Vakis, Renos

Person:
Vakis, Renos

Poverty and Equity Global Practice

Fields of Specialization

Measuring Poverty, Gender, Social Protection and Labor

External Links

RePEc
Google

Departments

Poverty and Equity Global Practice

Last updated: November 22, 2024

Biography

Renos Vakis is a Lead Economist with the Poverty and Equity Global Practice where he co-leads the Mind, Behavior, and Development Unit (eMBeD). The unit integrates behavioral science in the design of anti-poverty policies in a wide range of issues such as financial inclusion, early childhood development, social protection, health and education. As a member of the Living Standards Measurement Study (LSMS) team in the Development Data Group of the World Bank, he also conducts experiments to improve household survey measures of behavioral dimensions of well-being. He has written extensively on issues related to poverty dynamics and mobility, risk management, social protection, market failures and rural development, especially in Latin America and South Asia and has led the design of impact evaluation of anti-poverty interventions in various settings. Most recently, he has completed a book on Chronic Poverty in Latin America and the Caribbean. Renos has also taught economics at Johns Hopkins University (SAIS). He holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.

Full item page

Publication Search Results

Now showing 1 - 10 of 29

Behaviorally Informed Messages Increase COVID-19 Vaccination Intentions: Insights from a Global Meta-Analysis
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-11-22) Pinzon Hernandez, Daniel Alejandro; Lim, Jungkyu Rhys; Dugas, Michelle; Moscoe, Ellen; Chatila, Mohamad; Cameron, Corey; Vakis, Renos; Afif, Zeina; Orozco Olvera, Victor Hugo
During the COVID-19 pandemic, low- and middle-income countries struggled with lower vaccination rates compared to wealthier countries, posing challenges to reducing virus transmission, mitigating healthcare system pressures, and promoting economic recovery. Communications campaigns offer low-cost opportunities to overcome such challenges by strengthening vaccine confidence and intentions to get vaccinated, but empirical testing is needed to identify which messages will be most effective in different contexts. To support policy-making efforts to design effective communication rapidly during the pandemic, a global research program of 28 online experiments was conducted by recruiting respondents (123,270 individuals) through social media between January 2021 and June 2022 across 23 mostly low- and middle-income countries and territories. An individual participant data (IPD) meta-analysis of these data summarizes the results of this research program testing the impact of behaviorally informed messaging on vaccine intentions. Results from the meta-analysis show that among unvaccinated survey respondents, behaviorally informed messages significantly increased the odds of vaccination intention by 1.28 times overall and up to 1.93 times in individual studies (safety messages in Papua New Guinea). Significant pooled effects of specific framings ranged from increasing the odds of vaccination intention by 1.16 times (variant framing) to 1.45 times (experts and religious leaders framing). This research underscores the importance of communication tailored to address different drivers of vaccine hesitancy and offers insights for handling future health crises with behavioral communication strategies leveraging rapid insights afforded by social media.
Find the Fake: Boosting Resistance to Health Misinformation in Jordan with a WhatsApp Chatbot Game
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-09-30) Dugas, Michelle; Pinzón, Daniel; Lim, Jungkyu Rhys; Vakis, Renos; Afif, Zeina; Hasumi, Takahiro; Elfadel, Diya
The proliferation of misinformation and disinformation threatens to erode the credibility of public institutions and limit their capacity to implement policies that enhance public well-being. While health misinformation represents an urgent global challenge, relatively little research has examined solutions in low- and middle-income countries. This study experimentally tests the impact of a novel WhatsApp chatbot game pre-bunking inoculation intervention in Jordan to boost capacity to identify common misinformation techniques and reduce the likelihood of sharing misleading headlines with otherseffectively “inoculating” them against health misinformation. A sample of 2,851 participants was recruited online and randomly assigned to five study arms: (1) comprehensive game-based inoculation, (2) brief game-based inoculation that highlighted examples of only misinformation, (3) infographics-based inoculation, (4) exposure to placebo infographics unrelated to misinformation, and (5) pure control. To evaluate the impact of the intervention, the study assesses two main outcomes: (1) ability to discern accurately headlines using misinformation techniques and headlines that do not use misinformation techniques, and (2) discernment in sharing the two types of headlines. Compared to the placebo group, the comprehensive game significantly improved discernment of misinformation and reduced the likelihood of sharing misleading headlines. A brief version of the game yielded weaker effects on discernment of misinformation, but similarly reduced intentions to share misleading headlines. In contrast, exposure to infographics teaching similar techniques showed no significant impacts on discernment of misinformation, and marginal effects on intention to share misleading headlines. These findings suggest that games can effectively inoculate the public against misinformation in the context of a middle-income country in the short term. Future research is needed to explore the boundary conditions of the findings.
