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This paper describes emerging work in development economics at the intersection of hope, poverty and material prosperity. We blend Sen’s capability approach and Snyder’s hope theory to provide a conceptual framework for integrating hope into development eco-nomics. This framework emphasizes the interplay of internal and external constraints, belief updating and differential malleability of hope between children and adults. The paper then surveys the recent literature in development economics related to Snyder’s components of hope: aspirations, pathways and agency. This survey focuses primarily on the domains of education, employment and enterprise and uses the Sen-Snyder framework to synthesize patterns in these results. It concludes with a discussion of promising research frontiers for development economists, including the need to understand how complementarities between hope components shape realized outcomes and to accommodate distinctive features of hope as it is experienced by the poor in non-Western contexts.

Recent evidence suggests political polarization in the United States has magnified the role of political identity in shaping behavioral responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. We merge U.S. county-level data on mask-wearing, cell-phone mobility, county characteristics, and variables reflecting conservative political identity with data on COVID-19 cases and deaths from the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. State-level fixed-effect estimations controlling for county characteristics indicate every 10 percentage point increase in the county popular vote for President Trump in the 2020 election to be associated with a 4.3 percentage point decline in public mask-wearing, a 0.19 decline in a COVID-19 safety index, and an increase in 811 COVID-19 cases and 17 COVID-19 deaths per 100,000 county residents. Once we control for the county-level Trump vote, measures of traditional American conservatism, including gun ownership, lower state tax rates, and the availability of abortion, display little systematic explanatory power over COVID-safety behaviors, cases, and deaths.

Cleft Lip/Palate (CLP) is a congenital orofacial anomaly appearing in approximately one in 700 births worldwide. While in high-income countries CLP is normally addressed surgically during infancy, in developing countries CLP is often left unoperated, potentially impacting multiple dimensions of life quality. Previous research has frequently compared CLP outcomes to those of the general population. But because local environmental and genetic factors both contribute to the risk of CLP and also may influence life outcomes, such studies may present a downward bias in estimates of both CLP status and restorative surgery. Working with the non- profit organization Operation Smile, this research uses quasi-experimental causal methods on a novel data set of 1,118 Indian children to study the impact of CLP status and CLP correction on the physical, psychological, and social well-being of Indian teenagers. Our results indicate that adolescents with median-level CLP severity show statistically significant losses in indices of speech quality (-1.55), academic and cognitive ability (-0.43), physical well-being (-0.35), psychological well-being (-0.23), and social inclusion (-0.35). We find that CLP surgery improves speech if carried out at an early age, and that it significantly restores social inclusion.

The role of aspirations in facilitating movement out of poverty is a subject of increasing research in development economics. Previous work (Wydick, Glewwe, and Rutledge, 2013 and 2017) finds positive impacts from international child sponsorship on educational attainment, employment, and adult income. This paper seeks to ascertain whether the positive impact of child sponsorship on educational outcomes may occur through elevating aspirations among sponsored children. Using an age-eligibility rule applied during program rollout to identify causal effects, we study whether international child sponsorship increases educational and vocational aspirations among a sample of 2,022 children in Kenya, Indonesia, and Mexico. While effects are heterogeneous and strongest in Kenya, we find that over the three countries sponsorship increased indices of self-esteem (0.25σ), optimism (0.26σ), aspirations (0.29σ) and expected grade of completed education (0.43 years). We find that sponsorship increases actual grade completion by 0.56 among children at the time of the survey. Mediation analysis suggests that the impact of sponsorship on aspirations is likely to act as a channel for higher levels of grade completion.

We carry out a cluster-randomized trial among 1,578 children from 979 households in rural El Salvador to test the impacts of TOMS shoe donations on children’s time allocation, school attendance, health, self-esteem, and aid dependency. Results indicate high levels of usage and approval of the shoes by children in the treatment group, and time diaries show modest evidence that the donated shoes allocated children’s time toward outdoor activities.Difference-in-difference and ANCOVA estimates find generally insignificant impacts on overall health, foot health, and self-esteem but small positive impacts on school attendance for boys. Children receiving the shoes were significantly more likely to state that outsiders should provide for the needs of their family. Thus, in a context where most children already own at least one pair of shoes, the overall impact of the shoe donation program appears to be negligible, illustrating the importance of more careful targeting of in-kind donation programs.

Cash transfers have emerged over the last two decades as one of themost widespread and highly researched poverty interventions. The use ofcash transfers to create a Basic Minimum Income (BMI) has become animportant policy debate. Extensive research has been carried out on theimpact of both conditional and unconditional cash transfers. Some of thisevidence finds that cash transfers can lead to long-term, transformativeeffects on economic well-being, while in other contexts, the effects appear tobe limited to increases in short-term consumption. This paper reviews theliterature on the impacts of cash transfers. It then presents a simple modelthat seeks to understand when we can expect cash transfers to havetransformative effects in which the income of recipients transitions to asignificantly and sustainably higher level. Behavioral extensions to themodel show how responses to cash transfers may change when we accountfor endogenous discount rates, cognitive ability, and aspirations.

The study uses a cluster-randomized trial among 1,578 children from 979 households in rural El Salvador to test the impacts of TOMS shoe donations on children's time allocation, school attendance, health, self-esteem, and aid dependency. Results indicate high levels of usage and approval of the shoes by children in the treatment group, and time diaries show modest evidence that the donated shoes allocated children's time toward outdoor activities. Difference-in-difference and ANCOVA estimates find generally insignificant impacts on overall health, foot health, and self-esteem but small positive impacts on school attendance for boys. Children receiving the shoes were significantly more likely to state that outsiders should provide for the needs of their family. Thus, in a context where most children already own at least one pair of shoes, the overall impact of the shoe donation program appears to be negligible, illustrating the importance of more careful targeting of in-kind donation programs.