Daily Times

The second day of the conference opened with a plenary address by Dr. Danila Serra (Associate Professor, Texas A&M University) on the impacts of war violence mainly focusing on education and health outcomes, economic outcomes, mental health and individual preferences especially for girls in Northern Uganda. This is especially pertinent considering that the year 2022 was the deadliest year since the Rwandan genocide in 1994 with 100% increase in war related fatalities mainly due to the wars in Ukraine and Ethiopia. Dr Serra found that long term impacts of war victimization persisted in terms of poverty, education, pro-sociality and risk aversion.

The plenary address was followed by a session on women and labor markets, chaired by Dr. Danila Serra. The first speaker of the session Dr. Mahreen Mahmud (Assistant Professor University of Exeter) conducted a randomized control trial with 1200 firms in Pakistan that have a job opening for a technical/professional role advertised on the country’s largest online job search portal and offered a 6-month wage subsidy to a randomly selected half of the sample if they hired a women for the advertised role. The authors find that a wage subsidy led to an increase in the likelihood of a female being hired and the effect is particularly large for firms that only had male employees at baseline. The second paper by Dr. Zunia Tirmazee (Assistant Professor, Lahore School of Economics) discussed whether supply or demand side constraints play a larger role in determining gender gaps in labor market outcomes in Pakistan. She finds that firm-side gender criteria are more likely to be binding for women than men driven by pre-existent gender segregation in firms; however, as education level rises, this female penalty disappears. Saniya Jillani (PhD student, Colorado State University) discussed the intricate relationship between women’s involvement in informal collective action and their empowerment in Pakistan. She finds that in areas where women are the primary actors in political events, they are more likely to engage in sole decision making by 11.9 percentage points regarding the uptake of paid work.

The second session on political economy was also chaired by Dr. Danila Serra. The first speaker of the session Dr. Sanval Nasim (Assistant Professor, Colby College) presented on whether concerns to preserve an anti-liberal self-image affect low cost, private school owners’ willingness to explore a collaboration with a liberal Pakistani NGO. The authors find limited evidence that treated school owners are less willing to explore a collaboration with their partner NGO. The second paper by Alix Bonargent (PhD student, London School of Economics and Political Science) investigated whether relaxing political constraints on partnership formation results in more collaboration between researchers and policymakers, and whether this translates into higher evidence take-up in programmatic decision-making. Preliminary results suggested that collaboration with policymakers substantially increases the likelihood that changes in programmatic decisions are observed after project implementation. Findings also revealed that the emergence of partnerships coincide with the election cycle: they occur earlier in the term when political conditions are conducive to experimentation and reform. Dr. Faiz Ur Rehman (Associate Professor, Institute of Business Administration) examined whether frontier rule, which disallows frontier residents from recourse to formal institutions of conflict management and disproportionately empowers tribal elites, provides a more fragile basis for maintaining social order in the face of shocks. The authors find that the 9/11 tragedy represented a universal shock to grievances against the state that led to a sharp surge in attacks against state targets in the frontier regions.

Dr. Naved Hamid (Director, Center for Research in Economics and Business (CREB)) chaired the last session of day 2 on state effectiveness. The first speaker of the session Shabbar Shagufta (PhD student, Institute of Business Administration) examined two types of social assistance i.e. lump sum transfer (LST) versus unconditional cash transfer (UCT) and determined which is more effective in enhancing a household’s income in the long term in a district in Sindh, Pakistan. The empirical analysis suggests that the static LST permanently increases the total household income. The difference in the household incomes of LST and UCT recipients in the long run is large and significant. The last paper of the session by Muhammad Nadeem Sarwar (PhD Scholar in Economics, Institute of Business Administration) proposed social cost as an alternative punishment for tax evasion and tested it against the existing monetary penalty as punishment for its effectiveness in controlling tax evasion and its impact on labor supply.

The authors find that social cost punishment leads to decreasing tax evasion incidents but in case of evasion, the share of evaded income increases. On the other hand, the social cost punishment strategy positively affects labor efforts. Both papers were discussed by Dr. Fareena Malhi (Senior Research Fellow, Center for Research in Economics and Business (CREB)).