carry different significance in the Chinese society, which explains the co-existence and co-development of both payments in the 21st century. Chapter 3 analyzes the negative health impact of rising housing prices in China. There is massive housing price appreciation since the early 2000s, which caused huge financial stress to households because of the strong social norm of owning rather than renting a house or apartment. We highlight that the high competition among males in the marriage market due to the “missing women” phenomenon is an important factor that contributes to such a negative health effect. Chapter 4 shows that natural disasters would elevate the incidence of intimate partner violence through higher alcohol use by the male partner, higher likelihood of co-residing with the male partner, and an increase in male intra-household economic power. Moreover, we highlight that the access to protective institutions, such as the “women justice centers”, are of vital importance to women’s vulnerability of intra-household violence. This paper points out one important but often neglected socio-economic consequence of natural disasters, and provides a strong policy implication for the post-disaster relief and reconstruction. The last two chapters are based on data collected in Uganda. The fourth chapter evaluates the impact of a financial education program on the use of digital finance (mobile money) as well as the business performance and household finance among microentrepreneurs in rural Uganda. We design a randomized saturation experiment, and find a positive impact of financial education on the use of mobile money, saving promotion, and business investments on targeted entrepreneurs. At the same time, we do not find evidence of positive spillover effects on the untreated ones in treated clusters. Instead, the estimated spillover coefficients often show negative (albeit insignificant) signs. In the last chapter, we document that the COVID-19 lockdown increases the financial stress of the micro-entrepreneurs in rural Uganda in the long term.