Recent & Upcoming Talks

I compare the education systems of China and India and examine what India can learn from the negative and positive experiences of China’s policy experiments with education during the Mao and the Post-Mao periods. The main topics to be addressed. 1) The broader educational strategies followed for primary, secondary, and vocational and higher education. 2) The education delivery systems—the kind of centralization-decentralization-privatization of education financing and curricular reform policies was followed, and how these policies affected the educational quality and disparities. 3) Parent’s motivation to enroll their children in school and children’s motivation to learn – I will discuss in this context my work with Heckman, and other research that I have done in this area. Analyses of PISA data found that teacher quality is the most central to student learning. Furthermore, the school quality, school choice, school infrastructure, teacher recruiting, teacher training, and teacher accountability are also very important for providing quality education. I will first point out what we learn statistically from the public domain dataset–India Human Development Survey of 2005–about the importance of these factors. I then draw from the techniques that Shanghai-China and a few other east Asian countries adopted to attain high performance in PISA (measured in average score with low disparity across social groups) to point out what positive lessons India can learn to achieve higher educational qualities with equalities. I will also talk about the effectiveness of the IT-technology, distant learning and quotas for SC/ST in closing the educational gap across caste, rural-urban location and income groups in India.

I compare the education systems of China and India and examine what India can learn from the negative and positive experiences of China’s policy experiments with education during the Mao and the Post-Mao periods. The main topics to be addressed. 1) The broader educational strategies followed for primary, secondary, and vocational and higher education. 2) The education delivery systems—the kind of centralization-decentralization-privatization of education financing and curricular reform policies was followed, and how these policies affected the educational quality and disparities. 3) Parent’s motivation to enroll their children in school and children’s motivation to learn – I will discuss in this context my work with Heckman, and other research that I have done in this area. Analyses of PISA data found that teacher quality is the most central to student learning. Furthermore, the school quality, school choice, school infrastructure, teacher recruiting, teacher training, and teacher accountability are also very important for providing quality education. I will first point out what we learn statistically from the public domain dataset–India Human Development Survey of 2005–about the importance of these factors. I then draw from the techniques that Shanghai-China and a few other east Asian countries adopted to attain high performance in PISA (measured in average score with low disparity across social groups) to point out what positive lessons India can learn to achieve higher educational qualities with equalities. I will also talk about the effectiveness of the IT-technology, distant learning and quotas for SC/ST in closing the educational gap across caste, rural-urban location and income groups in India.

Using the one percent CWHS sample of the Administrative data on around 3 million individuals, this paper studies the pattern and determinants of the rate at which workers get into the DI rolls. It uses a competing relative risk Cox hazard model with time varying covariates to examine how the gender, race, and changing economic incentives over the life-cycle affect the probability of one’s getting into the DI rolls. It estimates the rate at which disability related health status of US workers has been changing over time, and the effects of the unemployment shocks and the replacement rate (measured as the ratio of expected DI benefits to average recent earnings) on the propensity to get into the DI rolls. The paper also estimates a baseline DI entitlement rate that can be interpreted as proportional to the natural rate of DI entitlement by age after other estimated factors have been taken into account.

It is known that the human brain develops between age 0-8. And it develops almost at the speed of light between age 2-3. The stimulus that is given during this time is most important for the child’s later development. But many children from the poor families are not able to develop skills such as social, motivational and cognitive due to the circumstances in their home and neighborhood. Education was important for the children of the poor families to move up in the social ladder. But the lack of social, motivational and cognitive skills, which are important for school and labor market success, affects their social mobility. With a good preschool program, it is possible to create a structured learning ability, self-esteem, self-confidence and cognitive developments. A better performance at the elementary level boost the self-confidence and esteem of the children of the poor which help them do well in later years in school and college as well,

