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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

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Behavioral Economics

Master's Theses

2024

Behavioral economics

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

What The Stork Brought: Endogenous Fertility Preferences, Lucas Fortier Borden May 2024

What The Stork Brought: Endogenous Fertility Preferences, Lucas Fortier Borden

Master's Theses

Where most existing literature on fertility preferences has described how fertility preferences shape outcomes, this paper provides insight into how the sex of a recent birth affects a mother’s fertility preferences. Utilizing data from the Demographic Health Survey from 1985-2020 in 81 countries containing 309,238 mothers who gave birth in the past 12 months and who have equal to or fewer than three children, I employ OLS with two-way fixed effects as my primary specification, examining the effects of the plausibly exogenous sex of a recent birth on sibship sex composition preferences. Results show that a recent daughter birth increases …


Can Aspiration And Financial Literacy Interventions Relieve Internal Constraints? Evidence From Uganda And India, Veronika Divis May 2024

Can Aspiration And Financial Literacy Interventions Relieve Internal Constraints? Evidence From Uganda And India, Veronika Divis

Master's Theses

Can aspiration and financial literacy interventions relieve internal constraints? We address this question through a novel experiment in Uganda and India, using 617 participants in 89 already existing borrowing groups of microfinance institutions. We carry out aspiration and financial literacy treatments as well as a combined treatment group which received both treatments to measure effects on aspirations, hope, agency, and pathway indices. Results show that receiving the aspirations treatment led to 0.34, 0.42, 0.18, and 0.40 standard deviation increases in aspirations, agency, pathways, and aspirational hope, respectively. The game and combined treatment groups also showed positive effects but lacked statistical …