Timothée Demont

Chercheur ,  Aix-Marseille Université , Faculté des arts, lettres, langues, sciences humaines (ALLSH)

Développement et économie politique
Demont
Statut
Maître de conférences
Domaine(s) de recherche
Économie du développement
Thèse
2012, University of Namur
Téléchargement
CV
Contact
timothee.demont[at]univ-amu.fr
+33(0)4 13 55 25 42 / +33(0)4 13 94 20 09
Adresse

AMU - AMSE
5-9 Boulevard Maurice Bourdet, CS 50498
​13205 Marseille Cedex 1

Site
https://sites.google.com/site/timotheedemont/
Résumé Worrisome topics, such as climate change, economic crises, or pandemics including Covid-19, are increasingly present and pervasive due to digital media and social networks. Do worries triggered by such topics affect the cognitive capacities of young adults? In an online experiment during the Covid-19 pandemic (N=1503), we test how the cognitive performance of university students responds when exposed to topics discussing (i) current adverse mental health consequences of social restrictions or (ii) future labor market hardships linked to the economic contraction. Moreover, we study how such a response is affected by a performance goal. We find that the labor market topic increases cognitive performance when it is motivated by a goal, consistent with a 'tunneling effect' of scarcity or a positive stress effect. However, we show that the positive reaction is mainly concentrated among students with larger financial and social resources, pointing to an inequality-widening mechanism. Conversely, we find limited support for a negative stress effect or a 'cognitive load effect' of scarcity, as the mental health topic has a negative but insignificant average effect on cognitive performance. Yet, there is a negative response among psychologically vulnerable individuals when the payout is not conditioned on reaching a goal.
Mots clés Human behaviour, Psychology and behaviour
Publication HAL Google Scholar
Résumé Combining seven years of household data from an original eld experiment in villages of Jharkand, East India, with meteorological data, this paper investigates how Indian Self-Help Groups (SHGs) enable households to withstand rainfall shocks. I show that SHGs operate remarkably well under large covariate shocks. While credit access dries up in control villages one year after a bad monsoon, reecting strong credit rationing from informal lenders, credit ows are counter-cyclical in treated villages. Treated households experience substantially higher food security during the lean season following a drought and increase their seasonal migration to mitigate expected income shocks. Credit access plays an important role, together with other SHG aspects such as peer networks. These ndings indicate that local self-help and nancial associations can help poor farmers to cope with climatic shocks and to implement risk management strategies.
Mots clés Seasonal migration, Food security, Resilience, Risk management, Climatic shocks, Credit, Micronance
Publication HAL Google Scholar
Résumé This paper investigates the impact of informal microfinance groups (self-help groups, or SHGs) on children’s education and work in rural India. In 2002, 24 eligible villages were randomly selected for opening SHGs, and 12 others were randomly selected as a control group. Households were surveyed three times over a 5-year period, allowing for the study of medium-term outcomes. We find a robust and strong increase in secondary school enrollment rates over time, with intention-to-treat estimates of about 40%. This effect stems from a quicker grade progression, leading to lower dropout rates between primary and secondary school. Contrary to usual presumptions, we find no decrease in overall child labor (but a reorientation toward part-time domestic work) and no direct role of credit. By contrast, we show that social interactions within SHGs are very important.
Publication HAL Google Scholar
Résumé We designed an experiment to estimate the socioeconomic and behavioral characteristics associated with financial exclusion in a developed economy and the demand for savings products progressively trading-off flexibility for commitment. Our sample includes people in Italy living below the poverty line, stratified by migration status. Despite a large bank branch penetration in the study area, we find a high rate of financial exclusion, with households below the sample median income being unbanked at twice the rate of those above (30% vs. 15%), a difference that is especially significant for migrants. Financial exclusion is associated with poverty and social exclusion, as measured by unemployment, low food consumption, and little help from personal networks. Despite a high-declared willingness to open new accounts and a strong interest in commitment products following a financial education training seminar, actual uptake in the year to follow remains low, suggesting that demand-driven factors besides knowledge hamper access to formal financial services, namely incomes that are perceived too low to make accounts worthwhile. Yet, migrants, especially if non-Muslim, appear more willing to become financially included than non-migrants, suggesting that there are gains to be made by targeting minorities.
Mots clés Field experiment, Migrants, Savings, Financial exclusion
HAL Google Scholar
Résumé Despite widespread interest in the development of microfinance, spillover effects on the non-using population and redistributive issues remain largely unexplored. I study a competition game between microfinance institutions (MFIs) offering joint-liability loans and moneylenders offering individual loans in presence of adverse selection. I show that one unintended consequence of the entry of a microfinance sector in local credit markets can be to trigger an increase in the equilibrium informal interest rate, because MFIs tend to attract a disproportionately-safe share of the borrower pool away from incumbent moneylenders. The existence of such composition externality depends crucially on the size of the microfinance sector and the risk composition of the borrower pool. The model predicts a non-linearly increasing relationship between informal interest rates and MFIs' capacity in relatively safe credit markets, and no relationship in risky villages. I show evidence supporting these predictions, using a first-hand panel database that records all credit transactions over 8 years for a sample of about 1000 households living in Indian villages with extensive space and time variation in the size of their microfinance sector.
