03. Journals
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Eliciting Probabilistic Expectations with Visual Aids in Developing Countries: How Sensitive Are Answers to Variations in Elicitation Design?
( 2011) Delavande, Adeline ; Gine, Xavier ; McKenzie, DavidEliciting 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) Nazmi, Nader ; Revilla, Julio E.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) van der Klaauw, Bas ; Wang, LiminThis 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) Muralidharan, Karthik ; Sundararaman, VenkateshThe 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) Muralidharan, Karthik ; Sundararaman, VenkateshWe 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) Sanyal, Paroma ; Shankar, RashmiThis 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) Alderman, H. ; Lokshin, M. ; Radyakin, S.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. -
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Revisiting Between-Group Inequality Measurement: An Application to the Dynamics of Caste Inequality in Two Indian Villages
( 2011) Lanjouw, Peter ; Rao, VijayendraStandard approaches to decomposing how much group differences contribute to inequality rarely show significant between-group inequality, and are of limited use in comparing populations with different numbers of groups. We apply an adaptation to the standard approach that remedies these problems to longitudinal household data from two Indian villages-Palanpur in the north and Sugao in the west. In Palanpur we find that the largest Scheduled Caste group failed to share in the gradual rise in village prosperity. This would not have emerged from standard decomposition analysis. However, in Sugao the alternative procedure does not yield any additional insights because income gains have applied relatively evenly across castes. -
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Information, Direct Access to Farmers, and Rural Market Performance in Central India
( 2010) Goyal, AparajitaThis paper estimates the impact of a change in procurement strategy of a private buyer in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. Beginning in October 2000, Internet kiosks and warehouses were established that provide wholesale price information and an alternative marketing channel to soy farmers in the state. Using a new market-level dataset, the estimates suggest a significant increase in soy price after the introduction of kiosks, supporting the predictions of the theoretical model. Moreover, there is a robust increase in area under soy cultivation. The results point toward an improvement in the functioning of rural agricultural markets. -
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Valuing Access to Water--A Spatial Hedonic Approach, with an Application to Bangalore, India
( 2010) Anselin, Luc ; Lozano-Gracia, Nancy ; Deichmann, Uwe ; Lall, SomikAn important infrastructure policy issue for rapidly growing cities in developing countries is how to raise fiscal revenues to finance basic services in a fair and efficient manner. This requires estimates of the potential benefits or positive welfare effects that may follow from improved infrastructure. In this paper, we take advantage of a unique geo-referenced household survey to carry out a hedonic analysis of housing values that explicitly accounts for spatial spillovers. We use this to derive an estimate of the value of improved access to water in the Indian city of Bangalore. The findings suggest that by limiting the focus to individual or private benefits only, we may underestimate the overall social welfare from investing in service supply. We further demonstrate how spatially explicit policy simulations based on these estimates provide insight into the total effects of targeted interventions.