Shamma Alam named 2012 Hewlett Foundation / IIE Dissertation Fellow

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Shamma Alam has been named as one of the seven 2012 Hewlett Foundation / IIE Dissertation Fellows. These fellowships support dissertation research on topics that examine how population dynamics, family planning and reproductive health influence economic development, including economic growth, poverty reduction, and equity. Shamma and I are currently working on a paper examining the effects of income shocks on timing of fertility and use of contraceptives in Tanzania. Shamma has also worked as my RA on my NSF grant. The official announcement and short bio of Shamma and the other recipients is here.

International Development Internship Program (IDIP) at Seattle University

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This announcement from Joe Philips, Dean of Albers School of Business and Economics, is mainly of interest for students at Seattle University:

We are pleased to announce that the university’s International Development Internship Program (IDIP) will become part of the Albers School starting this academic year. Dr. Janet Quillian, who has directed the program since it started in 2001, will be joining the Albers School as part of our faculty, having served on the SU faculty since 1995. Janet’s disciplinary background is in nursing, with her undergraduate degree from the University of Nevada, master’s from Texas Women’s University, and doctorate from the University of Texas.

If you are not already familiar with IDIP, it is truly one of the most distinctive programs at SU, offering undergraduate students from across the campus an opportunity to work with an NGO in emerging economies in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. A brief description of the program on the program website says:

The International Development Internship Program (IDIP) is a 20 credit, three-phase academic program designed for undergraduate students. Students are challenged to explore the root causes and consequences of situations that undermine the well-being of individuals in the developing world. The goal of the IDIP Program is to instill in students a lifelong commitment to the Jesuit mission of service and promotion of social justice. Internships with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are available in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

For more information on IDIP, check out the current website: http://www.seattleu.edu/IDIP/Inner.aspx?id=25084

Visit to Bergen

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I was in Bergen in June and presented my work with Kathleen Beegle and Luc Christiaensen on the effects of family planning on fertility at CMI and my work with Shamma Alam on income shocks and timing of fertility at Norwegian School of Economics. A new version of the family planning paper will be available soon and we should have the first public version of the timing of fertility paper ready soon as well.

CSDE seminar on 6 April

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I will be presenting Shamma Alam and my work on shocks and timing of fertility in Tanzania tomorrow (Friday 6 April) at the CSDE seminar series. There is no finished paper yet, but the abstract is below. Income Shocks, Contraceptive Use, and Timing of Fertility

This paper examines the relationship between household income shocks and fertility decisions. Using panel data from Tanzania, we estimate the impact of agricultural shocks on contraception use, pregnancy, and the likelihood of childbirth. To account for unobservable household characteristics that potentially affect both shocks and fertility decisions we employ an fixed effects model. Households significantly increase their contraception use in response to income shocks from crop loss. This comes from an increased use of both traditional contraceptive methods and modern contraceptives. The poorer the household the stronger the effect of income shock on contraceptive use is. Furthermore, pregnancies and childbirth are significantly delayed for households experiencing a crop shock. For both pregnancy and childbirth the likelihood of delay because of shocks increases the poorer the household. We argue that the changes in behavior are the result of deliberate decisions of the households rather than income shocks’ effects on other factors that influence fertility, such as women’s health status, the absence or migration of spouse, and dissolution of partnerships.

Presented Gone with the Wind? paper at the CSAE Conference 2012: Economic Development in Africa

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I was in Oxford in March for the 2012 CSAE Conference: Economic Development in Africa. I presented my paper on the impact of hurricane risk on fertility and education decisions. The conference was great and the quality of the papers continues to increase. You can find the latest version of the paper under "Research" on this website. A full program can be found here.

Ethiopia family planning paper selected for World Bank research group monthly research highlights for October

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My paper on family planning programs in Ethiopia, joint with Kathleen Beegle and Luc Christiaesen, was selected for the October Development Research Group Monthly Research Highlight. The paper is World Bank Policy Research Working Paper No. 5812 and you can find it through SSRN or the World Bank.

Literacy paper out in Economic Development and Cultural Change

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Niels-Hugo Blunch and my paper, "Literacy, Skills, and Welfare: Effects of Participation in Adult Literacy Programs," is out in this issue of EDCC, vol 60(1): 17-66. You can find the published version on JSTOR, at http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/661219. It is rather long, 50 pages, but worth the read if you are interested in literacy programs.

