Person:
Özler, Berk
Author Name Variants
Fields of Specialization
Poverty and inequality,
Social Protection,
Gender,
Maternal and Child Health
Degrees
External Links
Departments
Development Research Group
Externally Hosted Work
Contact Information
Last updated
August 22, 2023
Biography
Berk Özler is a lead economist in the Development Research Group, Poverty Cluster. He received his B.Sc. in Mathematics from Bosphorous University in 1991, and his Ph.D in Economics from Cornell University in 2001. After working on poverty and inequality measurement, poverty mapping, and the 2006 World Development Report on Equity and Development earlier, he decided to combine his interests in cash transfer programs and HIV risks facing young women in Africa by designing a field experiment in Malawi. He has since been involved in a number of cluster-randomized field experiments. He is a co-founder of and a regular contributor to the Development Impact blog.
Publication Search Results
1 - 10 of 12
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Publication
Conditional Cash Transfers and the Equity-Efficiency Debate
(World Bank, Washington, D.C., 2004-04)During the past decade, the use of conditional cash transfers to increase investment in human capital has generated considerable excitement in both research and policy forums. Such schemes are being increasingly adopted in a number of contexts and countries to improve outcomes in health, education, and child labor as they aim to balance the goals of current and future poverty reduction. In this paper, the authors define any scheme requiring a specified course of action in order to receive a benefit as a conditional cash transfer. This definition includes cash transfers based on human capital investments, but is sufficiently broad to encompass other schemes such as work-fare programs or consumption transfers. The authors examine the rationales behind, the problems with, and the tradeoffs inherent to conditional cash transfer programs. They discuss two main concerns: low participation and fungibility. Low participation refers to the problem of program uptake. If individuals do not participate in the program, whether it was designed to increase human capital investment or to target resources, the program will not be successful. The problem of fungibility, however, depends on the rationale for the particular conditional cash transfer program. When used to increase efficiency, even when program uptake is high, program effects may be less than envisioned due to behavioral responses of households that lead to changes in the consumption of close substitutes. While researchers have typically addressed these issues separately, the authors emphasize the need for policymakers to incorporate a number of different factors in a comprehensive framework to design optimal conditional cash transfer schemes. -
Publication
On the Unequal Inequality of Poor Communities
(World Bank, Washington, D.C., 2004-02)Important differences exist between communities with respect to their needs, capacities, and circumstances. As central governments are not able to discern these differences fully, they seek to achieve their policy objectives by relying on decentralized mechanisms that use local information. However, household and individual characteristics within communities can also vary substantially. A growing theoretical literature suggests that inequality within communities can influence policy outcomes, and that this influence could be harmful or helpful, depending on the circumstances. Empirical investigations into the impact of inequality have, to date, largely been held back by a lack of systematic evidence on community-level inequality. The authors use household survey and population census data to estimate per capita consumption inequality within communities in three developing countries: Ecuador, Madagascar, and Mozambique. Communities are found to vary markedly from one another in terms of the degree of inequality they exhibit. The authors also show that there should be no presumption that inequality is less severe in poor communities. They argue that the kind of community-level inequality estimates generated in this paper can be used in designing and evaluating decentralized antipoverty programs. -
Publication
Poverty Alleviation through Geographic Targeting: How Much Does Disaggregation Help?
(World Bank, Washington, D.C., 2004-10)Using recently completed "poverty maps" for Cambodia, Ecuador, and Madagascar, the authors simulate the impact on poverty of transferring an exogenously given budget to geographically defined subgroups of the population according to their relative poverty status. They find large gains from targeting smaller administrative units, such as districts or villages. But these gains are still far from the poverty reduction that would be possible had the planners had access to information on household level income or consumption. The results suggest that a useful way forward might be to combine fine geographic targeting using a poverty map with within-community targeting mechanisms. -
Publication
Reassessing Conditional Cash Transfer Programs
(Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2005-03-01)During the past decade, the use of conditional cash transfer programs to increase investment in human capital has generated considerable excitement in both research and policy forums. This article surveys the existing literature, which suggests that most conditional cash transfer programs are used for essentially one of two purposes: restoring efficiency when externalities exist or improving equity by targeting resources to poor households. The programs often meet their stated objectives, but in some instances there is tension between the efficiency and equity objectives. The overall impact of a program depends on the gains and losses associated with each objective. -
Publication
On the Unequal Inequality of Poor Communities
(World Bank, 2004-09-01)Communities differ in important ways in their needs, capacities, and circumstances. Because central governments are not able to discern these differences fully, they seek to achieve their policy objectives by relying on decentralized mechanisms that use local information. Household and individual characteristics within communities can also vary substantially. A growing body of theoretical literature suggests that inequality within communities can influence policy outcomes in ways that are either harmful or helpful, depending on the circumstances. Until recently, empirical investigations into the impact of inequality have been held back by a lack of systematic evidence on community-level inequality. This study uses household survey and population census data to estimate per capita consumption inequality within communities in three developing economies. It finds that communities vary markedly in their degree of inequality. It also shows that there should be no presumption that inequality is less severe in poor communities. The kind of community-level inequality estimates generated here can be used in designing and evaluating decentralized antipoverty programs. -
