Person:
de Walque, Damien
Author Name Variants
Fields of Specialization
Education,
Macroeconomic and Structural Policies,
Health
Degrees
ORCID
External Links
Departments
Development Research Group
Externally Hosted Work
Contact Information
Last updated
January 31, 2023
Biography
Damien de Walque received his Ph.D.in Economics from the University of Chicago in 2003. His research interests include health and education and the interactions between them. His current work is focused on evaluating the impact of financial incentives on health and education outcomes. He is currently evaluating the education and health outcomes of conditional cash transfers linked to school attendance and health center visits in Burkina Faso. He is also working on evaluating the impact of HIV/AIDS interventions and policies in several African countries. He is leading two evaluations of the impact of short-term financial incentives on the prevention of HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted infections (STIs): individuals who test negatively for a set of STIs receive regular cash payment in Tanzania, while in Lesotho they receive lottery tickets. On the supply side of health services, he is managing a large portfolio of impact evaluations of results-based financing in the health sector. He has also edited a book on risky behaviors for health (smoking, drugs, alcohol, obesity, risky sex) in the developing world.
Publication Search Results
1 - 2 of 2
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Publication
The Intergenerational Mortality Tradeoff of COVID-19 Lockdown Policies
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-05)In lower-income countries, the economic contractions that accompany lockdowns to contain the spread of COVID-19 can increase child mortality, counteracting the mortality reductions achieved by the lockdown. To formalize and quantify this effect, this paper builds a macro-susceptible-infected-recovered model that features heterogeneous agents and a country-group-specific relationship between economic downturns and child mortality, and calibrate it to data for 85 countries across all income levels. The findings show that in low-income countries, a lockdown can potentially lead to 1.76 children’s lives lost due to the economic contraction per COVID-19 fatality averted. The ratio stands at 0.59 and 0.06 in lower-middle and upper-middle income countries, respectively. As a result, in some countries lockdowns can actually produce net increases in mortality. In contrast, the optimal lockdown that maximizes the present value of aggregate social welfare is shorter and milder in poorer countries than in rich ones, and never produces a net mortality increase. -
Publication
Early Education, Preferences, and Decision-Making Abilities
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-09)One way to advance understanding of individual differences in decision making is to study the development of children’s decision making. This paper studies the causal effects of daycare attendance on children’s economic preferences and decision-making abilities, exploiting a lottery system that randomized admissions into oversubscribed daycare centers in Rio de Janeiro. Overall, daycare attendance had no effect on economic preferences or decision-making abilities. However, it did increase aversion to disadvantageous inequality (having less than one’s peer). This increase is driven mostly by girls, a result that reproduces in a different study that randomized admissions into preschool education.