Person:
Beegle, Kathleen

Development Research Group, The World Bank

Fields of Specialization

Development Economics, Poverty, Living Standards, Gender, Jobs and Development, Measuring Poverty

ORCID

0000-0002-7080-7411

External Links

RePEc

Departments

Development Research Group, The World Bank

Last updated January 31, 2023

Biography

Kathleen Beegle is Research Manager and Lead Economist in the Human Development Team of the World Bank's Development Research Group. Her research experience includes the study of poverty, labor, economic shocks, and methodological studies on household survey data collection in developing countries. She has expertise in the design and implementation of household surveys and their use for poverty and policy analysis. Her work has been published in peer-reviewed academic journals including the Journal of Development Economics, Economic Development and Cultural Change, Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, World Bank Economic Review, Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of Human Resources, and Demography. She is co-author of numerous chapters in books and is co-lead of several World Bank reports including Realizing the Full Potential of Safety Nets in Africa, Poverty in A Rising Africa, Accelerating Poverty Reduction in Africa, and the World Development Report 2013 on Jobs. She was previously in the Research Group from 2001-2013. In the interim, she was the Lead Economist with the Gender Group (2018-2021), the Human Development Program Leader for Ghana, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, based in Accra, Ghana (2014-2018), and a Lead Economist in the Africa Chief Economist Office (2013-2014). She received her Ph.D. in Economics from Michigan State University and competed a post-doctoral fellowship at RAND.

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Publication Search Results

Now showing 1 - 10 of 51

What Does Variation in Survey Design Reveal about the Nature of Measurement Errors in Household Consumption?

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2013-02) Gibson, John ; Beegle, Kathleen ; De Weerdt, Joachim ; Friedman, Jed

This paper uses data from eight different consumption questionnaires randomly assigned to 4,000 households in Tanzania to obtain evidence on the nature of measurement errors in estimates of household consumption. While there are no validation data, the design of one questionnaire and the resources put into its implementation make it likely to be substantially more accurate than the others. Comparing regressions using data from this benchmark design with results from the other questionnaires shows that errors have a negative correlation with the true value of consumption, creating a non-classical measurement error problem for which conventional statistical corrections may be ineffective.
Do Labor Statistics Depend on How and to Whom the Questions Are Asked? Results from a Survey Experiment in Tanzania

(World Bank, 2011-10-18) Bardasi, Elena ; Beegle, Kathleen ; Dillon, Andrew ; Serneels, Pieter

Labor market statistics are critical for assessing and understanding economic development. However, widespread variation exists in how labor statistics are collected in household surveys. This paper analyzes the effects of alternative survey design on employment statistics by implementing a randomized survey experiment in Tanzania. Two features of the survey design are assessed – the level of detail of the employment questions and the type of respondent. It turns out that both features have relevant and statistically significant effects on employment statistics. Using a short labor module without screening questions induces many individuals to adopt a broad definition of employment, incorrectly including domestic duties. But after reclassifying those in domestic work as ‘not working’ in order to obtain the correct ILO classification, the short module turns out to generate lower female employment rates, higher working hours for both men and women who are employed, and lower rates of wage employment than the detailed module. Response by proxy rather than self-report has no effect on female labor statistics but yields substantially lower male employment rates, mostly due to underreporting of agricultural activity. The large impacts of proxy responses on male employment rates are attenuated when proxy informants are spouses and individuals with some schooling.
Can Subjective Questions on Economic Welfare Be Trusted? Evidence for Three Developing Countries

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2013-12) Ravallion, Martin ; Himelein, Kristen ; Beegle, Kathleen

While self-assessments of welfare have become popular for measuring poverty and estimating welfare effects, the methods can be deceptive given systematic heterogeneity in respondents' scales. Little is known about this problem. This study uses specially-designed surveys in three countries, Tajikistan, Guatemala, and Tanzania, to study scale heterogeneity. Respondents were asked to score stylized vignettes, as well as their own household. Diverse scales are in evidence, casting considerable doubt on the meaning of widely-used summary measures such as subjective poverty rates. Nonetheless, under the identifying assumptions of the study, only small biases are induced in the coefficients on widely-used regressors for subjective poverty and welfare.
The Challenge of Measuring Hunger

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2014-01) De Weerdt, Joachim ; Beegle, Kathleen ; Friedman, Jed ; Gibson, John

There is widespread interest in the number of hungry people in the world and trends in hunger. Current global counts rely on combining each country's total food balance with information on distribution patterns from household consumption expenditure surveys. Recent research has advocated for calculating hunger numbers directly from these same surveys. For either approach, embedded in this effort are a number of important details about how household surveys are designed and how these data are then used. Using a survey experiment in Tanzania, this study finds great fragility in hunger counts stemming from alternative survey designs. As a consequence, comparable and valid hunger numbers will be lacking until more effort is made to either harmonize survey designs or better understand the consequences of survey design variation.
HIV Testing, Behavior Change, and the Transition to Adulthood in Malawi

