35 research outputs found

    The Impact of school meals on school participation: Evidence from rural India

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    This paper assesses the effect of transition from monthly distribution of free food grains to the daily provision of free cooked meals to school children on enrollments and attendance in a rural area of India. School panel data allow a difference-in-differences estimation strategy to address possible endogeneity of program placement. The results suggest that program transition had a significant impact on improving the daily participation rates of children in lower grades. The average monthly attendance rate of girls in grade 1 was more than 12 percentage points higher while there was a positive but insignificant effect on grade 1 boys' attendance rate. The impact on enrollment levels was insignificant.school meals, attendance, enrollment

    Does political reservation for women improve programme delivery?

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    This column outlines results of a study that assesses the impact of women leaders on corruption and other aspects of the quality of delivery of MNREGA. It argues that administrative experience, training and institutional support are essential for making women’s political participation and affirmative action policies more effective

    Social Identity and Inequality--The Impact of China’s Hukou System

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    We conduct an experimental study to investigate the causal impact of social identity on individuals? response to economic incentives. We focus on China?s decades old household registration system, or the hukou institution, which categorizes citizens into urban and rural residents, and favors the former over the latter in resource allocation. Our results indicate that making individuals? hukou status salient and public significantly reduces the performance of rural migrant students on an incentivized cognitive task by 10 percent. This leads to a leftward shift of their earnings distribution – the proportion of rural migrants below the 25th earnings percentile increases significantly by almost 19 percentage points. However, among non-migrants the proportion with earnings below the 25th percentile drops by 5 percentage points, and the proportion above the 75th percentile increases by almost 8 percentage points, albeit insignificantly. The results demonstrate the impact of institutionally imposed social identity on individuals? intrinsic response to incentives, and consequently on widening income inequality.social identity, hukou, inequality, field experiment, China

    “Policies to increase women’s representation in the political sphere through affirmative action are insufficient” – Farzana Afridi

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    In an interview with LSE alumna Hemal Shah, Dr Farzana Afridi analyses Indian women’s access to education and the labour market and stresses the importance of changing cultural stereotypes for genuine empowerment

    The Ties That Bind Us: Social Networks and Productivity in the Factory

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    We use high frequency worker level productivity data from garment manufacturing units in India to study the effects of caste-based social networks on individual and group productivity when workers are complements in the production function. Using plausibly exogenous variation in the production lines' caste composition for almost 35,000 worker-days, we find that a 1 percentage point (pp) increase in the share of own caste workers in the line increases daily individual productivity by at least 0.09 pp. The least efficient worker's productivity, however, rises by almost 0.17 pp when the caste composition of the line becomes more homogeneous by 1 pp. These results are robust to unobservable heterogeneity in worker ability and line level trends. Production externalities, that induce greater effort through within-network peer effects, can potentially explain our findings.</p

    Centralised versus decentralised monitoring in developing countries: a survey of recent research

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    We consider the effectiveness of centralised and decentralised monitoring using a theoretical framework of factors affecting each approach. Centralised monitoring is more costly, yet more professional. However, the monitors themselves are not directly affected by the activity they are monitoring, so they may have less at stake in policies or services working well. By contrast, in community monitoring local people and civil society have high stakes in improving local outcomes. In the political economy literature, top-down audits have been seen as more effective in certain types of activities (like procurement) where detailed documentation exists, and where corruption can be more clearly defined as compared to mismanagement. Community monitoring has had higher efficacy when collective action problems can be solved, when monitoring teams have a sense of agency, and when the composition of teams is more homogeneous. Community monitors have deeper knowledge of local agents, so that (ceteris paribus) this approach should be less costly for the government because monitoring resources can be targeted better. However, both local monitoring and local agents may suffer from problems of elite capture

    Intra-household decision-making, child welfare and gender in India.

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    To the extent that the objective of most policy interventions is to improve individual well-being, it is essential to examine how public programs influence the behavior and the resource allocation decisions of families within which individuals reside. This dissertation, therefore, aims to further the understanding of the process of intra-household decision-making and thereby predict the impact of public interventions targeted at individuals. The thesis uses survey data, designed and collected by me, on a nationally mandated school meal program in India to examine the extent to which nutrient transfers to school children are reflected in overall increases in their daily intakes and its impact on school participation. The field experiment randomized the date of village interview yielding children in some villages recalling their 24 hour food consumption for a school day and in other villages on a non-school day. A comparison of the daily nutrient intake between these two days indicates that individual consumption of nutrients increased by 49% to 100% of the transfers. The results thus suggest little or no redistribution of resources away from a participating child by households. Next, taking advantage of the staggered implementation of the school meal program in the survey region I use a difference-in-differences analysis to show that the scheme led to a more than 10 percentage point increase in the monthly school attendance rates of girls. The program was thus effective in increasing household investment in schooling, particularly of girls. The findings imply that public programs which subsidize the cost of schooling and even implicitly target girls can be effective in reducing gender gaps in education. In the penultimate chapter I employ an intra-household bargaining model to investigate whether husbands' and wives' preferences on resource investment differs by gender and the order of birth of a child in India. The empirical results show a significant effect of mothers' autonomy and education on reducing the bias against girls' schooling. At the same time the findings suggest that the gender gap varies by the order of birth of children. The chapter emphasizes the need to account for the socio-cultural context in determining women's decision-making powers within the family which in turn can influence the allocation of household resources.Ph.D.EconomicsPublic policySocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/125606/2/3208414.pd

    TvÄsprÄkiga pedagoger i flersprÄkig miljö : En- och tvÄsprÄkiga perspektiv pÄ tvÄsprÄkiga pedagogers roll i den mÄngkulturella förskolan

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    The purpose of the study is to investigate into professional knowledge of the bilingual teachers, compared to monolingual, and what benefits they give to pre-school. Qualitative method was used to get an understanding of informantÂŽs perspective on bilingual teachers. The informants believe that bilingual teachers are able to understand all the children. A bilingual teacher can make the children feel secure. If one has a positive attitude toward bilingualism, the bilingual children also show a positive attitude that in turn contributes to learning and development of the language
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