Essays on development economics

We study two major policies widely implemented in developing countries that target low income households and seek to reduce poverty by expanding economic opportunity and increasing productivity. In Chapters 2 and 3, we examine a large-scale subsidized housing program in Brazil and estimate its effects on individuals who received their homes as adults and those exposed as children. We find that adult beneficiaries experience small declines in employment. Unlike in other settings, these effects are not driven by spatial isolation, but are instead consistent with modest income effects. In contrast, the impacts on children are large and transformative. Childhood exposure substantially increases educational attainment and leads to markedly improved labor-market performance in early adulthood. Individuals who receive subsidized housing at age 11 are 22 percent more likely to hold a formal job at age 25 than those who receive housing at age 18 or older. These gains are concentrated among children from the poorest households and are driven by proximity to higher-quality schools. Together, these findings indicate that housing assistance can generate sizable intergenerational mobility gains when children are exposed at early ages. In Chapter 4, we turn to agricultural input subsidy programs (ISPs), which face a central targeting dilemma: whether to allocate resources to individuals with the highest marginal returns on efficiency grounds or to the poorest households on equity grounds, potentially allowing secondary markets to reallocate inputs. We study this trade-off through a field experiment in which beneficiaries in different villages in Tanzania were selected either by lottery or by a local committee. In lottery villages, we document displacement of fertilizer purchases and the emergence of a secondary market. In contrast, in non-lottery villages we find no evidence of displacement or elite capture. The overall impacts of the ISP on agricultural productivity and household welfare are limited, suggesting that complementary investments, such as improvements in soil quality and irrigation, may be necessary for input subsidies to generate meaningful gains.