C. Journal articles published externally
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These are journal articles by World Bank authors published externally.
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Publication
Addressing declining female labor force participation in India: Does political empowerment make a difference?
(Taylor & Francis, 2022-02)Despite income growth, fertility decline, and educational expansion, female labour force participation in rural India dropped precipitously over the last decade. Nation-wide individual-level data allow us to explore if random reservation of village leadership for females affected women’s access to job opportunities, their demand for participation in the labour force, and income as well as intra-household bargaining in the short-and medium term. Gender reservation of local leadership affected female but not male participation in public works and regular labour markets, their income, and their influence on key household decisions with a lag, suggesting that such reservation affected social norms and stereotypes. -
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Saving for Dowry: Evidence from Rural India
(Elsevier, 2022-01)The ancient custom of dowry, i.e., bride-to-groom marriage payments, remains ubiquitous in many contemporary societies. Using data from 1986–2007, this paper examines whether dowry impacts intertemporal resource allocation and other household decisions in rural India. Utilizing variation in firstborn gender and dowry amounts across marriage markets, we find that the prospect of higher dowry payments at the time of a daughter’s marriage leads parents to save more in advance. The higher savings are primarily financed through increased paternal labor supply. This implies that people are farsighted; they work and save more today with payoff in the distant future. -
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Curse of the Mummy-ji: The Influence of Mothers-in-Law on Women in India
(John Wiley and Sons, 2020-08-23)Restrictive social norms and strategic constraints imposed by family members can limit women's access to and benefits from social networks, especially in patrilocal societies. We characterize young married women's social networks in rural India and analyze how inter-generational power dynamics within the household affect their network formation. Using primary data from Uttar Pradesh, we show that co-residence with the mother-in-law is negatively correlated with her daughter-in-law's mobility and ability to form social connections outside the household, especially those related to health, fertility, and family planning. Our findings suggest that the mother-in-law's restrictive behavior is potentially driven by the misalignment of fertility preferences between the mother-in-law and the daughter-in-law. The lack of peers outside the household lowers the daughter-in-law's likelihood of visiting a family planning clinic and of using modern contraception. We find suggestive evidence that this is because outside peers (a) positively influence daughter-in-law's beliefs about the social acceptability of family planning and (b) enable the daughter-in-law to overcome mobility constraints by accompanying her to health clinics. Wiley Terms and Conditions, https://authorservices.wiley.com/author-resources/Journal-Authors/licensing/self-archiving.html -
Publication
Six Sigma to Reduce Claims Processing Errors in a Healthcare Payer Firm
(Taylor and Francis, 2020-06)As a continuous improvement practice, Six Sigma has been accepted globally across the service industry. In the past one decade, the application and success of Six Sigma in healthcare services has been remarkable. Despite the fact that several papers on Six Sigma have appeared in the erstwhile literature related to healthcare operations, there is a dearth of field studies highlighting the application of Six Sigma in healthcare outsourced firms, in specific to healthcare payers that engage in a non-clinical setup. The aim of this paper is to explore the role of Six Sigma within the healthcare payer outsourced firms, where error-free delivery becomes critical. The article contributes to the literature of Six Sigma in healthcare outsourcing highlighting how “Six Sigma as a methodology” could help reduce claims adjudication errors in a healthcare payer firm. The Six Sigma DMAIC project case study presented as part of the paper delivered a saving of USD 0.53 million and is a classic example of how Six Sigma can bring bottom-line impact to healthcare outsourced organizations. Managerial implications and lessons learned are discussed alongside the concluding notes. -
Publication
Flies without Borders: Lessons from Chennai on Improving India's Municipal Public Health Services
(Taylor and Francis, 2020-05)India’s cities face key challenges to improving public health outcomes. First, unequally distributed public resources create insanitary conditions, especially in slums – threatening everyone’s health, as suggested by poor child growth even among the wealthiest. Second, devolving services to elected bodies works poorly for highly technical services like public health. Third, services are highly fragmented. This paper examines the differences in the organisation and management of municipal services in Chennai and Delhi, two cities with sharply contrasting health indicators. Chennai mitigates these challenges by retaining professional management of service delivery and actively serving vulnerable populations − while services in Delhi are quite constrained. Management and institutional issues have received inadequate attention in the public health literature on developing countries, and the policy lessons from Chennai have wide relevance. -
