Author: ekfletch

I am an independent researcher on issues of gender, labor, violence, education, and children.

What works for women and girls, redux

Woman ironing clothes in Chandni Chowk, Delhi, India
Woman ironing clothes in Chandni Chowk, Delhi, India

Last week, I wrote a little about my contiuous struggle with the word “empowerment” and what it means in the context of improving the lives of women and girls. In particular, I mentioned a few World Bank studies that examine “what works?” and how can we incorporate the knowledge of local context into our understanding of empowerment. Then, a survey by DFID came across my desk asking a similar kind of “what works” question, but posing it to researchers, practitioners, and funders. If you’re involved in research, funding, or implementation of programs that target violence against women and girls, I encourage you to take the survey and be involved in the subsequent discussion groups. For my part, I can say that my involvement with DFID (through the partnership with the Nike Foundation—Girl Hub) was extremely informative and worthwhile.

Because the survey asks about rigorous evidence, I think it’s also worth mentioning some of my own work on the subject (with Laurie Ball Cooper). While the programmatic mapping is a bit old by now (I know plenty of new programs have been put in place), I think the overarching takeaway is the same. We need more evidence about what works to reduce violence and discrimination against women and girls. Whether that’s accomplished through increased impact evaluations, RCTs, use of secondary or administrative data, or experimental ethnography, great, but we need more evidence.

All of the papers that came out of that DFID workshop are worth a read. Here’s a link to one a linkt to one more from IFPRI’s Agnes Quisumbing and Chiara Kovarik.

What works for girls?

Last week, I had the pleasure of meeting with Ratna Sudarshan, an economist here in Delhi who is currently a fellow at the National University Education Planning Administration. We had a long discussion about how to look at female employment in India and then about the cultural dimensions of women’s empowerment and agency. I’ve often said that I really dislike the term empowerment. First, because the word literally means to give someone power and you can’t really give someone your own power, but secondly because it’s a term that’s quite jargon-y and steeped in a Western sense of what it means to be independent, have agency, and make one’s own decisions. 

Ratna asked me what I meant by empowerment and I gave a litany of possible answers, ending with, but it all depends on where you are. And she responded with a story of girls in Rajasthan, an arid, desert-y state in Western India, where age of marriage is very early, but girls tend not to live with their husbands until they’ve finished their formal schooling. So while the outward measure of “empowerment” bodes poorly for women, their age at first birth is actually quite high, so the health risks normally associated with child marriage aren’t really present.

It was with this in mind that I read about a series of World Bank reports summarizing impact evaluations on what works to reduce maternal mortality, delay age of marriage, and generally improve the lot of girls in the developing world. The reports were released this month in anticipation of the coming Millenium Development Goals deadlines. 

So, while I highly recommend you read them, I also urge you to think about context. 

Context, context, context, and how important it is in determining the effectiveness of policy or programmatic interventions.

AEA Job Market Portal

In a move that is widely considered (at least from my limited discussion with colleagues over the past few hours and extrapolating from years of conversation) a long time coming, the American Economic Association has decided to expand its share of the recent-Ph.D. employment space. The new JOE Network, as they’re calling it, will be a platform for uploading CVs and teaching statements for candidates as well as letters of reference for advisors, coauthors and other letter-writers. I assume this is meant to bypass the multiple websites in this space already. In the past, the JOE has been the first place to go for employers to advertise openings and thus for graduating PhDs (and mid-career professors looking to change jobs) looking for a job. Among my most popular blog posts are ones from the series called “Job listing of the month.” There’s some pretty good ones in there.

But I digress, from the AEA website:

The AEA is proud to announce the new enhanced JOE (Job Openings for Economists) targeted to the comprehensive needs of all participants in the annual economics job market cycle.

The new JOE Network automates the hiring process. Users share materials, communicate confidentially, and take advantage of new JOE features to easily manage their files and personal data. Everything is securely maintained and activated in one location. The JOE Network is accessible right from your desktop at the AEA website.

While in the process of applying for jobs, many of my colleagues and I have questioned why this didn’t exist before. Econjobmarket.org filled a lot of this space, but there are so many competing services in the market now, I’m not sure how useful it’s going to be. It’s either got to be demonstrably better for employers, so that they convince their department heads/HR to switch, or I don’t know if anyone will actually switch.

