Smurra, Andrea;
(2023)
Essays in Development Economics.
Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).
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Abstract
This thesis focuses on the functioning of labour markets in low income countries, and the challenges faced by young women transitioning from education to the labour force. Chapter 1 documents how the organisation of labour varies within and across countries at different stages of development, with emphasis on the allocation of jobs along the wealth distribution and across gender. Chapter 2 focuses on young labour market entrants in Africa, documenting how their outcomes compare to older generations and to their counterparts in other low- and middle-income regions of the world. Both chapters leverage a novel dataset – the Jobs of the World Dataset - built by harmonizing micro-data for 115 countries, observed on average 4 time between 1990 and 2020. The last two chapters provide evidence on the impact that large aggregate shocks have on the socio-economic trajectories of young women. Chapter 3 follows a sample of young women through the 2014 Ebola epidemic in Sierra Leone, providing evidence on the link between lack of access to female-friendly safe spaces during school lockdowns, teenage pregnancies and school enrolment post-epidemic. Against this backdrop, the study discusses the heterogeneous impacts of a randomly allocated club-based intervention aimed at fostering young women’s socioeconomic empowerment. Chapter 4 combines new theory, measurement, and evidence to shed light on the fundamentals linking exposure to conflict during childhood and trust. The framework establishes the role of psychological legacies of conflict - operating through post-traumatic growth and the generation of self-efficacy - in linking conflict and trust. Taking the predictions to data, we show empirically such links exist, are quantitatively important, and these channels complement well-established mediators of conflict on trust. The analysis leverages differences in exposure to conflict for a sample of young women born during the Sierra Leonean civil war (1991-2001).
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | Ph.D |
| Title: | Essays in Development Economics |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author 2022. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Dept of Economics |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10180674 |
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