I gave a presentation in our weekly labour/development brown bag series on a NSF grant that I am co-PI on. This is very different from most of the other things I work on, but I think it has great potential. You can find the presentation here.
This project merges the fields of Economics and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) into a new field of Interaction Economics. This field studies the costs and benefits of computer systems that define how people decide to use them. This project makes three contributions that form the basis of Interaction Economics. First, we will scientifically measure the objective, quantitative amount that a user interface motivates or demotivates a user to accomplish a task with it. This capability has broad implications, and our method is faster and cheaper than traditional user studies. Second, we will create economic models of these motivations, predicting how systems of interfaces differentially affect production. Third, we will repeatably experiment with social systems by creating multiple copies of them with controlled and manipulated variables, and running the systems to observe the effects of our changes. These three contributions will let us experimentally optimize current systems, and design new systems, of greater complexity and novelty, with greater certainty of success. Our methodology relies on a novel use of Internet labor markets, specifically Amazon‘s Mechanical Turk, a place where interactive tasks (HCI) meet incentives and markets (Economics). With controlled payments to real people we can simulate and study a wide range of social-computational phenomena that was not possible before.
A substantially revised version of “Literacy, Skills and Welfare: Effects of Participation in Adult Literacy Programs” is available. It is joint work with Niels-Hugo Blunch. The abstract is here:
This paper examines the effect of adult literacy program participation on household consumption in Ghana. The adult literacy programs in Ghana are of special interest since they are more comprehensive than standard literacy programs and incorporate many additional topics. We use community fixed effects combined with instrumental variables to account for possible endogenous program placement and self-selection into program participation. For households where none of the adults have completed any formal education we find a substantial, positive and statistically significant effect on household consumption. Our preferred estimate of the effect of participation for households without education is equivalent to a ten percent increase in consumption per adult equivalent. The effects of participation on welfare for other households are smaller and not statistically significant, and become smaller the more educated the household is. We find positive and statistically significant effects of participation on literacy and numeracy rates, although the increases are too small to be the only explanation for the welfare effects. There is also evidence that participants are more likely to engage in market activities and to sell a variety of agricultural goods. Taking account of both direct cost and opportunity cost we argue that the social returns to adult literacy programs are substantial.
My paper on children’s time use is now available on-line. The abstract for the paper is:
This paper uses a longitudinal survey from the Philippines with detailed information on family time use to analyse the effects of economic factors on children’s time allocation. This is done while taking account of censoring, unobservable family heterogeneity and simultaneous decisions with respect to time spent in different activities. It is shown that there is a statistically significant correlation between unobservable individual and household characteristics when it comes to hours spent working and in school, but that this correlation is substantially smaller than one. Including household heterogeneity leads to substantial changes in the estimated effects of many of the important explanatory variables.
I gave a seminar at the CSDE seminar series Friday 17 April. The topic of the talk was “The Demand for Sex Selective Abortions”. The abstract is here (it is the same paper as I presented at University of Michigan – see below).
I gave a seminar at UBC 17 March on my paper “Gone with the Wind? Hurricane Risk, Fertility and Education“. I am in the process of revising the paper based on comments from seminar participants and referee reports I have gotten. An revised version should be ready in the not too distant future.
I gave a seminar at the Population Studies Center at University of Michigan Monday 9 March 2009. The paper, “The Demand for Sex Selective Abortions,” is still work in progress, but the presentation is here. Note that since this is work in progress methods and results might/will change, especially in light of the very useful comments I got during my visit. The abstract is:
One of the major changes that have taken place in India over the last two decades is a significant shift in the sex ratio at birth, as techniques for prenatal sex determination have become more widely available. There has, however, been little analysis of which factors influence the decision to abort female fetuses at the individual level. Furthermore, the sparse literature does not address the relationship between fertility, spacing and the demand for sex selective abortions, which may lead to biased estimates of the determinants of sex selective abortions. Using data from the three rounds of the National Family and Health Survey this paper relies on the observed spacing between births to examine the determinants of the demand for sex selective abortions. By employing a discrete hazard model it is possible to simultaneously control for the fertility and abortion decisions, while taking account of censoring and unobservable characteristics that might affect either.
This is a highly recommended conference. More information on the conference below or you can get in touch with me.