One colleague on twitter mentioned how big a deal moving to electronic was for many schools. I can’t imagine if they’ve already got their process down with Academicjobsonline.org or whatever other service they’re using, that they’ll be compelled to switch.

An even worse outcome, which is something I’ve observed employers doing already, is to require that you apply through multiple sites (perhaps local HR site and Econjobmarket.org, for instance). At any rate, hoping it’s useful to job seekers and that they’ve got all the kinks worked out before the first deadlines start coming.

Process, research ideas, and learning my way around new fields

Of the many things I’m learning in my new position is just how one individual has so many projects going at once. Rohini, and others like her with large development-oriented field projects, has a veritable army of students, RAs, research managers, field managers, enumerators, and post-docs to keep a million different parts moving. This translates into several big things for me. The first is that the work environment is much more social than any one I’ve ever been in.

I have to admit that being in India and the Philippines this summer has been a bit like being at summer camp. We all work in a big room together. We’re living in the same guesthouses and hotels. We’re mostly each other’s only friends, so there’s lots of time together. Thus far, there’s been a little bit of mentoring, lots of “how do I do this in Stata?” talk, lots of research talk exchange, and a whole lot (at least for me) of beginning to understand the process of both how this organization works and how others like it might work as well.

The other big thing about the size of the organization is that “my” research group is putting out papers on topics that I’ve never really thought about. For instance, topics in environmental economics. I took environmental economics, I think I even got an A in it, but I don’t think about environment the way I think about gender (sorry, Dr. Walsh!). When I think about gender and labor and discrimination and families and health, research ideas come out of every corner and I can barely keep up. When I think about the environment, I kind of just get depressed about how we’re destroying it. Corruption is another big space in which people are working that I just don’t know that much about.

Without any explicit instructions to do so, I kind of feel like it’s my duty to understand the papers that are coming out of this group. So when this one (gated), with an almost incomprehensible title, came across my desk for the fourth time this week, I figured I should read it. I’m starting to get my head around it and feel like I’m learning a ton, but luckily for me, we’re still talking about issues closest to my heart.

 

 

Random financial inclusion thoughts

The buildup around Prime Minister Modi’s Independence Day speech was palpable in the EPoD/BCURE office last week. My research group does quite a bit of work on financial inclusion in India and so rumors that Modi would announce a financial inclusion plan had not a few people talking.

In fact, the PM did announce a financial inclusion plan to open bank accounts for 75 million Indians by August 2018. It’s an ambitious plan, to be sure, but it struck me as rather odd. The way the papers presented the plan, Modi introduced the plan by talking about how many people have mobile phones in India, but nobody has a bank account. My head went immediately to the thought of “well, maybe he wants to expand mobile money use in India.” Despite the presence of quite a few mobile money providers in India, mobile money is used in very few transactions. This is very different than a place like Kenya, where mobile money is extremely widely used.

I’m not sure that mobile money is the best answer, but I think it’s at least an interesting use of existing infrastructure, as opposed to brick and mortar banks with minimum transactions and high withdrawal fees, for instance.

BCURE policy dialogue

I promised last week that I would write more about the BCURE policy dialogue on economic growth and evironmental protection in Delhi last week and I’ve barely been able to sit down since it happened (except when I was on a plan to Manila; they make you sit down for those things). Luckily, I work with a great team, one member of which managed to storify the day for me, or for you, or for us!

So there you have it. Politicians, media personalities, lawyers, academics, and industry partners in frank conversation about India’s economic and environmental growth trajectories. 

India update

I’ve been in India a few days now and the jet lag is mostly faded. It’s about right now (noon), when my body says it’s 3am! WTF are you doing awake? Much less working?! that I start to fade and I get a bit nauseated before I bounce back and out of it. I swear this was easier when I was younger.

I’ve spent the last few days reconnecting with Delhi in unexpected ways. My hotel this trip is in Green Park, a stone’s throw from where I spent two months in 2008. So yesterday I went to visit Evergreen sweet shop and sat under the freezing cold air conditioning with a cup of masala chai at the Cafe Coffee Day. Or the Barista. Or one of the other myriad essentially identical coffee shops in Delhi that serve super sugary American-style drinks and pastries. 

