Essays in Development Economics

This dissertation consists of three essays in development economics. The first chapter es- timates the existence and prevalence of poverty traps using harmonized microdata from 27 randomized controlled trials covering 75,000 households and finds that while poverty traps are widespread, differences in productivity and forward-looking consumption responses allow many households to escape. The second chapter studies the interaction between spatial access costs and social image incentives in a Kenyan community deworming campaign, showing that when participation is observable, the social image return to participation partly offsets travel costs. The third chapter evaluates the scale-up of an incentive for immunization program in Pakistan, demonstrating how combining random and quasi-random variation with Bayesian smoothing can generate plausible impact estimates despite programmatic constraints.