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Can Women’s Self-help Groups Contribute to Sustainable Development? Evidence of Capability Changes from Northern India
(Taylor and Francis, 2020-04-15)This paper offers an evaluation of a supported women’s self-help program with over 1.5 million participants in one of the poorest rural regions of the world (Uttar Pradesh, India). Methodologically, it shows how indicators from the direct capability measurement literature can be adapted for program evaluation in a low-income country setting. Unique data on capabilities across a range of dimensions are then developed for some 6000 women and used to estimate a number of propensity score matching models. The substantive empirical results of these models indicate that many of the capability indicators are higher for program members, that the difference appears robust, and that there are significant benefits for those from scheduled tribes and lower castes. The discussion highlights two points. First, human development improvements offered by multi-strand programs can help to explain the paradox as to why nearly 100 million women (in India alone) have participated in self-help programs despite modest global research evidence for micro-finance impacts on nominal incomes. Second, results argue strongly for the use of capability measures over agency measures focused solely on household decision-making to assess women’s empowerment when structural causes of disempowerment, external to the household, are present and significant. -
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Inheritance Law Reform, Empowerment, and Human Capital Accumulation: Second-Generation Effects from India
(Taylor and Francis, 2019)Although many studies point towards significant positive impacts of Hindu Succession Act (HSA) reforms on females’ empowerment and access to human and physical capital, the fact that this reform also led to increased female mortality raises questions about long-term sustainability of reform effects. We use evidence from three states, one of which amended the HSA in 1994, to assess first- and second-generation effects of this reform using a triple-difference strategy. First-generation effects include greater likelihood of completing primary education, more assets brought into marriage, improved access to bank accounts, a lower share of female births, and higher female survival rates. Second-generation effects on education, time use, and health are robust and point estimates of education are larger than first-generation ones even after mothers’ endowments are controlled for, pointing to a sizeable and sustained empowerment effect. -
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Variations in the Quality of Tuberculosis Care in Urban India: A Cross-Sectional, Standardized Patient Study in Two Cities
(PLoS, 2018-09-25)India has the highest burden of tuberculosis (TB). Although most patients with TB in India seek care from the private sector, there is limited evidence on quality of TB care or its correlates. Following our validation study on the standardized patient (SP) method for TB, we utilized SPs to examine quality of adult TB care among health providers with different qualifications in 2 Indian cities. -
Publication
Who Should Be at the Top of Bottom-Up Development? A Case-Study of the National Rural Livelihoods Mission in Rajasthan, India
(Taylor and Francis, 2018-05-31)It is widely acknowledged that top-down support is essential for bottom-up participatory projects to be effectively implemented at scale. However, which level of government, national or sub-national, should be given the responsibility to implement such projects is an open question, with wide variations in practice. This paper analyses qualitative and quantitative data from a natural experiment of a large participatory project in the state of Rajasthan in India comparing central management and state-level management. We find that locally managed facilitators formed groups that were more likely to engage in collective action and be politically active, with higher savings and greater access to subsidized loans. -
Publication
Asymmetric Information and Middleman Margins: An Experiment with Indian Potato Farmers
(The MIT Press, 2018-03)West Bengal potato farmers cannot directly access wholesale markets and do not knowwholesale prices. Local middlemen earn large margins; pass-through from wholesale to farmgate prices is negligible. When we informed farmers in randomly chosen villages about wholesale prices, average farmgate sales and prices were unaffected, but pass-through to farmgate prices increased. These results can be explained by a model where farmers bargain ex post with village middlemen, with the outside option of selling to middlemen outside the village. They are inconsistent with standard oligopolistic models of pass-through, search frictions, or risk-sharing contracts.