Tarana Chauhan is a first year PhD student at the Dyson school of Applied Economics and Management at Cornell University. Prior to joining the program, she was working with IFPRI in New Delhi as a research analyst.
NEUDC 2018, hosted by Cornell University, covered the latest development questions of interest to economists. Across the different thematic sessions, much of the research focused on South Asia.
Here are some of the pertinent ideas and results that were presented in the different panel sessions:
Education: Zimmerman presented evidence on disparate external shocks that can influence schooling. In a monsoon-dependent agrarian country like India, it was surprising to see that rainfall had a negative impact on school enrollment in the last thirty years when it is expected to increase income from better agricultural yield and therefore enrollment. Another interesting impact on schooling is caused by the setting of the sun such that as the sun sets later, children’s sleep time and study effort reduce, and children in areas of later sunset have fewer years of schooling (Jagnani).
Intervention in school targeting children’s nutrition can be successful as shown by Alderman in his results for India’s school feeding program which has contributed 12-15% of stunting reduction from 2006-16.
Rafkin’s presentation was thought provoking as it revealed how education mobility in India has excluded a religious minority group. In a region as diverse as South Asia, policies often do not benefit all social groups as intended.
Gender and intra-household decisions: It was distressing to learn how women’s educational choices are being governed by their concern for safety. Borker’s findings reveal that in Delhi, women were willing to pursue their education in a lower ranked college if they perceived their commute to the college and back to be safer. They were also willing to pay more than men to travel by a safer route. Establishing a causal relation between the age of woman’s marriage and domestic violence, Roychowdhury showed that if a woman’s marriage is delayed by a year, she is less likely to experience physical violence. An RCT study in Haryana showed that gender attitudes could be improved if adolescents were sensitized about gender equality through classroom discussions (Jain). Lowe showed how the employment decision of a woman is affected by whether the decision is made jointly with spouse or independently, bringing to light that husbands’ response is determined by their bargaining power and whether they perceive the discussion of the job opportunity as a threat to their position.
Risk management, infrastructure and firms:
In a discussion on risk management and index insurance, Kumar presented that rice growing farmers in Bangladesh needed incentives such as subsidies to purchase insurance, with discounts stimulating more demand than rebates. The impact of insurance in increased harvest, yield and rice cultivation was verified. Negi’s paper added to the discussion of the usefulness of index insurance for farmers. His simulations showed that an Indian farmer preferring to avoid risks such as crop failure benefitted more from an insurance plan protecting from extreme or catastrophic losses in comparison to a plan covering all losses and so demand for the former is expected to be higher.
Shilpi discussed how the Jamuna bridge in Bangladesh increased agricultural productivity and population density validating the theory that infrastructure investments help boost economic activity.
In the area of firms: Velayudhan discussed the negative effects of a value added tax in India on the average output of firms at the exemption threshold level. With respect to labour, Krishnaswamy presented evidence that social norms influence labour supply such that workers are unwilling to accept wage cuts.
South Asian countries were represented in nearly all research topics covered at NEUDC, highlighting the performance of this sub-continent across different fields of health and nutrition, gender, firms, agriculture, education and networks, among many others. For the PhD aspirants who attended the conference (like myself), it was particularly useful to understand the density of research in different avenues of development economics and to think of ideas and creative methods for their own research. It was heartening to see the overall warm and encouraging atmosphere in the conference as discussants and other panelists shared invaluable suggestions and ideas with one another.
