Monday, March 28, 2011

29 March 2011: Education and Labour Market Outcomes: Evidence from India

Geraint Johnes
Lancaster University

Abstract:
The impact of education on labour market outcomes is analysed using data from various
Rounds of the National Sample Survey of India. Occupational destination is examined using both multinomial logit analyses and structural dynamic discrete choice modeling. The latter approach involves the use of a novel approach to constructing a pseudo-panel from repeated cross-section data, and is particularly useful as a means of evaluating policy impacts over time. We find that policy to expand educational provision leads initially to an increased take up of education, and in the longer term leads to an increased propensity for workers to enter non-manual employment.

Date: March 29, 2011
Time: 03:00 P.M.

Venue:
NIPFP Auditorium,
National Institute of Public Finance and Policy,
18/2 Satsang Vihar Marg, Special Institutional Area,
New Delhi-110067(INDIA)

Location:

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29 March 2011: Rule by Aesthetics: World-Class City Making in Delhi

Asher Ghertner
London School of Economics

Date: March 29, 2011
Time: 03:45 P.M.

Venue:
Conference Hall,
Centre for Policy Research,
Dharma Marg, Chanakyapuri,
New Delhi–110021(INDIA)

Location:

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Friday, March 25, 2011

28 March 2011: Governance and Legal Issues: Liberalization of Legal Services

Vikramaditya S. Khanna
University of Michigan Law School

Date: March 28, 2011
Time: 11:30 A.M.

Venue:
Conference Hall,
Centre for Policy Research,
Dharma Marg, Chanakyapuri,
New Delhi–110021(INDIA)

Location:

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Thursday, March 24, 2011

29 March 2011: The Economic Role of the State: A Historical Perspective

Vito Tanzi
Honorary President, International Institute of Public Finance, USA and
Former Director, Fiscal Affairs Department, International Monetary Fund

Abstract:
The talk will discuss how the conception of what the state should do in
the economic sphere changed over the past couple centuries and the
consequence of the change on the levels of public spending and taxation. It will discuss the factors and some of the beliefs and the assumptions that led to the growth of public spending. It will outline the role of some economists in this process and the consequences for that growth. It will speculate about future developments on the role of the state in the economy.

Date: March 29, 2011
Time: 03:00 P.M.

Venue:
New Seminar Room [First Floor],
Department of Economics,
Delhi School of Economics,
New Delhi-110007(INDIA)

Location:

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24 March 2011: Relationship Farming:The Problem of Enforcement in Contract Farming Systems in India

Sudha Narayanan
Cornell University and
Visiting Post-doctoral Fellow, Centre for Development Economics, Delhi School of Economics

Abstract:
This study examines the problem of enforcement in select contract farming schemes in southern India, bringing together data from surveys, conducted between 2007 and 2010, of 824 farmers from multiple commodity sectors. The central argument of this paper is that contract farming relationships in India are seen more as relationships and less as contracts, with formal enforcement mechanisms playing only a peripheral role in maintaining and supporting transactions. This is related only in part to the costs and inefficacy of formal enforcement mechanisms. Given that firms typically contract for small quantitites from a large number of farmers, court-based enforcement does not usually make economic sense. In a case presented in this study, 37% of the contract farmers had some default; most of these were modest amounts. Depending on the costs of enforcement, the number defaulting farmers who can be taken to court without entailing a net loss for the firm, ranges from only 3% to about 25% of those who have outstanding dues. More importantly, however, firms tend to view court-based formal enforcement as detrimental to farm-firm relationships in a way that undermines the handshake ethic. This latter concern drives firm to leverage relationships to support economic transactions, mixing formal and informal elements to do so, with considerable heterogeneity among the commodities. The space of contract farming then defines a `moral' economy, where breach by both firm and farmers is pervasive, a large part of which is overlooked or excused in the interests of sustaining the system. The Farmer Survey finds that the incidence of breach by way of sideselling farmers is 17% and 10% of contracting farmers reported that the firm had breached the contract the previous season. While personal relationships underpin these economic transactions for promoting contractual commitment and compliance, the study suggests that relationships necessarily work in tandem with price-based incentives. When contract price offers enough premium over alternative prices, relationship-based incentives to improve contractual performance are ineffective since they are rendered irrelevant. When spot market prices far exceed contract price,relationships are inadequate and fail to induce farmers to honor contracts. Between these two ends, however, there exists a range of price differentials, where despite the incentives for breach implied by high market prices, relationship can overturn or neutralize this influence and improve contractual performance. In short, there are limits to the role of relationships in defining a self-enforcing range of agreements, and this could differ across commodities. Overall, the empirical evidence cautions that policy prescriptions mandating legal and institutional mechanisms to promote contract farming might be ineffective, if not misplaced.

