2023 Rosenstein-Rodan Prize Awarded to Max Garcia and Sophie Li
We are very happy to announce the joint winners of the 2023 Rosenstein-Rodan prize, awarded by the IED:
Max Garcia: Governance and Property Rights over Water
and
Sophie Li: Historical Evidence on Gender Differences in Job Loss: US Postmasters before World War Two
Congratulations, Max and Sophie!
The Rosenstein-Rodan prize is awarded annually in memory of Professor Paul Rosenstein-Rodan. A monetary prize is awarded to the best research paper(s) in development economics or related field submitted by a PhD student at Boston University. This year’s RR Prize Selection Committee members are Martin Fiszbein, Ben Marx, and Dilip Mookherjee.
Read their paper abstracts here:
Max Garcia: Governance and Property Rights over Water
Water resources present a classic tragedy of the commons that is of increasing relevance as a result of climate change. This paper uses the staggered introduction of a local governance institution to estimate the causal effect of property rights enforcement on the allocation of water in Chile. I find that the establishment of legally empowered boards representing water right holders leads to increased water access in downstream locations, reallocating water from upstream to downstream users. The increase happens during the irrigation season, suggesting that it corresponds to a reduction in illegal extractions. The presence of a board also slows down the creation of titles over river waters, which we attribute to improved monitoring of the state of the river by the boards. We further present evidence of greater misallocation of water in basins without boards, where the shadow value of water is higher in downstream locations than in upstream locations. We conclude that legally empowered community enforcement improves the performance of markets in absence of state capacity.
Sophie Li: Historical Evidence on Gender Differences in Job Loss: US Postmasters before World War Two
Were there any gender differences in response to job loss during historical periods? I examine this question by studying workers who experienced exogenous job loss due to party turnovers in the early 20th Century United States. Specifically, I study the postmaster occupation in the federal government, a unique labor market opportunity for women that did not impose marriage bars. With a newly digitized dataset on postmaster appointments, I show that the share of postmasters that were women increased from 5% to 30% between 1910 and 1940, most of whom had been married at the time of the appointment. Next, I estimate the causal effect of job loss by comparing postmasters appointed just before and just after a party turnover in a regression discontinuity design. The RD estimates show that women experienced a reduction in the probability of employment by 40.5% after job loss and decreased their labor supply by 21.4 weeks per year and 15.1 hours per week. In contrast, men were just as likely to be employed as before and did not decrease their labor supply. To address endogeneity concerns in RD, I corroborate my findings by comparing female and male postmasters who experienced job loss in a differences-in-differences design. Finally, I show that the gender difference in post-job-loss employment was more prominent in states that introduced legislation against married women working during the Great Depression, suggesting gender discrimination drove women to exit the labor market after job loss. On the other hand, the severity of the Great Depression and individual preferences about fertility and home production cannot explain the significant gender differences in post-job-loss labor market outcomes.