Click to apply: the impact of online job portals on job search outcomes

India has one of the largest and fastest growing populations of internet users in the world. An estimated 190 million Indians use the internet, up from 7 million in 2001. Approximately 40 million Indians go online every day, using the Internet to make purchases, access financial services and education, and interact with friends and family. In a recent IGC project Jeremy Magruder studies the effect of online job portals on labour market and job-matching outcomes

Can Network Theory-based Targeting Increase Technology Adoption?

In order to induce farmers to adopt a productive new agricultural technology, we apply simple and complex contagion diffusion models on rich social network data from 200 villages in Malawi to identify seed farmers to target and train on the new technology. A randomized controlled trial compares these theory-driven network targeting approaches to simpler strategies that either rely on a government extension worker or an easily measurable proxy for the social network (geographic distance between households) to identify seed farmers. Our results indicate that technology diffusion is characterized by a complex contagion learning environment in which most farmers need to learn from multiple people before they adopt themselves. Network theory based targeting can out-perform traditional approaches to extension, and we identify methods to realize these gains at low cost to policymakers. Keywords: Social Learning, Agricultural Technology Adoption, Complex Contagion, Malawi JEL Classification Codes: O16, O13Comment: 61 page

Darwin at the Library Exhibition

An Exhibit Guide for the "Darwin at the Library” exhibition held at the University of Oklahoma Bizzell Memorial Library, Summer 2011, comprised of the Darwin first editions that were displayed in the “Darwin at the Museum” joint exhibition with the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, Fall 2009

Evaluation of an Ecohydrologic-Process Model Approach to Estimating Annual Mountain-Block Recharge

Magruder, Ian, M.S., December 2006 Geology Evaluation of an Ecohydrologic-Process Model Approach to Estimating Annual Mountain-Block Recharge Chairperson: Dr. William Woessner Regional subsurface mountain-block recharge (MBR) is viewed as a key component of basin aquifer systems found in semi-arid environments. Yet water resource managers do not have a commonly available and reasonably invoked quantitative method to constrain possible MBR rates. Recent advances in landscape-scale ecohydrologic process modeling offer the possibility that weather, climate, and land surface physical and vegetative conditions can be used to estimate MBR. We present an approach that uses remotely sensed physiographic data to model a mountain water balance including the component of MBR. In this approach, we evaluate the ecosystem process model Biome-BGC (Running and Hunt, 1993; Thornton et al., 2002), used in tandem with the mountain climate simulation program MT-CLIM (Running et al., 1987; Kimball et al.,1997; Thornton and Running, 1999), to calculate the annual MBR within a 24,600 ha watershed. The modeling tool is also used to investigate how climatic and vegetative controls influence recharge dynamics along the basin-mountain physiographic gradient. Our work estimated mean annual MBR flux in this crystalline bedrock terrain to be 99,000 m3/d or approximately 19% of annual precipitation. Data analyses indicate that vegetative control on soil moisture flux is significant only at lower elevations and snowmelt is the only significant annual recharge source occurring on a macroscale in this environment. Results also demonstrate that evapotranspiration (ET) is radiation limited in wet years and moisture limited in dry years, and consequently potential recharge to groundwater is significantly higher during wet climate cycles. The application of ecohydrologic modeling to estimate MBR shows promise for modeling MBR at the mountain-scale. However, future efforts will need to incorporate a more advanced understanding of mountain recharge processes and refined ability to simulate those processes at varying and appropriate scales