Working Paper on Stephen D. O'Connell

Distributional preference divergence in targeting foreign aid: Experimental evidence from aid workers, refugees, and a proxy means test in a humanitarian setting

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Aid institutions delivering social assistance balance donors’ conceptions of appropriate program design with the need to maintain legitimacy among local beneficiaries. We present a conceptual framework for institutional targeting under dual accountability constraints and apply it to the case of cash transfer targeting among Syrian refugees in Lebanon. We recover distributional preferences for beneficiary selection in a discrete choice conjoint experiment given to humanitarian staff and refugees, and extract implicit preferences from the econometric proxy means test used in practice. Human respondents prioritize visible forms of vulnerability, while formal targeting models emphasize demographic predictors of expenditure. We find that donor compliance pressures outweigh legitimacy costs in shaping institutional behavior. The paper contributes to debates on governance, accountability, and institutional legitimacy in humanitarian and foreign aid settings.

Can political empowerment increase economic participation? Reservations, public works, and female labor force participation in India

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This study examines whether political empowerment of women affects their economic participation. In the context of a mandated political representation reform for women in India, we find that the length of exposure to women politicians affects overall female labor force participation. These effects arise through direct and indirect channels – political representation of women directly affects amount of work assigned to women under the recent national public works program, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, as well as their participation in small-scale businesses. Increases in these activities are offset by reductions in agricultural work and are seen across both high- and low-SES households. Greater physical safety may be one channel through which this occurs – we find greater geographic mobility among low-SES women, as measured by the likelihood of working outside the home. The findings suggest that women’s participation in politics could be a useful policy tool to increase both the supply of and the demand for labor market opportunities for women, potentially helping to stem India’s declining female labor force participation rate.

Geographic poverty targeting in social protection programs: Evidence from a nationwide policy experiment

Wed, 30 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We study how prioritization rules for a large-scale cash transfer program affect who is targeted, program effectiveness, and beneficiary satisfaction. In a nationwide policy experiment among Syrian refugees in Lebanon, we randomized households into different area-level allocation rules based on monetary poverty, food insecurity, food consumption, and multidimensional deprivation. We find that these rules select demographically distinct groups, but generate little difference in program impacts on key welfare outcomes. In contrast, there is substantial geographic heterogeneity in program effectiveness across districts, suggesting that local conditions, rather than targeting rules, are the primary drivers of variation in outcomes. Administrative data and household characteristics explain little of this location-based heterogeneity. Qualitative interviews highlight market-specific constraints, such as transport costs and debt burdens, that mediate program impacts. Our findings suggest that that the the poverty target used for budget allocation are crucial in determining who benefits from the transfers but may be less important for determining overall program effectiveness in a given locality.

Tell us what you need: Matching public job training to local skill demand with employers' input

Wed, 02 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Governments use job training programs to address unemployment and to improve the match between skill supply and skill demand. Targeting such programs with input from local employers has long been hypothesized as a way to improve their effectiveness. We test this hypothesis using a unique situation in Brazil in which two national skill training programs ran in parallel, with one taking local employer input in choosing course offerings while the other retained a traditional, government-led structure. The employer-informed program nearly doubled the short-term effect on trainees’ employment and earnings relative to the traditional program. The differential effectiveness of the employer-informed program is not attributable to differences in course or student composition across programs. Our findings provide evidence that limited, structured input from the private sector can improve the alignment between skills trained and skill demand to increase the employment and earnings of the underemployed.
Brazilian Senate Testimony (PR) | Estadão (PR)