Past Seminars

  Student Performance and the Effects of School Quality versus School Fit by Kehinde Ajayi Boston University On 23rd August, 2016 (Tuesday) at 3:00 PM Venue : Seminar Room (First Floor) Department of Economics, Delhi School of Economics All are cordially invited Abstract This paper quantifies the effects of attending a school with high academic quality versus one with preferred characteristics. Analyzing data on secondary students in Ghana, I find that school quality generates larger benefits than school fit — students admitted to schools with high performing peers are more likely to stay in the same school and have modest

  Mandated Political Representation and Development Outcomes: Evidence from India by   Arka Roy Chaudhuri Indian Statistical Institute, Delhi On 18th August, 2016 (Thursday) at 3:00 PM  Venue : Seminar Room (First Floor) Department of Economics, Delhi School of Economics All are cordially invited   Abstract India has a history of various affirmative action policies which include political representation to erstwhile untouchable castes, Scheduled Castes. The paper estimates the causal effect of political quotas of Scheduled Castes in Indian state assemblies on development outcomes of households belonging to their own ethnic group. Specifically I look at how political reservations for

  A Possibility Theorem on Information Aggregation in Elections by Sourav Bhattacharya  Royal Holloway, University of London On 16th August, 2016 (Tuesday) at 3:00 PM Venue : Seminar Room (First Floor) Department of Economics, Delhi School of Economics All are cordially invited Abstract We study aggregation of private information in large elections where all voters have the same preference. There are many states of the world, and each state is identified with a preference ranking over alternatives and a probability distribution over signals. Each voter draws his private signal independently from the said distribution conditional on the state. When there

  Dowry: Household Responses to Expected Marriage Payments by  Anukriti  Boston College On 11th August, 2016 (Thursday) at 3:00 PM Venue : Seminar Room (First Floor) Department of Economics, Delhi School of Economics All are cordially invited   Abstract Dowry is a ubiquitous feature of South Asian marriage markets. Using retrospective data on 39,544 marriages that occurred during 1960-2008, first we describe dowry trends in contemporary rural India. We find that average real net dowry has remained stable over time; however, there is considerable temporal and cross-sectional variation across religions, castes, and states. We then examine how dowry expectations affect

Private provision of public good and endogenous income inequality by Debasis Mondal Indian Institute of Technology Delhi  On 4th August, 2016 (Thursday) at 3:00 PM Venue : Seminar Room (First Floor) Department of Economics, Delhi School of Economics All are cordially invited Abstract In traditional models of public goods with voluntary provision (as like, Bergstrom, Blume and Varian, 1986), size of the non-contributing set does not affect the aggregate level of provision. A transfer of resources from the contributor to the non-contributor without changing their size, unambiguously lowers the aggregate level of provision. Also, aggregate provision level increases with the