Publication
Local Inequality and Project Choice: Theory and Evidence from Ecuador
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2006-08)This paper provides evidence consistent with elite capture of Social Fund investment projects in Ecuador. Exploiting a unique combination of data-sets on village-level income distributions, Social Fund project administration, and province level electoral results, the authors test a simple model of project choice when local political power is unequally distributed. In accordance with the predictions of the model, poorer villages are more likely to receive projects that provide excludable (private) goods to the poor, such as latrines. Controlling for poverty, more unequal communities are less likely to receive such projects. Consistent with the hypothesis of elite capture, these results are sensitive to the specific measure of inequality used in the empirical analysis, and are strongest for expenditure shares at the top of the distribution. -
Publication
Re-Interpreting Sub-Group Inequality Decompositions
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2005-08)The authors propose a modification to the conventional approach of decomposing income inequality by population sub-groups. Specifically, they propose a measure that evaluates observed between-group inequality against a benchmark of maximum between-group inequality that can be attained when the number and relative sizes of groups under examination are fixed. The authors argue that such a modification can provide a complementary perspective on the question of whether a particular population breakdown is salient to an assessment of inequality in a country. As their measure normalizes between-group inequality by the number and relative sizes of groups, it is also less subject to problems of comparability across different settings. The authors show that for a large set of countries their assessment of the importance of group differences typically increases substantially on the basis of this approach. The ranking of countries (or different population groups) can also differ from that obtained using traditional decomposition methods. Finally, they observe an interesting pattern of higher levels of overall inequality in countries where their measure finds higher between-group contributions. -
Publication
Crime and Local Inequality in South Africa
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2002-11)The authors examine the effects of local inequality on property and violent crime in South Africa. Their findings are consistent with economic theories relating inequality to property crime, and also with sociological theories that imply that inequality leads to crime in general. Burglary rates are 20-30 percent higher in police station jurisdictions that are the wealthiest among their neighbors, suggesting that criminals travel to neighborhoods where the expected returns from burglary are highest. The authors do not find evidence that inequality between racial groups fosters interpersonal conflict at the local level. -
Publication
The Short-Term Impacts of a Schooling Conditional Cash Transfer Program on the Sexual Behavior of Young Women
( 2009-10-01)Recent evidence suggests that conditional cash transfer programs for schooling are effective in raising school enrollment and attendance. However, there is also reason to believe that such programs can affect other outcomes, such as the sexual behavior of their young beneficiaries. Zomba Cash Transfer Program is a randomized, ongoing conditional cash transfer intervention targeting young women in Malawi that provides incentives (in the form of school fees and cash transfers) to current schoolgirls and recent dropouts to stay in or return to school. An average offer of US$10/month conditional on satisfactory school attendance plus direct payment of secondary school fees led to significant declines in early marriage, teenage pregnancy, and self-reported sexual activity among program beneficiaries after just one year of program implementation. For program beneficiaries who were out of school at baseline, the probability of getting married and becoming pregnant declined by more than 40 percent and 30 percent, respectively. In addition, the incidence of the onset of sexual activity was 38 percent lower among all program beneficiaries than the control group. Overall, these results suggest that conditional cash transfer programs not only serve as useful tools for improving school attendance, but may also reduce sexual activity, teen pregnancy, and early marriage. -
Publication
Designing Cost-Effective Cash Transfer Programs to Boost Schooling among Young Women in Sub-Saharan Africa
( 2009-10-01)As of 2007, 29 developing countries had some type of conditional cash transfer program in place, with many others planning or piloting one. However, the evidence base needed by a government to decide how to design a new conditional cash transfer program is severely limited in a number of critical dimensions. This paper presents one-year schooling impacts from a conditional cash transfer experiment among teenage girls and young women in Malawi, which was designed to address these shortcomings: conditionality status, size of separate transfers to the schoolgirl and the parent, and village-level saturation of treatment were all independently randomized. The authors find that the program had large impacts on school attendance: the re-enrollment rate among those who had already dropped out of school before the start of the program increased by two and a half times and the dropout rate among those in school at baseline decreased from 11 to 6 percent. These impacts were, on average, similar in the conditional and the unconditional treatment arms. Although most schooling outcomes examined here were unresponsive to variation in the size of the transfer to the parents, higher transfers given directly to the schoolgirls were associated with significantly improved school attendance and progress - but only if the transfers were conditional on school attendance. There were no spillover effects within treatment communities after the first year of program implementation. Policymakers looking to design cost-effective cash transfer programs targeted toward young women should note the relative insensitivity of these short-term program impacts with respect to conditionality and total transfer size.