Tseday Jemaneh Mekasha

Ph.d.-forsvar: Tseday Jemaneh Mekasha: "Macroeconomic Shocks and Inflation, Social Protection and Aid Effectiveness"

This thesis comprises five self-contained chapters. The first chapter studies how participation in social protection programs affects household size and composition. The issue is investigated using survey data from the Ethiopian Productive Safety Net Program (PSNP), where households receive cash transfers conditional on participation in labor intensive public works. The chapter also looks into potential mechanisms through which participation in the program may lead to changes in household size and composition.

The second chapter builds upon chapter one and further examines how the level of financial gain from participation in PSNP and the associated labor supply requirement affect household structure. In particular this chapter aims to disentangle the income effect of the program from the effect that comes through the labor supply conditionality and investigates how these two channels work in terms of changing household structure.

The third chapter empirically examines how macroeconomic shocks affect consumer price and its disaggregated components in Ethiopia with a particular focus on shocks to the nominal exchange rate. This is done using a Structural VAR approach where identification of the structural shocks is achieved based on a combination of short and long run restrictions.

The last two chapters present empirical evidence on aid effectiveness focusing on the impact of aid on economic growth. While chapter four presents evidence using a meta-analysis tool to assess what the accumulated empirical evidence, on average, has to say about aid effectiveness, chapter five employs a panel VAR model and examines the impact of aid on growth for a group of countries.