17 April 2013: Women's Status and Children's Height in India: Evidence from Joint Rural Households

Dean Spears
Princeton University

Abstract:
Children in India are puzzlingly short relative to their level of economic development. Stunting among Indian children is important because childhood height predicts adult human capital and health. One candidate explanation for why Indian children are so short is the very low social status of Indian women who, as mothers, feed and care for children in the early life period that largely determines their height. However, the literature lacks a well-identified test of this conjecture. This paper applies a novel strategy to identify an effect of women's status on children's height. Anthropological and demographic literature suggest that within joint Indian households, women married to older brothers have higher intra-household status than women married to younger brothers. We study children of these women: children of higher ranking daughters-in-law are taller, on average, than children of lower ranking daughters-in-law in rural Indian joint households. We provide empirical evidence that lower ranking daughters-in-law indeed have lower status in joint households and rule out several competing explanations for our findings.

Date: April 17, 2013
Time: 12:30 P.M.

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

Location:

View Larger Map

Note:
Please confirm your attendance by email to Jyoti Sriram at jsriram@worldbank.org by tuesday April 16.

15 April 2013: Workers Without Borders? Culture and the Political Economy of Temporary versus Permanent Immigration

Sanjay Jain
Cambridge University

Abstract:
This paper examines the role of cultural factors in driving the politics, size and nature (temporary versus permanent migration) of migration policy. We demonstrate that there exists a broad political failure that results in inefficiently high barriers restricting the import of temporary foreign workers, while admitting an inefficiently large number of permanent migrants, to fill a labor shortage. Strikingly, we show that countries that are poor at cultural assimilation may be better positioned to take advantage of temporary foreign worker programs than more culturally diverse and tolerant countries. In some circumstances, relaxing restrictions on the mobility of temporary migrant workers across employers has the potential to raise host country welfare, even though it increases migrant wages and lowers individual firms' profits. We also demonstrate the existence of multiple equilibria: some countries have mostly temporary migration programs and see a low degree of cultural assimilation by migrants, while other countries rely more on permanent migrants and see much more assimilation.

Date: April 15, 2013
Time: 03:00 P.M.

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

Location:

View Larger Map

10 April 2013: Learning to Invest: The Behaviour of Retail Investors in the Indian Equity Market

Tarun Ramadorai
Saïd Business School, University of Oxford

Date: April 10, 2013
Time: 04:00 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:

View Larger Map