A Comment on "Age Set versus Kin: Culture and Financial Ties in East Africa"

Moscona and Seck (2024a) examine how redistribution of economic benefits differs between age-based and kin-based societies in sub-Saharan Africa. Using the experimental evaluation of a cash transfer program in Kenya, they find that an increase in income of members of an individual's age cohort increased consumption expenditure in age-set societies but not in kin-based societies. Next, exploiting the staggered introduction of a pension program in Uganda, they find that the program had positive effects on child health in kin-based societies, though not in age-set societies. In this replication report, we successfully computationally reproduce all results of the paper, with only a few minor deviations. We then conduct three robustness checks on the pension program results in Uganda, by varying the definition of the exposure variable, excluding outliers, and re-weighting observations. The original results are robust to our sensitivity analyses. The point estimates are very close to the original results and statistical significance is unchanged. Finally, we highlight some issues relating to the lack of sample descriptive statistics on key explanatory variables in the original paper.