Eliana La Ferrara: Changing Harmful Norms through Information and Coordination

“Changing Harmful Norms through Information and Coordination: Experimental Evidence from Somalia”
Eliana La Ferrara
Harvard Kennedy School
Wednesday,March 5, 2025

Biography:
Eliana La Ferrara is Professor of Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. She received a PhD in Economics from Harvard in 1999. Prior to joining HKS, she was the Invernizzi Chair in Development Economics at Bocconi University, Milan, where she founded and directed the Laboratory for Effective Anti-poverty Policies (LEAP). She is a Past President of the Econometric Society, Foreign Honorary Member of the American Economic Association, and International Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is also NBER Research Associate, Director of Development Economics at CEPR, and J-PAL Affiliate. She was president of the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD) in 2016-2019 and of the European Economic Association in 2018. She is the recipient of the 2020 Birgit Grodal Award. Her research focuses on Development Economics and Political Economics, particularly on the role of social factors in economic development. She has studied ethnic diversity, stereotypes, kin structure and social norms, and the effects of television on social outcomes. She has also investigated political constraints to development, with particular focus on violent conflict in Africa. Her work has been published in leading economic journals.

Abstract:
We study the role of biased beliefs and coordination failures in perpetuating the norm of female genital cutting (FGC) in Somalia, where 98% of women are cut. We experimentally evaluate three interventions to decrease the prevalence of infibulation, the most harmful type of FGC: (i) correcting misperceptions about support for the practice; (ii) public declarations of one’s willingness to abandon it; and (iii) a combination of the two. We find that on average community members overestimate others’ support for infibulation. Correcting this misperception reduces the probability of infibulation by 40% two years after the intervention. Over the same time horizon, this leads to an increase in the `intermediate’ type of FGC (Sunna). When taking into account parents’ future plans for younger, uncut daughters, the misperception treatment no longer results in higher Sunna rates, increasing instead the likelihood that parents plan not to cut. The public declaration treatment does not reduce infibulation, except in communities where participants had high priors about community support for abandoning the practice. The combined treatment yields similar but insignificant results. Our findings point to the importance of correcting biased beliefs when designing coordination interventions to eradicate harmful norms.