Essays on Impacts of Cell Phones on Agriculture and Labor Market Decisions in Pakistan

In this dissertation, I study the impact of cell phones on agriculture and labor market decisions in context of Pakistan. In the second chapter, I look at the impact of access to cell phone coverage on production choices of farmers in rural Pakistan using a spatial regression discontinuity design. In the third chapter, I study the impact of cell phone network quality on women's economic participation using new data from a nationally representative survey in Pakistan. In the fourth chapter, I study the impact of cell phones on trader efficiency and perishable crop quality using new micro-transaction records data. A transition to cash crop production is widely considered to be a principal path- way for poverty reduction and economic development. However, cash crops are often perishable, and therefore suffer from a high risk of incurring post-harvest losses when modern storage is unavailable and market linkages are weak. In the second chapter, I utilize administrative village census data and primary household survey data I collected in rural Pakistan, to estimate the impact of cell phone access on crop choice, farmer-trader coordination, and post-harvest losses. To deal with endogeneity of cell phone tower placement, I exploit a policy that restricts cell phone coverage in Pakistan from villages that lie within 10 km of the Indian border. Regression discontinuity estimates of village level data indicate that cell phone access causes an increase in the probability of producing perishable crops. To uncover the distinct impacts of cell phone access on crop choice and farmer-trader coordination, I estimate the household level regressions by degree of perishability. Results show that cell phones only have a strong positive effect on plantation and farmer-trader coordination for perishable crops. Farmers' agricultural income and household consumption increase. In the third chapter, I study the impact of reliability of communication network on labor market outcomes for women in Pakistan. In the context of developing countries such as Pakistan, cultural constraints and high incidence of violence against women, restricts women to engage in economic opportunities with low returns and low mobility. Access to a safe and reliable communication network can allow women to communicate with their households while traveling. This allows them to engage in high return economic opportunities. Using data from a new module, that I designed, for the nationally representative Pakistan Social and Living Standards Measurement Survey(PSLM), I look at the impact of reliability of communication network on economic participation of women in Pakistan. For identification, I make use of a natural experiment, where a computerized numbering system in Pakistan randomly assigns numbers to different destination codes. The variation in destination codes induces variation in network quality. Results show that reliable communication network leads to increase in women's economic participation. Moreover, women shift towards high return mobility requiring activities; leading to substantial income gains. In the fourth chapter, I look at the impact of farmers' cell phone access on efficiency of agriculture crop traders in rural Pakistan. The trade of perishable crops in developing countries remains inefficient due to lack of timely coordination and communications between farmers and traders. In this chapter, I utilize a high frequency data of micro-transactions in one of the study districts from Chapter 2, to look at the impact of cell phone coverage on the efficiency of trade. Applying Spatial Regression Discontinuity Methods to transaction records, I find that access to cell phone coverage leads to a decrease in the percentage of crop not purchased due to capacity constraint as well as an increase in the quality of crops purchased.