Does mobile internet empower young women in sub-Saharan Africa? The effect of 3G on child marriage and teen pregnancy
[GDL Working Paper, R&R from Journal of Development Economics]
with Jet Wildeman, Karlijn Morsink
Sub-Saharan Africa has persistently high rates of child marriage and teen pregnancy. Recognizing the rapid expansion of mobile broadband internet (3G) – a key driver of social media access – we investigate the effect of 3G coverage on child marriage and teen pregnancy in sub-Saharan Africa. We combine geo-referenced information on 3G coverage with marriage and fertility information for over 500,000 women-year observations from 20 sub-Saharan African countries between 2011-2022. Employing a two-way fixed effects estimator, we find that the risk of child marriage and teen pregnancy reduces substantially as 3G expands. Women are 1.7 percentage points less likely to get married during adolescence and 1.3 percentage points less likely to give birth, while older women are unaffected by 3G expansion. Heterogeneity analyses show that the effect is especially evident among wealthier and more educated women, as they are more likely to be early adopters. Complementary exploratory analyses highlight knowledge about family planning, attitudes towards women and children and behavioral change, including the use of contraception, as mechanisms, suggesting that simply the introduction of 3G is more powerful than most targeted conventional family planning interventions.
Do Shared Intentions Promote Follow-Through in Gym Attendance? Evidence from 28 Million Gym Reservations
[Working Paper]
with Simon van der Zandt, Katarzyna Burzynska and Koen van der Swaluw
Many individuals intend to be physically active but fail to follow through. This study examines whether forming a shared intention, defined as reserving a gym visit with a companion rather than solo, is associated with a smaller gap between intention and behavior. We compare attendance after solo and joint gym reservations using a dataset of over 28 million reservations made by 873,563 members across 1,084 clubs in five European countries. About 38 percent of reservations involve shared intentions. Exploiting within-person variation over time, we estimate a fixed effects linear probability model. The likelihood of attendance is approximately 3 percentage points higher after a joint reservation than after a solo one. Applied to the 10.8 million joint reservations in our data, this corresponds to more than 300,000 additional gym visits. The association is stronger among women, for whom shared intentions offset part of their lower baseline intention follow-through. The results are robust to a wide range of sensitivity analyses, including alternative fixed-effects structures, controls for time-slot convenience, and an Oster-style (2019) sensitivity analysis, gauging how strong omitted confounding would need to be to overturn the results. Overall, the findings suggest that interventions that promote joint planning are a promising avenue for improving exercise adherence.
Remedying transient loneliness: Pre-post evidence on a university intervention RECONNECT
[Working Paper, Under review with BMC Psychology]
with Jana Vyrastekova, Sara Arts, Constantina Markou
The COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing lockdown measures caused young people aged 14-25 to suffer particularly from loneliness and disconnect. We developed and tested a simple, cost-effective intervention called RECONNECT to increase student well-being. RECONNECT took place at a Dutch university in May-June 2022, and it consisted of three plenary meetings and a series of self-organized, small-group events. We perform a multivariate analysis of data from 150 students, including RECONNECT participants and non-participants. In parallel, we analyze qualitative data from six in-depth interviews as well as open feedback provided by participants. Our findings show the effectiveness of this simple intervention, which gave the students the possibility to reconnect socially with their academic peers. Prior to the intervention, participants who self-selected into RECONNECT reported heightened loneliness (1.13 points compared to the control group, p-value=0.017) and decreased well-being (5 points compared to the control group, p-value<0.001). The intervention improved self-reported well-being, with Satisfaction With Life increasing by 1.886 points (p-value<0.01). Though our study was conducted against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, it offers a broader insight: improving student well-being within a self-selected group is achievable in a relatively short time and with a low budget. The present study serves as a proof-of-concept for similar future efforts.
The Role of Norm Strength and Social Pressure for Decision-Making: Evidence on the timing of marriage and child birth in sub-Saharan Africa
[Working Paper]
with Jet Wildeman
Early marriage and adolescent childbearing remain widespread in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), despite strong evidence of their harmful consequences and extensive policy efforts to curtail the practices. This persistence is in part driven by social pressure to conform to traditional family formation norms. This paper introduces a novel proxy to measure social pressure using the coefficient of variation (CV) in the timing of marriage and first birth within a woman’s social groups –defined by neighborhood, ethnicity, and religion. Drawing on 104 geo-referenced Demographic and Health Surveys (1994–2023) from 33 SSA countries, we show that greater variation in the timing of family formation is associated with delayed transitions and reduced risk of early marriage and teen pregnancy. A one standard deviation increase in group-level variation corresponds to a 2-3 months delay in marriage and childbirth and a 1.8–1.9 percentage point reduction in the likelihood of early transitions. Variation in older cohorts predicts the timing of marriage, but not childbirth, suggesting that inter-generational pressure is strong for marriage. In turn, norms around fertility are shaped more by peers. Effects are strongest among rural and less-educated women, suggesting education and urban living can mitigate normative pressure. Our approach offers a readily scalable way to capture local norm strength and helps explain why behavior change remains limited in some contexts despite improvements in overall economic conditions, exposure to other lifestyles and advances in legal protection.
When Responsibility Meets Framing: Normative Beliefs and Contributions to Public Goods in Eldercare in China
[Working Paper]
with Zhiqi Xu & Jet Wildeman
As aging progresses not only in the Global North but also across the Global South, governments are under pressure to expand social service provision, and co-produced eldercare models are gaining traction. Yet who participates, and why, remains poorly understood. A long-standing debate in political economy concerns whether government intervention shapes or distorts citizen’s preferences for public goods provision. While state involvement can foster a sense of shared responsibility, it can also crowd out private initiative and reshape underlying beliefs about who ought to provide care. These tensions are particularly pronounced in China, where a socialist state committed to extensive public goods provision increasingly collides with traditional family-based norms of private provision. In rural areas especially, decades of poverty alleviation and rural development interventions may have transformed how citizens perceive responsibility for care and other local public goods.
We conducted a field experiment with 541 villagers in 14 rural Chinese communities, where participants made hypothetical contributions of money and volunteer time to local eldercare projects (canteens or day-care centers). Participants played two rounds of the contribution game and were randomly exposed to one of three cues in the first round: a government-responsibility cue, a community-responsibility cue, or no cue.
Employing a two-way fixed effects model, the results show limited direct impacts from the framings, but a pronounced withdrawal effect: contributions declined once the government frame was removed. Exploiting heterogeneity in responsibility orientations identified through latent profile analysis, we find that underlying beliefs about who should provide care shape both baseline cooperation and reactions to state involvement. State-oriented participants contributed more overall but less when eldercare was framed as a community responsibility, whereas family-oriented participants responded in the opposite direction. These findings underscore how government intervention interacts with normative beliefs to shape preferences for public goods provision and reveal potential risks of dependency for sustaining eldercare in an aging society.