Archives: Event

seminar on “The Impact of Groundwater Accessibility on the Performance of Firms” with Dr Sheetal Sekhri, Department of Economics, University of Virginia, USA will be held at NCAER on July 17, 2018.

This presentation is based on the joint work of Sheetal Sekhri with Jiahua Liu. In this paper, the authors evaluate the impact of groundwater accessibility on the performance of firms. The authors use a physical limitation that discontinuously raises the cost of accessing groundwater at a depth of 8 meters to examine how such a jump in the cost of groundwater access affects firm outcomes. Employing nationally representative Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprise Census data along with groundwater measures from observation wells in India in a regression discontinuity design framework, the authors find that firm outcomes worsen in areas where the cost of groundwater access is high. The authors examine mechanisms and find that evidence weighs in favour of groundwater inaccessibility changing the composition of firms for the micro, small, and medium enterprises as opposed to the dampening of demand due to a decline in the agricultural sector. The authors do not find evidence of forward linkages in the agricultural and industrial sectors.

Sheetal Sekhri is an Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies at the Department of Economics, University of Virginia, USA. She is also a Fellow at the International Growth Centre, London School of Economics. Her fields of interest are development economics, applied microeconomics, environmental and natural resource economics. Her research focuses on the delivery of public services and safety nets, higher education and skill development, and water-related issues in India.

She has a BS from Iowa State University, and an MA and PhD in Economics from Brown University.

For queries, please contact Ms Sudesh Bala at sbala@ncaer.org or on 91-11-2345-2722.

A seminar on “Environmental Catastrophes and Mitigation Policies in a Multi-region World” with Professor Avinash Dixit, Professor Emeritus at Princeton University was held at NCAER on July 12, 2018.

In his Presentation, Professor Dixit discussed his joint paper with Timothy Besley (LSE) which presents a simple model for assessing the willingness to pay for reductions in the risk associated with catastrophic climate change. The model is extremely tractable and applies to a multi-region world but with global externalities and has five key features. First, neither the occurrence nor the costs of a catastrophic event in any one year are precisely predictable. Second, the probability of a catastrophe occurring in any one year increases as the levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere increase. Third, greenhouse gases are a worldwide public bad with emissions from any one country or region increasing the risks for all. Fourth, there is two-sided irreversibility; if nothing is done and the problem proves serious, the climate, economic activity and human life will suffer permanent damage, but if we spend large sums on countermeasures and the problem turns out to be minor or even non-existent, we will have wasted resources unnecessarily. Fifth, technological progress may yield partial or even complete solutions. The framework proposed by the authors can be used to give a sense of the quantitative significance of mitigation strategies. The paper illustrates this for a core set of parameter values.

Avinash Dixit is John J. F. Sherrerd ’52 University Professor of Economics Emeritus at Princeton University. Before joining Princeton in 1981, he was assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley, a fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, and professor at the University of Warwick. He has held visiting professorships at MIT, and visiting scholar positions at the IMF, the LSE, the Institute for International Economic Studies in Stockholm, and the Russell Sage Foundation. Dixit’s research interests include microeconomic theory, game theory, international trade, industrial organization, growth and development theories, public economics, political economy, and the new institutional economics.

Dixit was President of the Econometric Society in 2001, and of the American Economic Association in 2008. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1992, the National Academy of Sciences in 2005, the American Philosophical Society in 2010, and was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy in 2006. He received the Indian Econometric Society’s Mahalanobis Memorial International Medal in 1985. He was awarded the Padma Vibhushan by the President of India in 2016. Dixit delivered the 15th Annual NCAER India Policy Forum Lecture 0n July 10, 2018. Dixit studied for a BSc in mathematics and physics at St. Xavier’s College Bombay, at Corpus Christi College Cambridge, for a BA in mathematics, and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for a PhD in economics.

Special 15th Anniversary IPF Event

Reflections: India’s Chief Economic Advisor
in Conversation

Dr Arvind Subramanian

talking to

Prof Karthik Muralidharan
Tata Chancellor’s Endowed Chair, University of California, San Diego
and NCAER

Arvind Subramanian is the Chief Economic Adviser to the Government of India and will be leaving that position soon after nearly four years in the Ministry of Finance. In a glowing tribute, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley has written about Subramanian’s tenure, “I will miss his dynamism, energy, intellectual ability, and ideas. He would walk into my room—at times, several times a day—addressing me as ‘Minister’ to give either the good news or otherwise. His departure will be missed by me. But I know that his heart is very much here.”

Subramanian was the Dennis Weatherstone Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, DC and has taught at the Harvard Kennedy School and at Johns Hopkins’ SAIS. Subramanian has been a Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Development, Assistant Director in the Research Department of the International Monetary Fund, and served at the GATT in Geneva during the Uruguay Round.

He is widely acknowledged for his expert knowledge of the economics of India and China. Besides papers in journals and collected works, Subramanian has written a number of books including India’s Turn: Understanding the Economic Transformation (2008); Eclipse: Living in the Shadow of China’s Economic Dominance (2011); and Who Needs to Open the Capital Account? (2012). He has published in leading magazines and newspapers, including The Economist, The Washington Post, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. He has dramatically elevated the analytical quality and presentation of ideas in the four Economic Surveys of the Government of India that he has guided. Arvind received a BA in Economics from St. Stephens College, Delhi, an MBA from IIM, Ahmedabad, and an MPhil and DPhil from Oxford University.

This special event marks the 15th Anniversary of IPF and is part of the annual two-day IPF conference to be held in New Delhi on July 10-11, 2018.

Prior registration is required. For queries, please contact Ms Sudesh Bala at sbala@ncaer.org or 91-11-2345-2722.