Date: March 24, 2011
Time: 03:00 P.M.

Venue:
New Seminar Room [First Floor],
Department of Economics,
Delhi School of Economics,
New Delhi-110007(INDIA)

Location:

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25 March 2011: Repeated Elections and Policy Persistence

Parikshit Ghosh
Delhi School of Economics

Abstract:
We introduce an electoral model with two salient features. First, long
lived voters can vote repeatedly on ballot proposals for introducing a new policy to replace the status quo. Second, voters' short term payoffs change over the course of their lives, either in a deterministic or stochastic manner. Even if the new policy generates higher lifetime utility for all voters compared to the status quo, it will have a strictly positive probability of being defeated in any given round if enough voters face short term losses. Moreover, there exist other stochastic processes over policy adoption that Pareto dominate the one arising in equilibrium. Allowing back and forth switches between the two policies gives rise to policy persistence, and under some conditions, more frequent elections create more inefficient outcomes. We discuss several applications, including social security, universal health care, unemployment assistance and technological change.

Date: March 25, 2011
Time: 11:30 A.M.

Venue:
Seminar Room 2,
Indian Statistical Institute Delhi Centre,
7, S. J. S. Sansanwal Marg,
New Delhi-110016 (India)

Location:

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25 March 2011: China and India in the Near Future - A Political Economy Viewpoint

Pranab Bardhan
University of California, Berkeley

Abstract:
Drawing upon his recently published book, Awakening Giants, Feet of Clay: Assessing the Economic Rise of China and India (Oxford University Press), Professor Pranab Bardhan will talk about the performance and prospects of the Chinese and Indian economy in terms of the rate and pattern of growth, poverty, inequality, and environmental conditions and end with some general reflections on the nature of capitalist development and governance and accountability issues for both countries.

Date: March 25, 2011
Time: 04:00 P.M.

Venue:
Seminar Hall-1 (Second Floor),
Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses,
1, Development Enclave,
Rao Tula Ram Marg,
New Delhi-110010(INDIA)

Location:

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Tuesday, March 22, 2011

22 March 2011: Missing Women: Patters Across Countries, and Over Time

Jishnu Das
World Bank

Abstract:
Excess female mortality is the most egregious manifestation of gender disadvantage in health. We compute patterns of missing women at all ages for all countries in 1990, 2000 and 2008, and compare them to historical patterns from currently high-income European countries. Like in Anderson and Ray (2009), these computations reflect the flow of missing women in the preceding year. Globally, 6.1 million women went missing in 1990 and by 2008, the flow increased to 6.3 million missing women every year. This was predominanty fueled by a doubling in Sub-Saharan Africa. Three periods in a woman's life are particularly dangerous: infancy (0-5), the reproductive years (15-40) and older ages (50-70). In addition, India and China also face a well-known girl-deficit at birth.

The historical record from European countries suggest very similar patterns with sharp reductions in infancy between 1900 and 1930; in the reproductive years between 1930 and 1960 and; in the older ages after 1980 (we never see an at-birth deficit in these countries). The strategies for decreasing excess female mortality are age-specific. In infancy, clean water and sanitation reduce overall child mortality and excess female mortality. In the reproductive years, maternal mortality and in SSA, HIV/AIDS are main factors. Consistent with the argument that reducing missing women is thus related to improvements in overall institutional delivery of services, we document little or no correlation between missing women and vaccination, use of health care services or anthropometric outcomes--three commonly used markers of household discrimination against women.