Pacific Conference for Development Economics
Saturday, March 14, 2009
http://bss.sfsu.edu/economics/newsevents/pacdev.htm
San Francisco State University
Please note that the conference submission deadline is fast approaching. If you have not already sent in your paper, please submit your paper (or extended abstract) by February 1st. Submission and registration information is available on the conference website.
I went to Boston for the annual NEUDC conference last weekend. It is always interesting to see what people are working on … and catching up with old friends. My paper on adult literacy in Ghana (which is joint work with Niels-Hugo Blunch) was part of the poster session and we got some good comments (plus it gave me a chance to figure out how to make posters in LaTeX!). The final result is here.
This is not quite new (January 2008), but it is a very interesting look at whether Hepatitis B can really explain a substantial part of the sex ratio in China as claimed by Oster 2005. The paper is by Monica Das Gupta of the World Bank and you can find the paper here. The abstract nicely sums up the main problem with the Oster argument:
China has a large deficit of females, and public policies have sought to reduce the son preference that is widely believed to cause this. Recently a study has suggested that up to 75 percent of this deficit is attributable to hepatitis B infection, indicating that immunization programs should form the first plank of policy interventions. However, a large medical dataset from Taiwan (China) shows that hepatitis B infection raises women’s probability of having a son by only 0.25 percent. And demographic data from China show that the only group of women who have elevated probabilities of bearing a son are those who have already borne daughters. This pattern makes it difficult to see how any biological factor can explain a large part of the imbalance in China’s sex ratios at birth — unless it can be shown that it somehow selectively affects those who have borne girls, or causes them to first bear girls and then boys. The Taiwanese data suggest that this is not the case with hepatitis B, since its impact is unaffected by the sex composition of previous births. The data support the cultural, rather than the biological, explanation for the “missing women.”
Niels-Hugo Blunch and I have revised our paper “Literacy, Skills and Welfare: Effects of Participation in Adult Literacy Programs” for resubmission to Economic Development and Cultural Change. The abstract is below.
This paper examines the effects of adult literacy program participation on household consumption in Ghana. We use community fixed effects combined with instrumental variables to account for possible endogenous program placement and self-selection into program participation. For households where none of the adults have completed any formal education we find a substantial, positive and statistically significant effect on household consumption. Our preferred estimate of the effect of participation for households without education is equivalent to a ten percent increase in consumption per adult equivalent. There is, however, little evidence that other households benefit from participation in terms of welfare. The improvements in literacy and numeracy rates are also mainly concentrated among participants with little or no formal schooling, although most participants appear to gain in skills to some extent. Taking account of both direct cost and opportunity cost we argue that the social returns to adult literacy programs are substantial.
At the Population Association of America’s Annual Meeting in New Orleans I presented a preliminary version of my paper, “Hurricanes, Hoarding and Replacement: Estimating the Causal Effect of Mortality on Fertility,” on the effect of mortality on fertility using exposure to hurricanes to identify exogenous changes in mortality. The presentation can be found here. I also discussed four papers in the session on “Infant and Child Mortality”.
I recently presented a revised version of Niels-Hugo Blunch and my paper, “Literacy, Skills and Welfare: Effects of Participation in Adult Literacy Programs,” on the effects of participating in adult literacy programs in Ghana for the department and at the 2008 Pacific Development Conference held at UCSD. If you are interested in the preliminary results, please see the presentation.
The PacDev is a great opportunity to present work and see what else is going on in the development field on the West Coast. This year, Mark Anderson, who is a 2nd year student at the department, presented his paper on crime in South Africa and received a lot of praise and good comments. The paper was originally written for my Econ 591 and Econ 543 classes. I will try to link to his paper when the next version is ready.
Craig McIntosh did a great job at putting together a very interesting conference with lots of good papers. Next year the conference will be in the San Francisco, arranged by Anoshua Chaudhuri (SFSU), who is a former graduate student at UW Economics. Since we will be going back to San Francisco there were discussions about whether the name should be changed back to the original name: the Bay Area Development Association (you figure out what the “appropriate” acronym would be 
).
I presented my paper “Gone with the Wind? Hurricane Risk, Fertility and Education” at the AEA annual meeting in New Orleans and discussed a paper (Siwan Anderson and Mukesh Eswaran, “What Determines Female Autonomy? Evidence from Bangladesh”). My presentation is here if you are interested.
I presented at the Labour and Development brown bag today. The topic was a grant proposal that I am trying to put together in cooperation with University of Witwatersrand and people here at UW. You can find the slides for the presentation here