Contents Volume IIIA: Preface. Analytical Tools. Introduction (J. Behrman, T.N. Srinivasan). Data and econometric tools for development analysis (A. Deaton). Human resources: Empirical modeling of household and family decisions (J. Strauss, D. Thomas). Applied general equilibrium models for policy analysis (J.W. Gunning, M. Keyzer). Resources, Technology, and Institutions. Introduction (J. Behrman, T.N. Srinivasan). Savings, credit and insurance (T. Besley). Technological change and technology strategy (R.E. Evenson, L.E. Westphal). Institutions and economic development (J.Y. Lin, J.B. Nugent). Poverty, institutions, and the environmental-resource base (P. Dasgupta, K.-G. Maler) Contents Volume IIIB: Policy Reform, Stabilization, Structural Adjustment and Growth. Introduction (J. Behrman, T.N. Srinivasan). Policy lessons from development experience since the second world war (A. Krueger). Poverty and policy (M. Lipton, M. Ravallion). Power, distortions, revolt and reform in agricultural land relations (H. Binswanger et al.). Human and physical infrastructure: investment and pricing policies in developing countries (E. Jiminez). Structural adjustment, stabilization and policy reform: domestic and international finance (V. Corbo, S. Fischer). Trade and industrial policy reform (D. Rodrik). The contributions of endogenous growth theory to the analysis of development problems: an assessment (P. Bardhan).

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Handbook of development economics

The immediate physical damages caused by environmental disasters are conspicuous and often the focus of media and government attention. In contrast, the nature and magnitude of post-disaster losses remain largely unknown because they are not easily observable. Here we exploit annual variation in the incidence of typhoons (West-Pacific hurricanes) to identify post-disaster losses within Filipino households. We find that unearned income and excess infant mortality in the year after typhoon exposure outnumber immediate damages and death tolls roughly 15-to-1. Typhoons destroy durable assets and depress incomes, leading to broad expenditure reductions achieved in part through disinvestments in health and human capital. Infant mortality mirrors these economic responses, and additional findings -- that only female infants are at risk, that sibling competition elevates risk, and that infants conceived after a typhoon are also at risk -- indicate that this excess mortality results from household decisions made while coping with post-disaster economic conditions. We estimate that these post-typhoon "economic deaths" constitute 13% of the overall infant mortality rate in the Philippines. Taken together, these results indicate that economic and human losses due to environmental disaster may be an order of magnitude larger than previously thought and that adaptive decision-making may amplify, rather than dampen, disasters' social cost.

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Destruction, Disinvestment, and Death: Economic and Human Losses Following Environmental Disaster

We assess quantitatively the effect of exogenous reductions in fertility on output per capita. Our simulation model allows for effects that run through schooling, the size and age structure of the population, capital accumulation, parental time input into child-rearing, and crowding of fixed natural resources. The model is parameterized using a combination of microeconomic estimates and standard components of quantitative macroeconomic theory. We apply the model to examine the effect of a change in fertility from the UN medium-variant to the UN low-variant projection in Nigeria. For a base case set of parameters, we find that such a change would raise output per capita by 5.6 percent at a horizon of 20 years, and by 11.9 percent at a horizon of 50 years.

The Effect of Fertility Reduction on Economic Growth

We evaluate the long-term impact of treating maternal depression on women’s financial empowerment and parenting decisions. We leverage experimental variation induced by a cluster-randomized control trial that provided psychotherapy to perinatally depressed mothers in rural Pakistan. It was one of the largest psychotherapy interventions in the world, and the treatment was highly successful at reducing depression. We locate mothers seven years after the end of the intervention to evaluate its long-run effects. We find that the intervention increased women’s financial empowerment, increasing their control over household spending. Additionally, the intervention increased both time- and monetary-intensive parental investments, with increases in investments tending to favor girls.

https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdf/10.1257/aer.20180511

Maternal Depression, Women's Empowerment, and Parental Investment: Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial

World development report 1990.

Dowry is often adduced as an explanation of son preference in India, but there is little evidence that dowry motivates son-preferring behaviours. On the premise that gold is an integral part of dowry, we use variation in gold prices to investigate this. First, we exploit a sharp unexpected rise in the price of gold in 1980 and, using a difference-in-discontinuities design, find that the gold price hike is mirrored in an increase in girl relative to boy mortality in the neonatal and infant period. We also find that surviving girls are shorter. Second, using monthly time series data for 35 years, we again find that cyclical variation in gold prices is reflected in excess girl mortality and, since the introduction of prenatal sex determination technology, in the sex ratio at birth. This constitutes the first evidence that dowry costs lead parents to eliminate foetal and newborn girls, and on a scale much larger than "dowry deaths" amongst married women which have been the subject of public attention.

The Price of Gold: Dowry and Death in India

Jayachandran and Kuziemko (Why do mothers breastfeed girls less than boys? Evidence and implications for child health in India. Quarterly Journal of Economics 2011; 126(3): 1485-1538) develop and empirically validate a theory showing son preference in India generates passive parental bias against girls in breastfeeding due to gender-differentiated birth spacing and fertility stopping. I scientifically replicate their empirical exercises to test the validity of the theory in Egypt where there is also high prevailing son preference but little research on its implications for child health investments. I additionally examine whether using the exclusive breastfeeding rate as an alternative outcome yields supportive evidence for the theory. I find the theory is strongly supported by empirical results from Egyptian data bolstering its policy relevance for developing countries besides India.

Gender-Biased Breastfeeding in Egypt: Examining the Fertility Preference Hypotheses of Jayachandran and Kuziemko (2011)

This paper investigates the impact of dams on infant mortality using 32 waves of DHS data that have GPS locations of households. This allows us to estimate the impact of dams on households that reside upstream, downstream, and within its immediate vicinity. We use a sample of over 900,000 children in 17 countries in Africa. In contrast to earlier research on the impact of dams on agricultural productivity and poverty at the district level in India (Duo and Pande, 2007), we examine child-level outcomes, measure the impacts of dams on households that are both close and very far to the dam, and exploit variation in oodplain and non-oodplain

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Dams and Infant Mortality in Africa

We investigate whether restricting elected leadership positions to candidates with “desirable” characteristics leads to society-wide adoption of those characteristics in a low-income democracy with high political participation. Exploiting quasi-experimental variation in fertility limits imposed on village council members in India to curb population growth, we find that rural couples significantly decreased fertility in response. Socially
disadvantaged families exhibit the greatest reduction in marginal fertility immediately following the passage of these limits, but the decline in the long-run “stock” of children is more evenly spread across socioeconomic groups. The limits however also increased the already male-biased sex ratio at birth in castes with strong son preference. Therefore, while restricting access to elected office may aid in achieving social objectives, it
can also worsen inequality.

Abhishek Chakravarty

Papers

The Price of Gold: Dowry and Death in India

The Price of Gold: Dowry and Death in India

Gender-Biased Breastfeeding in Egypt: Examining the Fertility Preference Hypotheses of Jayachandran and Kuziemko (2011)

Dams and Infant Mortality in Africa

Democracy and Demography: Societal Effects of Fertility Limits on Local Leaders