Mots clés Microfinance, Joint liability, Informal credit market, Composition externalities, Adverse selection
Publication HAL Google Scholar
Résumé In developing countries, many policy interventions aim to enhance female entrepreneurship by giving access to cash inflows targeting women. However, important investment decisions are usually made at the household level and may be influenced by local cultural norms about female labour force participation. Using a standard collective household model, this paper studies spouses’ joint investment decisions. We show that the individual optimal investment levels are not necessarily aligned between spouses, though costly utility transfers can realign spouses’ incentives. The required transfer is increasing in the stringency of the gender norm against female labour participation, making investment potentially too costly. We test these predictions using two different empirical settings and strategies. First, we exploit original data from a field experiment in India, which gave access to new investment opportunities to women through microcredit. We find that treated women belonging to castes that are relatively more favourable to women investing are more likely to engage in home agricultural production and less likely to engage in casual low-wage jobs. Yet, they seem to enjoy lower utility levels in some dimensions such as health and freedom. To the contrary, we do not find any change in the occupation or independence of women belonging to castes that traditionally impose strong restrictions on women’s behaviour, suggesting that investment is then too costly. Second, we exploit India’s accession to the GATT in 2005 as a natural experiment and use Indian household surveys to study the effect of the termination of quotas imposed on textile exports, a female-dominated activity, on women’s well-being. We find that in districts that are more suitable for cotton growing, a feminine-oriented occupation, removing the quotas increases specialization in garments and decreases health indicators for women belonging to castes that are relatively more in favour of women working. Those empirical findings are consistent with our model, showing that, in the presence of gender norms, female entrepreneurship entails intra-household transfers that impact female well-being and can eventually prevent investment.
Mots clés Female Entrepreneurship, Gender Norms, Intra-household allocation
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Résumé Worrisome topics, such as climate change, economic crises, or the Covid-19 pandemic, are increasingly present and pervasive due to digital media and social networks. Do such worries affect cognitive performance? The effect of a distressing topic might be very different depending on whether people have the scope and means to cope with the consequences. It can also differ by how performance is rewarded, for instance, if is there a goal that people can focus on. In an online experiment during the Covid-19 pandemic, we test how the cognitive performance of university students responds to topics discussing (i) current mental health issues related to social restrictions or (ii) future labor market uncertainties linked to the economic contraction. Moreover, we study how the response is affected by a performance goal by conditioning payout on reaching a minimum level. We find that the labor market topic increases cognitive performance when performance is motivated by a goal. Conversely, there is no such effect after the mental health topic. We even find a weak negative effect among those mentally vulnerable when payout is not based on reaching a goal. The positive effect is driven by students with larger financial and social resources, pointing at an inequality-widening mechanism.
Mots clés Cognitive performance, Financial worries, COVID-19, Financial incentives, Anxiety, Coping behaviors
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Résumé This paper asks whether local savings and credit associations help poor rural households hit by climatic shocks. Combining data from an original field experiment with meteorological data, I investigate how Self-Help Groups (SHGs) allow households to cope with rainfall shocks in villages of East India over a sevenyear period. I show that SHGs withstand large rainfall shocks remarkably, and that credit flows are very stable in treated villages. As a result, treated households experience a higher food security during the lean season following a drought and increase seasonal migration to mitigate future income shocks. These results imply that small-scale financial institutions like SHGs help to finance temporary risk management strategies and to cope with important covariate income shocks such as droughts.
Mots clés Seasonal migration, Food security, Risk management, Weather shocks, Microfinance
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Résumé This paper investigates the consequences of the participation in informal microfinance groups, known as Self-Help Groups (SHGs), on children’s education and work in rural India. We analyze first-hand data collected from a panel of households in areas where new groups were formed in 2002. We observe these households three times over a five year period, which allows us to examine medium-term effects of SHG participation. We find a robust and strong increase in treated children’s secondary school enrollment rate over time, by about 20 percentage points, to be compared with a baseline rate of 45%. This effect stems from a quicker grade progression, leading to lower drop-out rates between primary and secondary school. We find no decrease in overall child labor (but a reorientation towards part-time domestic work), indicating that there is no clear substitution between labor and education for children of secondary-school age in rural India. Contrary to what is usually believed, we show that credit does not play any direct role in the increased schooling. However, we find evidence that it partly follows from social interactions within SHGs, under the form of peer effects. Our findings indicate that microfinance groups can have large effects on the human capital of participants and their families, though such effects can take time to materialize and happen through unintended channels.
Mots clés Microfinance, Self-Help Groups, Education, Child labor, Peer effects, India
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