Smriti Sharma

Bio: Smriti Sharma is an academic researcher from Newcastle University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Personality & Big Five personality traits. The author has an hindex of 9, co-authored 33 publications receiving 342 citations. Previous affiliations of Smriti Sharma include World Institute for Development Economics Research & Dayalbagh Educational Institute.

The power to choose: Gender balance of power and intra-household educational spending in India

Abstract: We assess the effect of female bargaining power on the share of educational expenditures in the household budget in India. We augment the collective household model by endogenizing female bargaining power and use a three-stage least squares approach to simultaneously estimate female bargaining power, per capita household expenditure and budget share of education.Our key results are: (i) female bargaining power has a positive and significant effect on the household budget share of educational spending; (ii) this bargaining power is associated positively (negatively) with education spending in urban (rural) areas; (iii) female bargaining power has a uniformly positive effect on educational expenditure of girls in urban areas among all caste groups, but the observed negative association in rural areas appears to be driven by one of the lower caste groups; and (iv) a pro-male bias exists in educational spending for all age groups, with some differentiation by location and caste.

Social Identity, Behavior, and Personality: Evidence from India

Abstract: Hierarchies in social identities have been found to be integrally related to divergences in economic status. In India, caste is one such significant social identity where continued discriminatory practices towards the lower castes have resulted in poor outcomes for them. While there is considerable work on such divergence on many economic outcomes along caste lines, there is no work on behavioral preferences and personality traits that can also be adversely affected by such identity hierarchies, and that are important determinants of educational attainments and labor market performances. We combine rich data from incentivized tasks and surveys conducted among a large sample of university students in a Seemingly Unrelated Regression framework and find that the historically marginalized Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (SCSTs) and Other Backward Classes (OBCs) fare worse than the upper castes along several dimensions of economic behavior such as competitiveness and confidence and personality traits such as grit, locus of control, and conscientiousness. Further, we find that parental investments only have limited compensatory effects on these gaps. This suggests a need for redesigning the structure of affirmative action policies in India as well as targeting interventions with an aim to improving soft skills among the disadvantaged.

Caste differences in behaviour and personality: Evidence from India

Abstract: The persistent gap in economic outcomes between the upper and lower caste groups in India is typically explained through differences in endowments and the presence of discrimination. While there is sizable literature that examines caste gaps in physical and intellectual human capital, this paper contributes to a small literature that evaluates caste differentials in behavioural preferences and personality traits that are possibly associated with the persistent economic gap between these castes.Using data from experiments and surveys conducted among a large sample of Indian undergraduate students, we find significant caste differences in behaviour and personality such that Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, and Other Backward Classes are less likely to be endowed with the behavioural preferences and personality traits that tend to affect educational attainment, labour market performance, and overall wellbeing positively. Our results have implications for revising the focus of current caste-based policy formulations.

Cognitive, socioemotional and behavioural returns to college quality

Abstract: We exploit the variation in admission cutoffs across colleges at a leading Indian university to estimate the causal effects of enrolling in a selective college on cognitive attainment, behavioral preferences, and Big Five personality traits. Using a regression discontinuity design, we find that enrolling in a selective college improves university exam scores of the marginally admitted females, and makes them less overconfident and less risk averse, while males in selective colleges experience a decline in extraversion and conscientiousness. We find differences in peer quality and rank concerns to be driving our findings.

A Treatise on the Family

Abstract: A Treatise on the Family. G. S. Becker. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1981. Gary Becker is one of the most famous and influential economists of the second half of the 20th century, a fervent contributor to and expounder of the University of Chicago free-market philosophy, and winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in economics. Although any book with the word "treatise" in its title is clearly intended to have an impact, one coming from someone as brilliant and controversial as Becker certainly had such a lofty goal. It has received many article-length reviews in several disciplines (Ben-Porath, 1982; Bergmann, 1995; Foster, 1993; Hannan, 1982), which is one measure of its scholarly importance, and yet its impact is, I think, less than it may have initially appeared, especially for scholars with substantive interests in the family. This book is, its title notwithstanding, more about economics and the economic approach to behavior than about the family. In the first sentence of the preface, Becker writes "In this book, I develop an economic or rational choice approach to the family." Lest anyone accuse him of focusing on traditional (i.e., material) economics topics, such as family income, poverty, and labor supply, he immediately emphasizes that those topics are not his focus. "My intent is more ambitious: to analyze marriage, births, divorce, division of labor in households, prestige, and other non-material behavior with the tools and framework developed for material behavior." Indeed, the book includes chapters on many of these issues. One chapter examines the principles of the efficient division of labor in households, three analyze marriage and divorce, three analyze various child-related issues (fertility and intergenerational mobility), and others focus on broader family issues, such as intrafamily resource allocation. His analysis is not, he believes, constrained by time or place. His intention is "to present a comprehensive analysis that is applicable, at least in part, to families in the past as well as the present, in primitive as well as modern societies, and in Eastern as well as Western cultures." His tone is profoundly conservative and utterly skeptical of any constructive role for government programs. There is a clear sense of how much better things were in the old days of a genderbased division of labor and low market-work rates for married women. Indeed, Becker is ready and able to show in Chapter 2 that such a state of affairs was efficient and induced not by market or societal discrimination (although he allows that it might exist) but by small underlying household productivity differences that arise primarily from what he refers to as "complementarities" between caring for young children while carrying another to term. Most family scholars would probably find that an unconvincingly simple explanation for a profound and complex phenomenon. What, then, is the salient contribution of Treatise on the Family? It is not literally the idea that economics could be applied to the nonmarket sector and to family life because Becker had already established that with considerable success and influence. At its core, microeconomics is simple, characterized by a belief in the importance of prices and markets, the role of self-interested or rational behavior, and, somewhat less centrally, the stability of preferences. It was Becker's singular and invaluable contribution to appreciate that the behaviors potentially amenable to the economic approach were not limited to phenomenon with explicit monetary prices and formal markets. Indeed, during the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, he did undeniably important and pioneering work extending the domain of economics to such topics as labor market discrimination, fertility, crime, human capital, household production, and the allocation of time. Nor is Becker's contribution the detailed analyses themselves. Many of them are, frankly, odd, idiosyncratic, and off-putting. …

