 So, please, go ahead. I'm Alamayo. I'm presenting work that has been going on with my colleagues Tonghi Bernard, Seth Handelkorn, Catorcan, and myself. This is part of a larger research agenda that focuses on the measurement formation and impact of aspirations. This is specifically related to Ethiopia. I'll start with a summary. So I'll give you the results. And then if somebody wants to leave, they can. So the basic question we like to answer is poor people underinvest. If they underinvest, that means they stay poor. Do their aspirations matter in this outcome? That's the basic question we like to answer. And in order to get to answers, we adopted a strategy of assigning randomly selected households in Ethiopia from randomly selected villages to a treatment. This treatment is roughly an hour documentary of relatively successful farmers or village residents that these randomly selected households may identify with. It does not involve any other treatment. That means only aspirations are to affect it rather than their material outcomes. And we have a very good balance at baseline in terms of different characteristics, including aspirations themselves. Key findings. We have measured aspirations at the baseline, as usual, and then right after the treatment, as well as six months after the treatment. And we identify some improvement in aspirations of those treated. We also observed some changes in psychosocial characteristics, such as local self-control, perception about poverty, and so on. But no impact on the usual characteristics that economists focus on, namely risk preference, risk and time preferences. These were not significantly affected by this. Similarly, so far this was about beliefs and preferences. Then we have about behavior. What is the impact on behavior? We find some impact on savings and credit behavior. In particular, those treated appear to use their savings more frequently. And they are also more willing to borrow in a hypothetical credit exercise. They have higher demand. They enroll their children more than those who are not treated. And they spend more on their kids after screening. Although some of these results disappear or become less significant or insignificant once we control for multiple testing involved in our exercise. Outline, brief motivation. Now you can leave. A bit of a description of aspirations and the results, the design results of our field experiment. In this regard, our focus on, my report focuses on the direct effects of aspiration. Although I briefly summarize various effects that we observe in beliefs, preferences, and future-oriented behavior. So why aspirations? The key question, as I said earlier, is related to the observed underinvestment by the poor. There is now sufficiently convincing evidence that the poor do not invest as much as they should to change their economic future even when returns and opportunities are available. And the question we are going to look at is because the underinvestment by the poor is a source of persistence in poverty and inequality, is it possible to provide some answers in this regard related to aspirations? Now the first motivation is conceptual. A lot of development theory and practice focuses on what is called opportunities. I don't have to tell you this. The poor are poor because they like capital, they are no markets, they are not educated, and so on and so forth. So focus on opportunities as standard and deservedly so and correctly so. But it is incomplete in my view, and then completeness emerged in two ways. First of all, even when there are opportunities, you observe that the poor do not exploit them. So that should be explained. But the second and perhaps more important aspect is that opportunities are created. Today's developed countries were not created developed. And as you know, a lot of these countries didn't have foreign aid. And also, one can argue, of course, that colonialism helped and stuff like that, but the thing is always individually and collectively, opportunities are created. They do not exist once and for all. So this focus on conceptual and practical focus on opportunities is incomplete for these two reasons. And we try to contribute in explaining some of these aspects. Obviously economists and other social scientists have been working on answering some of these questions. A lot of them focus on external circumstances and, as I said, opportunities. Market failures lead to low returns to investments. Therefore, people do not invest. For instance, they don't send their kids to school because there is no credit market, which allows them to finance expenses in school. Or they do not start their businesses again because there's no credit market. There is also some explanation on the basis of information and knowledge and lack of these two and sufficient quantity. And again, still focusing on these external circumstances. Egalitarian norms, reducing what ultimately is appropriated by the investor, are also identified as a possible expansion, including high taxes. More recently, identity issues and psychology have come into play. And the aspirations framework I talk about is of these second type. In effect, it focuses on the internal logic the poor may have in making decisions and how these external circumstances, including their poverty status, condition that logic. So what are aspirations? Again, there is no general accepted definition. We'll use this one. We believe that this is perhaps the best definition. Aspirations are goals or boundary states sought after with respect to a relevant domain of choice. A lot of familiarity here is in terms of occupational choice and educational targets. A lot of people express aspirations in terms of what they would like to be. Some of us wanted to be engineers. Economists are considered to be frustrated physicists for instance, and the implication of that to how they behave and so on. So aspirations are goals or boundary states. In that sense, they are akin to preferences. They are, for me, a type of preferences. And they are about the future, of course. They are different from expectations because expectations are beliefs. I don't want to engage in this discussion, but I argue that aspirations are preferences. Why are they important? One, they are motivators. They condition behavior. I want to be an engineer. I try hard to get. I want to be rich. I do accordingly. Always, it doesn't work always, but that's the idea. They are motivators, and as a result, they influence individual behavior and outcomes. Second, they are not evenly distributed within communities because different people, different members of the same community have different aspirations. And third, they depend on where we are and they change accordingly. So the specific question I described several times earlier. This requires, first of all, measuring aspirations, which is not straightforward. And then it is important to introduce an exogenous shock, aspirational shock, because aspirations are obviously endogenous. In order to identify any change in them, it is important to introduce some change from outside, from outside the system. And third, I would like to estimate the impact of aspirations. The impact on aspirations and related determinants as well as behavior. So this is the brief description of the design. 