New version of "Family Planning and Fertility: Estimating Program Effects using Cross-sectional Data"

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We (Kathleen Beegle, Luc Christiaensen and I) have just finished revising our paper on the effects of family planning on fertility in Ethiopia. You can find the new version, which has been submitted to a journal, here. The abstract is:

Although reproductive health advocates consider family planning programs the intervention of choice to reduce fertility, there remains a great deal of scepticism among economists as to their effectiveness, despite little rigorous evidence to support either position. This study explores the effects of family planning in Ethiopia using a novel set of instruments to control for potential non-random program placement. The instruments are based on ordinal rankings of area characteristics, motivated by competition between areas for resources. Access to family planning is found to reduce completed fertility by more than 1 child among women without education. No effect is found among women with some formal schooling, suggesting that family planning and formal education act as substitutes, at least in this low income, low growth setting. This provides support to the notion that increasing access to family planning can provide an important, complementary entry point to kick-start the process of fertility reduction.

A bit of "old" news on population growth

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I really meant to put this up about a month ago, but here we go. The UN recently released the World Population Prospects: The 2010 Revision. This predicts that the world's population will be 9.3 billion by 2050 and will eventually reach 10.1 billion by 2100 using their medium variant. The larger increase compared to the revision two years ago is predominantly from slower than expected fertility declines and lower HIV/AIDS mortality. The NY Times has a nice piece about the new projections and you can find the full report here (once it is all available). The press release provides a bit more detail without being overly long. There are two things especially interesting. First, the new projections are the first based on new Bayesian methods developed here at the UW by Adrian Raftery and others. The UW Today has a little article about the work here. Second, it is very timely for my work with Kathleen Beegle and Luc Christiaensen (both from the World Bank) on the effects of family planning programs in Ethiopia. We show that family planning programs are substantially more effective than what have been found in previous studies. There are two likely reasons for this. First, we focus on the effect by education level and show that the whole effect is concentrated among women with no education. Second, instead of looking at countries that are undergoing rapid economic growth and demographic changes, such as Indonesian or Columbia, we study a poor country where there is little economic growth. We find that the total number of children a woman has declines by 1.2 with access to family planning. The paper is available here.

Talk at Google

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Mike Toomim and I gave a talk today at Google in Palo Alto on our joint project on using economics to understand users' choice of interfaces and to inform design decisions in human-computer interactions. The title of the talk was "HCI meets Economics" and the slides are available here. The abstract is below:

In 1983, Donald Norman presented the very first paper at the very first meeting of the Computer-Human Interaction (CHI) conference, and posed a still open problem: can we scientifically measure and optimize "user satisfaction"?  Specifically, can we predict which interfaces users will value and choose to use, before building and deploying a product? Twenty-eight years later, we have yet to find objective measures of an interface's "value" or "user satisfaction."

We present a new method to measure and quantify user choice based on Economics.  To understand user behavior we run economic experiments with thousands of humans on the web.  We pay users different amounts of money to use different interfaces that accomplish the same task, and determine the monetary amount that an interface variation is worth.  For instance, we find that aesthetic changes to an interface significantly changes the amount of money we have to pay.  Thus, our approach provides direct measures of user behavior and how much improvements in interfaces are worth to different types of users.  This will help designers understand the trade-offs inherent in interface design.

In addition, our methods allows for experiments that were previously not possible in both HCI and Economics.  In this talk we explain our method, initial experiments, planned extensions, and the implications for both HCI and Economics.

Labour/development brown bag

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I am presenting at the labour/development brown bag on Thursday 12 May at 12.30. The title of the talk is "Risk Perception, Health Knowledge, and Sexual Behavior." This is not a paper, but a research agenda with Mark Anderson. It follows partly from our recent paper on drop outs and STDs submitted to Demography. A short abstract for the talk is below.

We will discuss a new research agenda relating to adolescent sexual behavior in the US that we are beginning to work on. The talk will focus on the basics of trying to understand the formation of beliefs in the absence of (practical) experience and how expectations and beliefs change over time with experience and additional information.