Dietary and Policy Priorities for Cardiovascular Disease, Diabetes, and Obesity: A Comprehensive Review

Abstract: Suboptimal nutrition is a leading cause of poor health. Nutrition and policy science have advanced rapidly, creating confusion yet also providing powerful opportunities to reduce the adverse health and economic impacts of poor diets. This review considers the history, new evidence, controversies, and corresponding lessons for modern dietary and policy priorities for cardiovascular diseases, obesity, and diabetes mellitus. Major identified themes include the importance of evaluating the full diversity of diet-related risk pathways, not only blood lipids or obesity; focusing on foods and overall diet patterns, rather than single isolated nutrients; recognizing the complex influences of different foods on long-term weight regulation, rather than simply counting calories; and characterizing and implementing evidence-based strategies, including policy approaches, for lifestyle change. Evidence-informed dietary priorities include increased fruits, nonstarchy vegetables, nuts, legumes, fish, vegetable oils, yogurt, and minimally processed whole grains; and fewer red meats, processed (eg, sodium-preserved) meats, and foods rich in refined grains, starch, added sugars, salt, and trans fat. More investigation is needed on the cardiometabolic effects of phenolics, dairy fat, probiotics, fermentation, coffee, tea, cocoa, eggs, specific vegetable and tropical oils, vitamin D, individual fatty acids, and diet-microbiome interactions. Little evidence to date supports the cardiometabolic relevance of other popular priorities: eg, local, organic, grass-fed, farmed/wild, or non-genetically modified. Evidence-based personalized nutrition appears to depend more on nongenetic characteristics (eg, physical activity, abdominal adiposity, gender, socioeconomic status, culture) than genetic factors. Food choices must be strongly supported by clinical behavior change efforts, health systems reforms, novel technologies, and robust policy strategies targeting economic incentives, schools and workplaces, neighborhood environments, and the food system. Scientific advances provide crucial new insights on optimal targets and best practices to reduce the burdens of diet-related cardiometabolic diseases.

Frustration and Aggression

Abstract: EIGHT members of the Yale Institute of Human Relations have co-operated to produce this book The result is not a mere juxtaposition of uncoordinated viewpoints but a unity of aim and consistency in presentation which make the multiple authorship almost undetectable Whatever judgment one may make about the value of the hypothesis elaborated in the book, there can be little doubt that the intimate collaboration of a team of specialists, each with a distinctive training, is a profitable way of examining a problem which has no clear-cut frontiers and which does not fall neatly into one of the conventional compartments of social study Frustration and Aggression By John Dollard Neal E Miller Leonard W Doob O H Mowrer Robert R Sears, in collaboration with Clellan S Ford, Carl Iver Hovland and Richard T Sollenberger (International Library of Sociology and Social Reconstruction) Pp ix + 150 (London: Kegan Paul and Co, Ltd, 1944) 10s 6d net

Inequality and Growth: What Can the Data Say?

Abstract: This paper describes the correlations between inequality and the growth rates in cross-country data. Using non-parametric methods, we show that the growth rate is an inverted U-shaped function of net changes in inequality: Changes in inequality (in any direction) are associated with reduced growth in the next period. The estimated relationship is robust to variations in control variables and estimation methods. This inverted U-curve is consistent with a simple political economy model, although, as we point out, efforts to interpret this model causally run into difficult identification problems. We show that this non-linearity is sufficient to explain why previous estimates of the relationship between the level of inequality and growth are so different from one another.