Blog

It's been official since Monday: Jim Yong Kim will be the next president of the World Bank. President Obama's nomination was controversial for many reasons -- not least the mere fact that the U.S. president gets to pick the president...Read More..

Regular readers of our blog will know that we talk a lot about heights and weights. This is because in a resource scarce setting, body size is a useful way of telling how well off people are. Especially in a...Read More..

I found this today searching for the Indonesia Family Life Survey. It's from Current TV, what I know as Al Gore's TV channel. I laughed at the dig at spending on the the Delhi Metro (at 6:05) rather than latrines....Read More..

I have posted in our research section a new, complete version of the TSC paper, looking like an economics paper. Here's the abstract: Over a billion people worldwide defecate openly without a toilet or latrine, with profound health consequences: over...Read More..

In my email today I received an announcement of a new paper “Price subsidies, diagnostic tests, and targeting of malaria treatment: Evidence from a randomized controlled trial,” by Jessica Cohen, Pascaline Dupas, and (disclosure: my friend) Simone Schaner. They report...Read More..

Apparently, while I have been in Sitapur, a lot of people in the U.S. have started paying attention to the deaths of so-called “invisible children”: child soldiers in Uganda. I don’t know much about child soldiering in Uganda or elsewhere...Read More..

Shopping today in the market of Sitapur’s district capital city, I saw a man squatting next to a little table with sorted piles of money: stacks of change, stacks of paper bills. You might think he would be nervous about...Read More..

This morning I had the chance to present preliminary findings from my Total Sanitation Campaign project at ISI Delhi. It was much fun and I appreciate the questions and comments I received. Thank you all! For those of you know...Read More..

I’m in Delhi for a few days to present results from my Total Sanitation Campaign project at ISI tomorrow. Today I’m mainly at the Delhi School of Economics, and this morning I was chatting with Ashwini Deshpande, who has written...Read More..

I’ve been staying away from the particular villages where Diane has been studying pregnancy and childbirth – one more angrazi might just be too much for her friends’ comfort. But her study is wrapping up, so this morning Diane took...Read More..

Today I went to Tapti and Amrita’s village, and sure enough, I got to meet Amrita’s new daughter. Too tired to tell me the story, Amrita deferred to her mother, who shared what had happened. Amrita’s mother was busy organizing...Read More..

In the past few weeks, I’ve been taking lots of field notes from my visits to the three villages in my study, and from visits with various official and government health workers. Yet, I’ve had a hard time figuring out...Read More..

I got exactly what I wanted for my birthday today: this graph! I've been working for a few months now on trying to figure out whether India's Total Sanitation Campaign is improving children's health. While I have been finding generally...Read More..

Our first post from a new blogger: rice board member, friend, and fellow development economist John Papp. For those interested in measurements of leakage from India's large public works program, Clement Imbert and my working paper Estimating Leakages in India's...Read More..

Around the world, holidays are all about the food. In my family, for instance, my dad starts mixing dough for Christmas cookies just a few days after Thanksgiving. Here in Sitapur, Holi, a Hindu holiday that celebrates the coming of...Read More..

Today I'm entering data with my handy travel-sized ten key (Diane, with any luck, is weighing babies as I write), and have enough brain space left over to listen to the BBC World Service. They just did an extended piece...Read More..