This is how you get sick, by the way. You go out, it starts raining, you sweat trying to get inside, so you’re wet from the rain and from sweating and then you sit under air conditioning that even a penguin would feel chilled by and voila, monsoon virus! Or something like that. I think that’s how it goes.

What else? I had lunch at a friend’s house, whose sister I know from graduate school, and got a hot-oil head massage, which did an awesome job of clearing the jet lag fog. Hmmm, perhaps I need another one of those. I’ve been trying to get some exercise and yesterday found myself in Deer Park, still in my kurta and leggings, having switched out my sandals for tennis shoes, speedwalking around the park before dark. I’ve become one of those ladies. (See, #oldandtired, I couldn’t even be bothered to change!)

At any rate, tomorrow (Thursday) is our BCURE policy dialogue on Economic Growth and Environmental Protection at the University of Chicago Center in Delhi. I’ll be tweeting about it and I’ll write more about it later, but BCURE is one of the big initiatives that EPoD has in India and Pakistan and is expanding (I think) to countries around the world. It’s a really cool program to partner with governments and civil society organizations on their data and program evaluation needs, connecting needs with creative minds. I’m excited to see how it works.

The impact of rainfall, directly

As a development and labor economist, it’s unusual to see colleagues concerned with the impact of rainfall, full stop, on anything. We’ve become so accustomed to seeing rainfall used as an instrumental variable, a pathway to causal results, rather than a driver of some effect in and of itself. A new working paper by David Levine and Dean Yang (gated), however, looks at rainfall itself, or rather deviations from mean rainfall levels, which is actually pretty important. If we’re going to use rainfall as an instrument, or think of it as an exogenous shock that can be modeled linearly (or non-linearly, but modeled nonetheless), then it’s a good idea to make sure those assumptiosn actually hold.

Abstract here:

We estimate the impact of weather variation on agricultural output in Indonesia by examining the impact of local rainfall shocks on rice output at the district level. Our analysis makes use of local meteorological data on rainfall in combination with government administrative data on district-level rice output in the 1990s. We find that deviations from mean local rainfall are positively associated with district-level rice output. 10% higher rainfall leads metric tons of rice output to be 0.4% higher on average. The impact of rainfall on rice output occurs contemporaneously (in the same calendar year), rather than with a lag. These results suggest that researchers should be justified in interpreting higher rainfall as a positive contemporaneous shock to local economic conditions in Indonesia.

New Yorker Archive heaven

There have been times in my life when I would devour a New Yorker from start to finish as soon as it hit my mailbox. They make great airplane companions, too, but sadly, now is not one of those times. The demands of work and travel and moving all over the place this summer mean my copy goes straight from my parents’ mailbox to their coffee table. Yes, I don’t even currently have an address to which to send them.

Even in times when I haven’t been able to read it a lot, archive access is one of my favorite parts about my New Yorker subscription. Since they opened their archives (back to 2007) through the end of the summer, so many publications and writers have come up with awesome lists of what you should read before they close them. There’s a great aggregation here of all of these lists, (with links!) for everything from food writing to stories about Boston!

My own list is not nearly so long, but it’s probably worth mentioning a few awesome pieces about women, gender, and female labor force participation, because I can.

  1. Shopgirls by Katherine Zoepf
  2. The Sex Amendment by Louis Menand
  3. Birthright by Jill Lepore
  4. A Woman’s Place by Ken Auletta
  5. Thanksgiving in Mongolia by Ariel Levy

The second life of RCTs and implications for child development

In the last few weeks, I’ve come upon two research programs (each with a few related papers) that utilize a combination of an RCT or phased-in intervention and follow-up data 7-10 years on to examine new research questions. They both happen to be focused on the lasting effects of childhood health and wellbeing initiatives, but I doubt that this trend will be confined to child health and literacy. Barham, Macours and Maluccio have a few papers (gated) that use the phasing in of a conditional cash transfer program in Nicaragua to test later childhood cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes, distinguishing effects by timing of the intervention. A working paper out last week shows that deworming programs in Uganda not only increased short-term anthropomorphic outcomes, but also contributed to children’s numeracy and literacy several years later.

In short, we’re seeing more evidence that these early health and wellbeing interventions can have profound impacts not just on the immediate outcomes–Under-5 mortaility, school attendance, etc–but also on future outcomes. I think it’s a neat use of experimental design to examine questions we might not have thought about when the programs were first put in place.