Poor Expectations: Experimental Evidence on Teachers' Stereotypes and Student Assessment
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-03) Farfan Bertran, Maria Gabriela; Holla, Alaka; Vakis, Renos
Do teachers’ stereotypes of social class bias their assessment of students? This study uses a lab-in-the-field experiment among primary school teachers to test whether they are biased against poor students. Teachers assessed a student in a video of an oral exam after watching one of two versions of an introductory video that portrayed the child’s home and playground. When the student in the exam video exhibited inconsistent performance, showing varying levels of scholastic aptitude and focus during the exam, teachers were far more likely to judge his scholastic aptitude as below grade-level if they had watched the introductory video portraying a poor background than if they had watched the introductory video portraying a middle-class background. The social class background portrayed in the introductory video did not affect teachers’ behavioral assessments of the student. When the student in the exam video was consistently high achieving, showing high levels of scholastic aptitude and focus throughout the exam, teachers who watched the introductory video depicting a poor background were more likely to assess the student as above grade-level than teachers who watched the video conveying a middle-class background. In this case, however, they had a more negative assessment of the child’s behavior when they thought he came from a poor background, deeming him to be less motivated and less emotionally mature than when the introductory video depicted a middle-class background. These findings suggest that stereotypes influence how teachers assess the scholastic aptitude and behavior of their students.
Behavioral Science and COVID-19: An Interactive Solutions Guide for Better Policy Design
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2022-07-27) Lim, JungKyu Rhys; Vakis, Renos; Cameron, Corey; Dugas, Michelle
The first Coronavirus (COVID-19) cases were reported in December 2019 (WHO, 2020). Governments around the world have tried various interventions to stop the COVID-19 spread and encourage vaccination. With growing evidence of the governments’ COVID-19 efforts to deal with the pandemic, this guide aims to summarize interventions and applications, and their effectiveness to address the following three COVID-19 topics: How to reduce COVID-19 spread; How to encourage people to get vaccinated; and How to address misinformation and fake news.
The Behavioral Professional: Improving Decision-Making and Performance in the Public Sector
(Washington, DC : World Bank, 2022) Lourenço, Joana S.; Vakis, Renos; Zoratto, Laura
Over the past decade, governments, multilateral organizations, and think tanks have been increasingly using behavioral science as an additional tool to understand and tackle complex policy challenges in several sectors. Yet despite this increase in the use of behavioral science for policy design, little attention has been given so far to those individuals responsible for designing and implementing public policies and programs: policy professionals. This note aims to achieve three objectives. first, it highlights recent examples building on work done by the eMBeD team and the World Bank at large on how behavioral bottlenecks can hinder key development goals, from ensuring inclusive and equitable education for all (SDG4) to ensuring good health and well-being (SDG3), among others. Second, the note presents a behavioral framework highlighting the individual, group and institutional contexts that affect policy professionals. Finally, it showcases the relevance of the behavioral approach to a broad range of areas - including public service design, corruption and accountability, service design, access and delivery, civil servants’ performance - by pinpointing common bottlenecks faced, and potential solutions to overcome them.
Transfers, Diversification and Household Risk Strategies: Can productive safety nets help households manage climatic variability?
(Oxford University Press, 2022-03-30) Macours, Karen; Premand, Patrick; Vakis, Renos
Despite increasing climatic variability and frequent weather shocks in many developing countries, there is little evidence on effective policies that help poor agricultural households manage risk. This paper presents experimental evidence on a program in rural Nicaragua aimed at improving households’ risk-management through income diversification. The intervention targeted agricultural households exposed to weather shocks and combined a one-year conditional cash transfer with vocational training or a productive investment grant. We identify the relative impact of each complementary package based on randomized assignment and analyse how impacts vary by exposure to exogenous drought shocks. The results show that both complementary interventions provide protection against weather shocks two years after the programme ended. Households that received the productive investment grant also had higher average consumption levels. The complementary interventions facilitated income smoothing and diversification of economic activities, as such offering better protection from shocks compared to beneficiaries of the basic conditional cash transfer and control households. Relaxing capital constraints induced investments in non-agricultural businesses, while relaxing skills constraints increased wage work and migration in response to shocks. These results show that combining safety nets with productive interventions relaxing skill or capital constraints can help households become more resilient and manage climatic variability.
