C. Journal articles published externally
2,064 items available
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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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Competition and Demographics in Large Indian Cities
(Taylor and Francis, 2011-08-05)Recent studies suggest that consumer-household attributes may be as important in determining the level of competition in certain markets as firm characteristics and the number of firms. However, evidence on which consumer-household attributes matter for competition is limited, especially for developing countries. Focusing on India's retail sector, this article contributes to this literature by showing that the number of adult non-workers per household in the city, a proxy for shopping time opportunity cost, has a strong effect on competition between retailers. Policy implications of our findings in light of the ongoing dramatic reductions in non-workers in India are discussed. -
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Eliciting Probabilistic Expectations with Visual Aids in Developing Countries: How Sensitive Are Answers to Variations in Elicitation Design?
( 2011)Eliciting subjective probability distributions in developing countries is often based on visual aids such as beans to represent probabilities and intervals on a sheet of paper to represent the support. We conduct an experiment in India which tests the sensitivity of elicited expectations to variations in three facets of the elicitation methodology: the number of beans, the design of the support (predetermined or self-anchored), and the ordering of questions. Our results show remarkable robustness to variations in elicitation design. Nevertheless, the added precision offered by using more beans and a larger number of intervals with a predetermined support improves accuracy. -
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Brazil's Growth Performance: A Comparative Perspective to the Asian Giants
( 2011)We compare economic efficiencies in Brazil, India, and China, where economic efficiency measures the gap between potential and actual output for a given input combination and technological factor. We use stochastic production frontier models to measure the contributions of factors of production and technology to growth and estimate non-positive error terms that capture production inefficiencies in each country. The results suggest that China and India had relatively inefficient production in the early 1980s but have since improved production efficiency substantially. In the same period, production efficiency in Brazil has lagged those of China and India. The gap between Brazil's production efficiency and those of its Asian peers has narrowed in recent years. However, production remains more efficient in China and India, supporting more rapid growth in these countries relative to Brazil. -
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Child Mortality in Rural India
( 2011)This paper focuses on infant and child mortality in rural areas of India. We construct a flexible duration model, which allows for frailty at multiple levels and interactions between the child's age and individual, socioeconomic, and environmental characteristics. The model is estimated using the Indian National Family and Health Survey 1998/1999. The estimation results show that socioeconomic and environmental characteristics have significantly different impacts on mortality rates at different ages. These are particularly important immediately after birth. The parameter estimates indicate that child mortality can be reduced substantially, particularly by improving the education of women, providing safe water, and reducing indoor air pollution caused by dirty cooking fuels. Finally, we still found substantial differences in mortality rates between states, which are associated with differences in schooling expenditures, female immunization, and poverty rates. -
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Teacher Opinions on Performance Pay: Evidence from India
( 2011)The practical viability of performance-based pay programs for teachers depends critically on the extent of support the idea will receive from teachers. We present evidence on teacher opinions with regard to performance-based pay from teacher interviews conducted in the context of an experimental evaluation of a program that provided performance-based bonuses to teachers in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. We report four main findings in this paper: (1) over 80% of teachers had a favorable opinion about the idea of linking a component of pay to measures of performance, (2) exposure to an actual incentive program increased teacher support for the idea, (3) teacher support declines with age, experience, training, and base pay, and (4) the extent of teachers' stated ex ante support for performance-linked pay (over a series of mean-preserving spreads of pay) is positively correlated with their ex post performance as measured by estimates of teacher value addition. This suggests that teachers are aware of their own effectiveness and that implementing a performance-linked pay program could not only have broad-based support among teachers but also attract more effective teachers into the teaching profession. -
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Teacher Performance Pay: Experimental Evidence from India
( 2011)We present results from a randomized evaluation of a teacher performance pay program implemented across a large representative sample of government-run rural primary schools in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. At the end of 2 years of the program, students in incentive schools performed significantly better than those in control schools by 0.27 and 0.17 standard deviations in math and language tests, respectively. We find no evidence of any adverse consequences of the program. The program was highly cost effective, and incentive schools performed significantly better than other randomly chosen schools that received additional schooling inputs of a similar value. -
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Ownership, Competition, and Bank Productivity: An Analysis of Indian Banking in the Post-reform Period
( 2011)This paper investigates the effect of ownership and competition on Indian bank productivity since the 1991 reforms. We find that Indian private banks dominate the public and foreign banks both in terms of productivity levels and productivity growth, with the new Indian private banks leading the charge. Competition has a positive impact on productivity for the old Indian private banks, and all the other banks are hurt by competition--the worst hit being new Indian private banks. A similar picture emerges on the productivity growth side, with the new Indian private bank productivity growth being the worst affected as competition increases. An analysis of the pre- and post-1998 periods shows that the latter period displays a much higher productivity gap between the Indian private banks and the public and foreign banks. Indian private bank productivity and productivity growth suffer due to increasing competition in the post-1998 period. -
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Tall Claims : Mortality Selection and the Height of Children in India
( 2011)Data from three rounds of nationally representative health surveys in India (1992/93, 1998/99 and 2005/06) are used to assess the impact of selective mortality on children's anthropometrics. The nutritional status of the child population was simulated under the counterfactual scenario that all children who died in the first three years of life were alive at the time of measurement. The simulations demonstrate that the difference in anthropometrics due to selective mortality would be large only if there were very large differences in anthropometrics between the children who died and those who survived. Differences of this size are not substantiated by the research on the degree of association between mortality and malnutrition. The study shows that although mortality risk is higher among malnourished children, selective mortality has only a minor impact on the measured nutritional status of children stratified by gender.