About the India Policy Forum: The NCAER India Policy Forum is organised annually in New Delhi and promotes rigorous, world-class, empirical economic research on India with commissioned papers, an annual summer conference leading to an international journal, and the Annual IPF Lecture. The IPF provides a unique combination of intense scholarship and policymaker engagement at its summer conference. As India’s policy challenges become ever more complex, besides original empirical research the IPF now also features expert review articles that define the best available, research-based, policy guidance on issues of topical importance. An international Advisory Panel and an international Research Panel guide the IPF, with many panel members joining the summer conference. The IPF’s current editors are Shekhar Shah (NCAER), Barry Bosworth (Brookings), and Karthik Muralidharan (UC, San Diego). The IPF enters its 15th year in 2018, and for its first decade was a partnership with the Brookings Institution in Washington DC.

Background 

The National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) is India’s oldest and largest independent, non-profit, economic research institute. It does grant-funded research, commissioned studies for governments and industry, and is one of the few think tanks globally that also collect primary data. NCAER with its consortium partners, University of Maryland and University of Michigan, has recently set up a new National Data Innovation Centre (NDIC). Initial funding for NDIC is provided by Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The main objective of NDIC is to serve as a laboratory for experiments in data collection, interfacing with partners in think tanks, Indian and international universities, and government. NDIC forms an important core of NCAER’s long-standing data collection activities.

Request for Proposal (RFP)

The focus of the RFP is to seek for proposals on methodologies for data collection and analysis across the following domains: gender equity, income from different sources, consumption expenditure, employment and unemployment, financial inclusion, health insurance and health expenditure, and agriculture.

The proposals should focus on innovative ideas to improve data quality on the following aspects:

• Fulfilling data needs and bridging gaps: In the context of the above-mentioned domains, this would entail identifying the key sub-domains that have hitherto received little attention, and developing and evaluating scalable data collection modules.
• Mode of data collection: This would involve experimenting with alternative modes of data collection such as telephone interviews, various computer-assisted methods, and interactive voice response, and comparing these with the traditional methods of data collection in India.
• Questionnaire designing: The main question that needs to be addressed during designing of a questionnaire is: What are the elements of a good questionnaire, and how can these be integrated to elicit accurate responses from the target respondents? In this context, the components that require special attention are framing and wording of the questions, use of open versus closed questions, number of points on rating scales, labelling of the rating scale points, order of response alternatives, use of the ‘don’t know’ response, sequence of the questions, the recall period, and skip patterns, among other things.
• Social desirability bias: Since it has been observed that a significant number of people provide false information to stay within the socially desirable framework than be seen to be part of the socially undesirable one, it is important to identify methods of overcoming this problem in data collection. This phenomenon may also be related to the interviewer characteristics and interviewing techniques, as often people report what they perceive is considered desirable by the interviewer instead of giving an honest response.
• Interview setting: This implies assessment of the interview setting and how it can play a role in improving reporting by the respondents, particularly in the case of questions pertaining to sensitive behaviour (e.g., semi-private setting versus complete privacy).
• Survey implementation: The method of data collection and survey implementation may also affect the quality of data. This necessitates identification of the key elements of survey implementation for enhancing data quality, such as interviewing techniques, developing a feasible field plan, and monitoring and supervision of the fieldwork.

Eligibility

Students pursuing their PhD degree or equivalent in any Indian academic or research institute are eligible to apply. MA and M.Phil. Students are also eligible to apply if strong faculty mentoring is available. We seek proposals from student–faculty teams in order to promote innovations, build skills and foster collaborations between the researchers and senior faculty both during and after the grant implementation phase.

Funding

The Centre will support a budget of up to Rs. 6 lakhs for a period of 12 months. The budget should clearly indicate the actual needs and modes of utilisation of the funding for the proposed project. There is provision for five such grants. Only one grant from each applicant will be considered for funding.

Application Procedure

All applications must be emailed to Arpita Kayal, Programme Manager, NDIC (akayal@ncaer.org), in a single PDF document (with the text in ‘Georgia’ font, point size 12), comprising the following components:

A) The proposal (not longer than four pages of text in single space) on research work falling under the Centre’s focus areas outlined above. The proposal should include the following sections:

1. Project Summary;

2. Specific Aim(s);

3. Research Strategy, which would further specify:

a. Significance

b. Innovation

c. Approach and Implementation Plan, indicating how the proposed questions/innovations will be tested;

4. Expected Outcomes;

5. Potential Challenges and Alternative Strategies;

6. Timeline; and

7. Budget.

(The page limit is inclusive of the first six components delineated above, while additional pages may be used if needed for detailing the budget.)

B) Curriculum Vitae of both the applicant and the respective research guide/faculty member.

C) Support letter from the research guide/faculty member.

Last Date for Submission of Proposals has lapsed

Selection Criteria

The selection of students will be based on the merit of the proposal and the CV of the applicant. Merit of the proposal will be judged based on the following criteria:

• Alignment of the proposal with the RFP focus areas
• Innovativeness in method
• Rigour and feasibility of approach
• Clarity of thought
• Clarity in writing
• Selection will also be guided by the distribution of proposals across various domains and components that determine data quality.

Other Requirements

The student and faculty should first check the institutional policies of their respective universities/institutes regarding such grants before applying.

It is mandatory that the selected students spend some time at NCAER to make themselves familiar with the activities undertaken by the Centre and also to discuss and present their research findings. Optionally, the selected students may wish to spend the entire project period (one year) at NCAER.

At the end of the grant, selected students will have to submit a research/working paper authored by the student. The research/working paper after it has been peer-reviewed, will be uploaded on the NCAER-NDIC website. All research outputs are expected to follow the open access policy of the Gates Foundation.

The selected students and their supervisors will also be encouraged to contribute to the NCAER-NDIC blogs based on their experiences of working on the grant.