Texting Parents about Early Child Development: Behavioral Changes and Unintended Social Effects
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-12) Barrera, Oscar; Macours, Karen; Premand, Patrick; Vakis, Renos
Parenting interventions have the potential to improve early childhood development. Text messages are considered a promising channel to deliver parenting information at large scale. This paper tests whether sending text messages about parenting practices impacts early childhood development. Households in rural Nicaragua were randomly assigned to receive messages about nutrition, health, stimulation, or the home environment. The intervention led to significant changes in self-reported parenting practices. However, it did not translate into improvements in children's cognitive development. When local opinion leaders were randomly exposed to the same text message intervention, parental investments declined and children's outcomes deteriorated. Since interactions between parents and leaders about child development also decreased, the negative effects may have resulted from a crowding-out of some local leaders.
The Power of Believing You Can Get Smarter: The Impact of a Growth-Mindset Intervention on Academic Achievement in Peru
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-02) Outes-Leon, Ingo; Sanchez, Alan; Vakis, Renos
This paper evaluates the academic impact of a growth-mindset intervention on students starting the secondary level in public schools in urban Peru. ¡Expande tu Mente! is a 90-minute school session aimed at instilling the notion that a person's own intelligence is malleable. Students in schools randomly assigned to treatment showed a small improvement in math test scores and educational expectations, with a large and sustained impact in test scores among students outside the capital city. At a cost of $0.20 per pupil, ¡Expande tu Mente! was highly cost-effective. The results show the potential that brief growth-mindset interventions have for developing countries.
Obesity and Food Away from Home: What Drives the Socioeconomic Gradient in Excess Body Weight ?
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-11) Strupat, Christoph; Farfan, Gabriela; Moritz, Laura; Negre, Mario; Vakis, Renos
Rising obesity rates are one of the most challenging public health issues in many emerging economies. The extent to which the nutritional composition of food consumed away from home is behind this rise, and the links with socioeconomic status, is not yet well understood. This paper explores this question by combining a representative restaurant survey that includes detailed information on the nutritional composition of the most widely consumed meals in Metropolitan Lima and a representative household survey with anthropometric measures of adult women. The findings indicate that the nutritional quality in restaurants located in the food environment of the households is significantly associated with higher rates of obesity and overweight. Up to 15 percent of the socioeconomic gradient in obesity is attributable to restaurant food quality, with sodium being the main driver. This highlights the importance of considering the food environment to inform public health policies, particularly for the poor.
Poverty Measurement in the Era of Food Away from Home: Testing Alternative Approaches in Vietnam
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-01) Farfan, Gabriela; McGee, Kevin Robert; Perng, Julie; Vakis, Renos
Food consumed outside the home in restaurants or other food establishments is a growing segment of consumption in many developing countries. However, the survey methods that are utilized to collect data on expenditures on food away from home are often simplistic and could potentially result in inaccurate reporting. This study addresses the potential inaccuracy of commonly used methods and tests potentially superior methods to inform best practices when collecting data on consumption of food away from home. A household survey experiment was implemented in Hanoi, Vietnam, to test these different methods. Using a food away from home consumption diary as a benchmark, the study finds that many of the alternative methods considered -- including asking about consumption in one line (the existing practice in Vietnam) or asking each individual about their food away from home -- lead to underreporting (33 and 22 percent underestimates, respectively). Surprisingly, using one respondent and helping them with recall with a simple worksheet as well as bounding (two-visits) results in food away from home estimates that are indistinguishable from those reported in the benchmark diary. This finding implies that there is a more cost-effective way to collect accurate data on food away from home than an intensive daily diary. Furthermore, it highlights the inaccuracy associated with collecting data on consumption of food away from home from a single question in a survey. Although limited analysis can be conducted on the implications for poverty, the study finds that the profiles of the poorest households differ across different methods of collecting information on food consumed away from home.