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Functioning democracy requires that citizens reward politicians who deliver benefits, yet there is surprisingly little causal evidence of changes in citizen views or behavior in response to specific government programs. This question is examined in Tanzania, which has recently implemented large health programs targeting diseases such as HIV/AIDS and malaria. Tanzania's 2010-2011 national anti-malaria campaign took place concurrently with a national household survey, which enables a regression discontinuity design based on interview date to estimate the effect of this program on the popularity of local politicians. Bed net distribution results in large, statistically significant improvements in the approval levels of political leaders, especially in malaria endemic areas. Effects are largest shortly after program implementation, but smaller effects persist for up to six months. These findings suggest that citizens update their evaluation of politicians in response to programs, especially when these services address important problems, and that the effects decay over time, but not completely.

Health --- Insecticide-Treated Bed Nets --- Malaria --- Political Economy --- Regression Discontinuity Design

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Occupational segregation is a central contributor to the gap between male and female earnings worldwide. As new sectors of employment emerge, a key question is whether this pattern is replicated. This paper examines this question by focusing on the emerging information and communications technology sector in Nigeria. Using a randomized control trial, the paper examines the impacts of an information and communications technology training intervention that targeted university graduates in five major cities. The analysis finds that after two years the treatment group was 26 percent more likely to work in the information and communications technology sector. The program appears to have succeeded only in shifting employment to the new sector, as it had no average impact on the overall likelihood of being employed. However, viewed through the lens of occupational segregation, the program had a surprising effect. For women who at baseline were implicitly biased against associating women with professional attributes, the likelihood that the program induced switching into the information and communications technology sector was more than three times as large than that of unbiased women. These results suggest that training programs can help individuals overcome self-defeating biases that could hamper mobility and reduce efficiency in the labor market.

Active Labor Market Programs --- Formal Training Programs --- Occupational Mobility --- Randomized Experiment

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As mobile phone ownership rates have risen in Africa, there is increased interest in using mobile telephony as a data collection platform. This paper draws on two pilot projects that use mobile phone interviews for data collection in Tanzania and South Sudan. The experience was largely a success. High frequency panel data have been collected on a wide range of topics in a manner that is cost effective, flexible (questions can be changed over time) and rapid. And once households respond to the mobile phone interviews, they tend not to drop out: even after 33 rounds of interviews in the Tanzania survey, respondent fatigue proved not to be an issue. Attrition and non-response have been an issue in the Tanzania survey, but in ways that are related to the way this survey was originally set up and that are fixable. Data and reports from the Tanzania survey are available online and can be downloaded from: www.listeningtodar.org.

Data collection --- E-Business --- E-Government --- Listening to Africa --- Macroeconomics and Economic Growth --- Mobile phone --- Participations and Civic Engagement --- Poverty Reduction --- Social Accountability --- Social Analysis --- Survey

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The WHO has recently debated whether to reaffirm its long-standing recommendation of mass drug administration (MDA) in areas with more than 20 percent prevalence of soil-transmitted helminths (hookworm, whipworm, and roundworm). There is consensus that the relevant deworming drugs are safe and effective, so the key question facing policymakers is whether the expected benefits of MDA exceed the roughly USD 0.30 per treatment cost. The literature on long run educational and economic impacts of deworming suggests that this is the case. However, a recent meta-analysis by Taylor-Robinson and others (2015), (hereafter TMSDG), disputes these findings. The authors conclude that while treatment of children known to be infected increases weight by 0.75 kg (95 percent CI: 0.24, 1.26; p=0.0038), there is substantial evidence that MDA has no impact on weight or other child outcomes. This paper updates the TMSDG analysis by including studies omitted from that analysis and extracting additional data from included studies, and finds that the TMSDG analysis is underpowered: Power is inadequate to rule out weight gain effects that would make MDA cost effective relative to comparable interventions in similar populations, and underpowered to reject the hypothesis that the effect of MDA is different from the effect that might expected, given deworming's effects on those known to be infected. The hypothesis of a common zero effect of multiple-dose MDA deworming on child weight at longest follow-up is rejected at the 10 percent level using the TMSDG dataset, and with a p value < 0.001 using the updated sample. In the full sample, including studies in settings where prevalence is low enough that the WHO does not recommend deworming, the average effect on child weight is 0.134 kg (95 percent CI: 0.031, 0.236, random effects). In environments with greater than 20 percent prevalence, where the WHO recommends mass treatment, the average effect on child weight is 0.148 kg (95 percent CI: 0.039, 0.258). The implied average effect of MDA on infected children in the full sample is 0.301 kg. At 0.22 kg per U.S. dollar, the estimated average weight gain per dollar is more than 35 times that from school feeding programs as estimated in RCTs. Under-powered meta-analyses are common in health research, and this methodological issue will be increasingly important as growing numbers of economists and other social scientists conduct meta-analysis.

Cost-Effectiveness --- Deworming --- Meta-Analysis --- Nutrition