I have added a link to the undergraduate development economics course that I am currently teaching at Brown. You can find it under "Teaching" in the menu on the left. It is probably mostly of interest to other professors who are setting up a development economics course. I will be teaching a similar course during the Spring quarter at UW, although there will probably be quite a few changes, if for no other reason that I will not have a TA!
New paper! Niels-Hugo Blunch and I just finished a paper that examines the effectiveness of participation in adult literacy programs in Ghana. The abstract is below. You can download the paper here.
This paper examines the effects of adult literacy program participation on household consumption in Ghana. For households where none of the adults have completed any formal education we find a substantial, positive and statistically significant effect on household consumption. There is, however, little evidence that other households benefit from participation. Furthermore, there appears to be relatively little effect of participation on individual literacy and numeracy skills for all types of households. Hence, the positive effects of participation seem to arise not from literacy skills taught in the programs, but rather from another major component, which focuses on income generating activities, and/or from other factors such as improvements as a result of an expanded network.
I participated in the NEUDC 2005, which, very conveniently for me, was held at Brown. I presented my work on the relation between risk and fertility in Guatemala and discussed Shareen Joshi and T. Paul Schultz's paper on the long-term impact of family planning programs in Matlab.
I will a Visiting Assistant Professor at Brown for the Fall semester (mid August to mid December). While in Providence I will be based at the Population Studies and Training Center, which just moved in to a very nicely renovated building (the old Historical Society building on Waterman Street). Beside doing research and talking to people about my research ideas, I will also be teaching an undergraduate course in development economics for the Economics Department. Furthermore, I am scheduled to present a paper at the PSTC Colloquia Series and at the NEUDC which will be held at Brown this year. The best way to get in touch with me while I am gone is to use my UW email address, which I will continue to use (and I will probably forward my Brown email to that). You can also try giving me a ring at (401) 863-9411, although I do not have a voice mail yet.
Arif Mamun succesfully defended his PhD dissertation today, so a big congratulation to him. He is the first student I have been on a committee for. He will be going to work for Mathematica in September.
During the last couple of weeks I have been to two conferences and given a talk. The first conference was the European Society for Population Economics' annual meeting in Paris. I presented my paper on sex selective abortion in India and received a lot of valuable comments. Just before that conference I went to Mannheim to present my work on risk and fertility in Guatemala at the Mannheim Research Institute for the Economics of Aging at the University of Mannheim. Currently I am in San Francisco for the Western Economic Association's annual conference, where I presented the sex selection work. After this the next conference is not until the end of September when I will be presenting at the NEUDC at Brown.
I have uploaded the papers for the referee reports to the server. You can reach them through the class web site (such as it is). Note that access is restricted based on your UW username. If you have any problems please let me know.
I presented my paper, "Risk and Household Structure: Another Look at the Determinants of Fertility", at the Economic Demography Workshop, held in connection with the Population Association of America's (PAA) annual meeting in Philadelphia, and at the session "Parents and Children" during the regular meeting. At the PAA meeting I was also the chair for the session "Assessing Public Health Interventions in Developing Countries", arranged by Anoshua Chaudhuri. I plan to have the paper on-line before too long.
The first Pacific Conference for Development Economics was help at the University of San Francisco Saturday 5 March. It was a great success with lots of interesting papers and presentations. I presented my work on "Risk and Fertility: Another Look at the Determinants of Fertility". I hope to have a working paper version ready soon. However, the main advantage to going was meeting with the other people in the field. Next year's conference will be held 4 March 2006 at Santa Clara University. If you are a graduate student working on development you are encouraged to send it your paper. Part of the stated purpose of the conference is to allow graduate students to present and meet with faculty and other graduate students.
This New York Times article, Fearing Future, China Starts to Give Girls Their Due, is worth reading (required registration). The basic idea is that China is beginning to realise that its sex ratio is unlikely to change by itself in the short run. Therefore, in some areas the local governments have decided in some cases to pay families that already have daughters. This should be in order to persuade more families to have girls. As far as I can tell at least one of the programs is essentially a pension program aimed at parents without children or with only daughters.
I have set up the web site for Econ 448 - Population Economics, so it now has its own blog for announcements and discussion. If you are a student in that class please stop by on a regular basis.
According to BBC World China's population passed 1.3bn early Thursday with, very fittingly, the birth of a boy. The main interesting statistics in the article is that among registered births boys outnumer girls 120 to 100 (the expected numbers are 105 boys to every 100 girls). The numbers are obviously higher than in India, which is the topic of some of my current research (see this post), but given that India does not have a one-child policy the difference is not a large as one might expect.
Great news! I just received funding from the UW Royalty Research Fund to work on "Causes and Consequences of Sex Selective Abortion in India". The award will be used to cover costs of data, research assistance and travel. I have also been designated a Royalty Research Fund Scholar, which means that I get a quarter of release time from teaching to work on the project. As the work progresses, I will make sure to post more information about it here.
How can we figure out whether advanced placements courses are better than their corresponding college courses: A look at Washington Post's Jay Mathews' article about AP.
Read MoreOkay, I know everybody else has already discovered this, but Gary Becker and Richard Posner have set up a new blog: The Becker-Posner Blog. You can read their introduction here. They have this to say about their blog:
We have decided to start a blog that will explore current issues of economics, law, and policy in a dialogic format. Initially we will be posting just once a week, on Mondays. In time we may post more frequently. The first postings will be tomorrow, December 6.
So far they have discussed preventive war and pharmaceutical patents and as you might expect they are all for it :-). Actually, I was a little disappointed about the level of arguments used. I am not quite sure what I expected, but maybe I was hoping to see something which had some evidence of research behind it. More on this blog when they begin writing about things I care a little more about (research wise).