Using the NLSY79 (National Longitudinal Study of Youths, 1979) and the NLSY79 Children and Young Adults datasets, this paper formulates and then empirically estimates an altruistic model of parental preschool investment within a structural dynamic programming framework. The paper provides conditions for identification of the structural parameters of the dynamic programming model and carries out a Lucas-Critique free policy analysis using the estimated structural parameters. The paper empirically estimates the production processes for social, motivational and cognitive skills of a child and the role that the parental preschool investment plays in such production processes. It then examines the effect of a publicly provided preschool policy to disadvantaged children on their educational and labor market achievements, and also on the intergenerational long-term effect on social mobility, schooling mobility, and earnings inequality. The paper calculates the tax burden of such a social contract policy taking into account these intra- and inter-generational effects.

Using the NLSY79 (National Longitudinal Study of Youths, 1979) and the NLSY79 Children and Young Adults datasets, this paper formulates and then empirically estimates an altruistic model of parental preschool investment within a structural dynamic programming framework. The paper provides conditions for identification of the structural parameters of the dynamic programming model and carries out a Lucas-Critique free policy analysis using the estimated structural parameters. The paper empirically estimates the production processes for social, motivational and cognitive skills of a child and the role that the parental preschool investment plays in such production processes. It then examines the effect of a publicly provided preschool policy to disadvantaged children on their educational and labor market achievements, and also on the intergenerational long-term effect on social mobility, schooling mobility, and earnings inequality. The paper calculates the tax burden of such a social contract policy taking into account these intra- and inter-generational effects.

Individuals develop adverse health conditions as they get older, which limit their earnings, resources, and well-being. Workers also face uncertainty about their life spans, which affect their savings and consumption decisions. Many well-known economic characteristics of these risks prevent private markets from pooling these risks adequately. Pay-as-you-go social insurance programs – by levying payroll taxes on workers and paying benefits to disabled workers, retirees, and survivors – can substitute for these missing markets. In addition to sharing these two types of risks, such programs will affect the aggregate capital stock, consumption, and the elderly poverty rate. This paper models the risk sharing and the aggregate effects using a calibrated stochastic overlapping generations general equilibrium model. The paper uses as a benchmark the stationary equilibrium of an economy in which individuals self-insure themselves against these risks by adjusting their own saving, and compares this benchmark to the stationary equilibriums of economies with simplified old-age insurance (OASI) and disability insurance (DI) programs, alone and in combination (OASDI). The representative worker’s lifetime welfare is computed in the benchmark and the alternatives. Optimal replacement rates for the model’s OASI and DI programs are also calculated.The main findings of the paper are that the OASI and DI programs in the model economy together improve the lifetime welfare of workers, reduce the variation of consumption and asset holdings over the life cycle, and virtually eliminate elderly poverty that may arise from these two sources of income shocks. The welfare-equivalent increase in consumption at all ages in the benchmark would be about 14 percent for the DI program alone or 11 percent for the combined programs. The OASI program in the model, however, does not improve individual well-being. This might be due to several factors. First, similar to other models in the literature, this model assumes that the accidental bequest of an individual is redistributed equally among living individuals, which effectively mimics an actuarially fair annuity market with some progressive redistribution. This undermines the annuity role of the OASI program. Second, the model disregards the survivors’ benefits components of the OASI program, which would increase the welfare of an individual from an increase in welfare of his survivors. The paper finds that the optimal replacement rate to be zero percent for the OASI program without the survivors’ benefit component and with equal sharing of unintended bequest, and the optimal replacement rate for the DI program to be 90 percent.

This paper models the equilibrium dynamics of Malaria disease and growth in income. It incorporates utility maximizing private human as host behaviors regarding malaria related health care investments to build the disease dynamics and income growth. The paper contrasts how economic and biological epidemiology models differ in their predictions of dynamics of the disease and their effects on economic growth and in their prescriptions of public policies. The paper examines various public policies such as malaria awareness education program, provision of preventive cares to the poor through markets, and the timing of public malaria control programs, and the effects of such public policies on the dynamics of the disease and aggregate income.