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2014-03) Beegle, Kathleen ; Poulin, Michelle ; Shapira, Gil

For young adults living in countries with AIDS epidemics, getting an HIV test may influence near-term decisions, such as when to leave school, when to marry, and when to have a first child. These behaviors, which define the transition from adolescence to adulthood, have long-term implications on well-being and directly affect a person's risk of contracting HIV. Using an experimental design embedded in a panel survey from Malawi, this study assesses the impact of voluntary counseling and testing of young adults for HIV on these decisions. The results show negligible intent-to-treat effect of HIV testing on behaviors. There is some suggestive evidence on differential response by wealth and by prior beliefs about one's status.
Child Labor, Income Shocks, and Access to Credit

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2003-06) Beegle, Kathleen ; Dehejia, Rajeev H. ; Gatti, Roberta

Although a growing theoretical literature points to credit constraints as an important source of inefficiently high child labor, little work has been done to assess its empirical relevance. Using panel data from Tanzania, the authors find that households respond to transitory income shocks by increasing child labor, but that the extent to which child labor is used as a buffer is lower when households have access to credit. These findings contribute to the empirical literature on the permanent income hypothesis by showing that credit-constrained households actively use child labor to smooth their income. Moreover, they highlight a potentially important determinant of child labor and, as a result, a mechanism that can be used to tackle it.
Labor Effects of Adult Mortality in Tanzanian Households

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2003-05) Beegle, Kathleen

Due to the HIV/AIDS epidemic, sub-Saharan populations are challenged with increasing adult mortality rates that have potentially profound economic implications. Yet, little is known about the impact of adult deaths in African households. Using panel data from Tanzania, this paper will explore how prime-age adult mortality impacts the time allocation of surviving household members and the portfolio of household farming activities. Analysis of farm and chore hours across demographic groups generally found small and insignificant changes in labor supply of individuals in households experiencing a prime-age adult death. While some farm activities are temporarily scaled back and wage employment falls after a male death, households did not shift cultivation towards subsistence food farming and did not appear to have reduced their diversification over income sources more than six months after a death.
Adult Mortality and Children's Transition into Marriage

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2007-02) Beegle, Kathleen ; Krutikova, Sofya

Adult mortality due to HIV/AIDS and other diseases is posited to affect children through a number of pathways. On top of health and education outcomes, adult mortality can have significant effects on children by influencing demographic outcomes including the timing of marriage. The authors examine marriage outcomes for a sample of children interviewed in Tanzania in the early 1990s and re-interviewed in 2004. They find that while girls who became paternal orphans married at significantly younger ages, orphanhood had little effect on boys. On the other hand, non-parental deaths in the household affect the timing of marriage for boys
The Consequences of Child Labor : Evidence from Longitudinal Data in Rural Tanzania

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2008-07) Beegle, Kathleen ; Dehejia, Rajeev H. ; Gatti, Roberta ; Krutikova, Sofya

This paper exploits a unique longitudinal data set from Tanzania to examine the consequences of child labor on education, employment choices, and marital status over a 10-year horizon. Shocks to crop production and rainfall are used as instrumental variables for child labor. For boys, the findings show that a one-standard-deviation (5.7 hour) increase in child labor leads 10 years later to a loss of approximately one year of schooling and to a substantial increase in the likelihood of farming and of marrying at a younger age. Strikingly, there are no significant effects on education for girls, but there is a significant increase in the likelihood of marrying young. The findings also show that crop shocks lead to an increase in agricultural work for boys and instead lead to an increase in chore hours for girls. The results are consistent with education being a lower priority for girls and/or with chores causing less disruption for education than agricultural work. The increased chore hours could also account for the results on marriage for girls.
The Long-run Impact of Orphanhood

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2007-09) Beegle, Kathleen ; De Weerdt, Joachim ; Dercon, Stefan

This paper presents unique evidence that orphanhood matters in the long run for health and education outcomes, in a region of Northwestern Tanzania. The paper studies a sample of 718 non-orphaned children surveyed in 1991-94, who were traced and re-interviewed as adults in 2004. A large proportion, 19 percent, lost one or more parents before the age of 15 in this period, allowing the authors to assess the permanent health and education impacts of orphanhood. The analysis controls for a wide range of child and adult characteristics before orphanhood, as well as community fixed effects. The findings show that maternal orphanhood has a permanent adverse impact of 2 cm of final height attainment and one year of educational attainment. Expressing welfare in terms of consumption expenditure, the result is a gap of 8.5 percent compared with similar children whose mother survived till at least their 15th birthday.