64 villages in Ethiopia were randomly selected in a particular district. The size of these villages are comparable. They contain 50 to 100 households. So village size is not particularly a major difference. In each village, 18 households were selected for treatment, placebo, and control. Six households are exposed to the documentary. And because, as you know, these are rural communities with limited experience to modern media, a placebo effect may take place. And in order to control for this event itself, we have a placebo, which I'll describe very briefly. And finally, there are six households who are not invited to any of these treatments, as well as placebo. Whenever present, both the head and the spouse are treated accordingly. So the three arms, the treatment, as I said, is exposure to four mini-documentaries about successful people from Ethiopia speaking the same language so that the treated people would identify with them. As I said, there is no other intervention. And for those of you who are keen on these things, they are online. We have examples of these documentaries, as well as the placebo online on YouTube. The placebo is a TV show, essentially, 15-minute segments of dramatic presentations. Three rounds of data collection, baseline, and a collection on aspiration right after the screening. And finally, a follow-up, six months. These are the pictures. So we focus on four dimensions of aspirations, although, as you know, aspirations can be very widespread. Multiple, annual income, and cash assets as a measure of essentially durables and standard of living, social status as measured by how many people or a vast fraction of the village seek the advice of the individual on major decisions. And education, specifically, aspiration regarding the level of education that the oldest child is desired to achieve. We have two questions emphasizing the distinction between aspirations and expectations. The aspiration question focuses on what the person would like to achieve, while the expectation question focuses on what the person thinks will achieve or reach within the next 10 years after that. And we construct an index using the level of aspirations reported, the mean of that domain in that village, the standard deviation in the same village, and each is weighted by an individual selected weight. What we did is we gave them 20 pebbles and asked them to allocate it over the four quadrants, each quadrant representing one of these dimensions. So these attempts to measure the importance they attach to each of them, and that is used as, right. So this is the standardized aspiration measure we use. This is a specification. So it's ANOVA, COVA. So clearly this is the end line measure of the aspiration variable or the expectation variable, the outcome variable we have. And then this is the treatment. This is the placebo. This is lagged outcome variable. And we have controls, village level fixed effects, and individual fixed effects. Or individual error, sorry. And the key thing is that because a lot of these are measured at the household level, household level-crested standard errors are used. I'll report on two. So small effects on aspiration immediately observed. Roughly, look at this and this, there are about 20% of a standard deviation in each of these, standard deviation or aspiration or standard deviation of expectations. They're relatively small, but significant impact. If any project can have such an impact, it would be very, very happy. It is usually 20% of a standard deviation is usually the minimum detectable effect size project evaluation users. So treatment increased aspirations right after the screening, as well as expectations significantly. And the specification we have to focus on is this one where we control for village level effects, lagged outcome, and controls the third one. And here also we have, let's see. So corresponding to the treatment effect, we don't observe a placebo effect, effect coming from being exposed to the placebo. Six months later, the effect is still there, but it is reduced. It says now three to five percent of standard deviation. Still there is no placebo effect. But there is an interesting hypothesis we tested and that is, does the effect after six months statistically differ from the effect right after the treatment or right after the screening and we could not reject the equality of the two. It cuts both ways. The main thing is that the persistence, it's a further evidence of the persistence of the effect. Now to conclude, I just summarized some of the other results. So what we found as I showed you is the fact that watching the documentaries improves aspirations. Compared to control group. And in some cases, compared to the placebo group. But because we did not have a pure controlled village or a pure placebo village, it is not possible to strongly establish or strongly and unambiguously compare placebo with the treatment or the treatment group. Even those households in the placebo group had leave in the treatment in a village where the screening of documentaries happened. Always this impact is heterogeneous. This is the last slide. The impact is heterogeneous and we test for that and discover that a lot of the impact is actually achieved or relates to those with above median aspiration from the beginning. So the impact is still is not experienced by those who have very low aspirations to begin with. This is no surprise for me because the treatment is very, very mild. It is a very weak treatment. Just showing documentaries too. No change in risk aversion and time preference. This is important because one of the hypothesis one could forward is that, well, people behave in this way because they are risk averse or they have a high discount. And we did not observe such a change. There are some change in locus of control, particularly the locus of control in the internal dimension. As you know, these three divisions, internality, believe in powerful others and believe in chance. And those with that we observe an important improvement, significant improvement in the internal locus of control. And people also, those who are treated change their perception about the cause of poverty from fatalistic to more individualistic perception. They attribute poverty a lot more to individual causes. In terms of forward-looking behavior, as I said, children's school enrollment increased. Yeah. Spending on their schooling also increased. Although, as I said, saving and credit effects disappear or stop becoming significant once we account for multiple testing. Finally, we also looked at the possibility of group effects and there is suggestive evidence that these reinforce individual effects in particular in terms of spending on children's education. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.