Date: March 22, 2011
Time: 12:30 P.M.

Venue:
Second Floor Conference Room
The World Bank,
70 Lodi Estate,
New Delhi-110003(INDIA)

Location:

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Note:
Please confirm attendance by mail to Jyoti Sriram at jsriram@worldbank.org by March 21st

Friday, March 18, 2011

23 March 2011: 'Missing Middle' in Manufacturing and the Employment Problem in India: A Study in Asian Perspective

Dipak Mazumdar
Munk Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto and Institute of Development Studies, New Delhi

Abstract:
In spite of the well noticed high growth rate of GDP in India, the employment problem is serious. The crux of the problem seems to be the slow absorption of labor in the formal sector. The reallocation of labor from low productivity agriculture has been at a modest rate in international perspective, and most of the increase in employment is absorbed in the informal sector with low wages and irregular employment contract. The result of the process is that, although the rate of poverty has been falling, the growth rate of labor earnings is slow and there is a strong trend to increasing inequality. It is argued that the crux of the problem is the failure of the manufacturing sector to play a significant role in labor absorption at reasonably high level of wages. This can in its turn be traced to the dualism in Indian manufacturing with a conspicuous ‘missing middle’ in its size structure. The mechanics of the problem is analyzed in the perspective of alternative patterns of size structure seen in the manufacturing sector of other industrializing countries of Asia.

Date: March 23, 2011
Time: 12:30 A.M.

Venue:
Second Floor Conference Room
The World Bank,
70 Lodi Estate,
New Delhi-110003(INDIA)

Note:
Please confirm attendance by mail to Jyoti Sriram at jsriram@worldbank.org by March 22nd

Location:

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Thursday, March 17, 2011

18 March 2011: Regulation via the Polluter-pays Principle

Stefan Ambec
Toulouse School of Economics

Abstract:
We consider the problem of regulating an economy with environmental pollution. We examine the distributional impact of the polluter-pays principle which requires that any agent compensates all other agents for the damages caused by his or her (pollution) emissions. With constant marginal damages we show that regulation via the polluter-pays principle leads to the unique welfare distribution that assigns non-negative individual welfare and renders each agent responsible for his or her pollution impact. We extend both the polluter-pays principle and this result to increasing marginal damages due to pollution. We also discuss the acceptability of the polluter-pays principle and compare it with the Vickrey-Clark-Groves mechanism.

Date: March 18, 2011
Time: 11:30 A.M.

Venue:
Seminar Room 2,
Indian Statistical Institute Delhi Centre,
7, S. J. S. Sansanwal Marg,
New Delhi-110016 (India)

Location:

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17 March 2011: Incumbents and Candidates to the Indian National Legislature

Miriam Golden
UCLA

Abstract:
Utilizing new data on candidate affidavits for India's Fourteenth and Fifteenth
Lok Sabha, the country's lower house of representatives, we study the
conditions that resulted in approximately a quarter of those elected to each
legislature facing or having previously faced criminal charges. We show that
Indian political parties are more likely to select individuals facing such
charges to run as candidates in electoral districts with lower levels of
literacy and when parties face greater electoral uncertainty. Subsidiary
results show that the well-known incumbency disadvantage characterizing Indian
legislative elections stems from the electoral performance of candidates facing
criminal indictment and that providing voters more information about
politicians does not inoculate the political system against the proliferation
of such candidates. Possible interpretations are offered.

Date: March 17, 2011
Time: 12:30 P.M.

Venue:
Second Floor Conference Room,
The World Bank,
70 Lodi Estate,
New Delhi-110003(INDIA)

Location:

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Friday, March 11, 2011

15-16 March 2011: 8th Research Meeting of NIPFP-DEA Research Program


Organised By: Macro/Finance group at NIPFP

Conference Program

Date: March 15 - 16, 2011
Time: 9 A.M. to 6 P.M.

Venue:
Amaltas Conference Room,
India Habitat Centre,
Lodhi Road,
New Delhi-110003(INDIA)

Location:

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