Essays in Empirical Development Economics

Hidalgo Arestegui, Alessandra (2026) Essays in Empirical Development Economics. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.

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Abstract

This thesis comprises three empirical essays in development economics on how large shocks and public policies shape human capital formation, fertility, and labour-market outcomes in low- and middle-income countries. Using microdata from Peru and Zambia linked to administrative and geospatial sources, the chapters examine the intergenerational consequences of civil conflict, the effects of adolescent-friendly reproductive health services, and the gendered impacts of climate shocks. The first chapter, The long shadow of conflict on human capital: Intergenerational evidence from Peru, estimates the intergenerational impacts of mothers’ exposure to the 1980-2000 Peruvian civil conflict on their children’s socio-emotional skills development. Combining longitudinal data, which measures skills across a child’s life, with historical geo-located conflict data and exploiting spatial and temporal variation in conflict episodes, this chapter finds that mothers’ exposure to conflict has adverse intergenerational effects on their children’s socioemotional outcomes of agency and pride. These effects are present at ages 8 and 12 and are robust to alternative specifications. At age 15, mothers’ conflict exposure increases children’s propensity to engage in crime-related risky behaviour. The analysis of mechanisms highlights the role of reduced parental investments in children, driven by constrained household resources, a quality-quantity trade-off, and diminished maternal empowerment. Finally, an examination of the mother’s migration history reveals that migration decisions of her parents during the conflict partially mitigated the adverse effects on the socio-emotional development of their grandchildren. The second chapter, Impact of Adolescent-Friendly Family Planning Services on Teenage Fertility in Peru, evaluates a 2017 reform to Peru’s public family planning system that standardised a rights-based approach to adolescent service delivery and introduced confidential, adolescent-friendly protocols in a subset of facilities. Using difference-in-differences designs that leverage spatial variation in proximity to upgraded health centres, and combining administrative birth records with repeated cross-sections from the Demographic and Health Surveys, I find sustained reductions in adolescent fertility, delayed cohabitation and marriage, and fewer schooling interruptions linked to early family formation. The chapter also documents unequal gains, with larger impacts among relatively more advantaged adolescents, highlighting how universal reforms can translate into unequal effective access when stigma and provider discretion remain salient. Event-study estimates further show that the effects attenuate in 2020, during the COVID-19 interruption of non-urgent reproductive health services, and rebound when service provision is restored. The third chapter, The gendered effects of climate shocks on labour and welfare in Zambia, examines the gendered consequences of climate shocks in Zambia and the extent to which formal safety nets mitigate their effects. I merge nationally representative labour-force and living-conditions surveys with high-resolution measures of rainfall and temperature shocks to characterise how extreme precipitation and heat affect employment and welfare. The results show that adverse climate conditions reduce labour force participation and reallocate work toward self-employment, with consistently larger responses among women. These labour-market adjustments translate into measurable welfare impacts: shocks reduce household income and food consumption, indicating incomplete consumption smoothing. Exploiting variation in exposure to Zambia’s social cash transfer programme, I show that transfers provide only partial insurance against these climate-related losses. Across chapters, the evidence shows that the effects of shocks and policy changes depend on when exposure occurs over the life cycle and on household and institutional channels that shape investments, labour supply adjustment, and risk management, with persistent distributional consequences by gender and socio-economic status.