People

Diane Coffey

Executive Director

Diane is a demographer who studies social influences on health in India. She studies the intergenerational transmission of poor population health resulting from India’s exceptionally poor maternal nutrition. Her research traces links among gender, stratification, and poor birth, childhood, and adult health outcomes. She has also studied the causes and consequences of poor sanitation in India.

Her research has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, as well as Social Science & Medicine, Population Research & Policy Review, and other journals. She is currently a visiting researcher at the Indian Statistical Institute in Delhi.

Diane grew up in eastern Connecticut. She holds a BA from Villanova University, and MPA and a PhD from Princeton University. See her academic website here.

Blog

Check out our new paper on experiences and perceptions of discrimination

By Diane Coffey, on October 25th, 2018

This week, a new paper by the SARI team came out in the Economic & Political Weekly. Here's the abstract: Through the use of new survey data, the experiences and perceptions of discrimination among Dalits and Muslims have been quantified.Read More..

Paper on child height published in EPW

By Diane Coffey, on August 7th, 2018

Please check out the Research page to read Dean and my new paper on child height using the NFHS-4 data. It was just published in the journal Economic & Political Weekly on August 4th. We discuss the improvements in childRead More..

Sense and Solidarity: Jholawala Economics for Everyone -- just launched!

By Diane Coffey, on September 22nd, 2017

Congratulations to Jean Drèze on the launch of his new book, Sense and Solidarity: Jholawala Economics for Everyone. The book was just launched in a lovely outdoor ceremony in Ranikhet, Uttarkhand. You can read about on the permanent black publishingRead More..

Three recent reviews of Where India Goes

By Diane Coffey, on August 29th, 2017

We were very happy to find three reviews of Where India Goes in various corners of the internet and we wanted to share them with you! The first is by Raghunath Nageswaran at Youth ki Awaas. It provides a greatRead More..

Research

Open defecation: Manual scavenging’s legacy in rural India

By Diane Coffey, on February 15th, 2019

Manual scavenging is caste-based work which has been handed down over generations, subjecting the same families and communities to deep humiliation, social exclusion, and poor health. This book chapter argues that same casteist attitudes that relegate Dalits to the filthy workRead More..

Where Bharat Goes

By Diane Coffey, on February 15th, 2019

This book chapter discusses why rural Indians tend to reject affordable sanitation options, using which many poorer countries in the developing world have either completely eliminated or have successfully reduced open defecation. The practice of open defecation has negative externalitiesRead More..

The association between neonatal death and facility birth in regions of India

By Diane Coffey, on February 15th, 2019

This paper assesses evidence for the hypothesis that facility births reduce NNM using new data from the National Family Health Survey, 2015-2016. It finds that for babies born outside of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, facility birth is robustly associated with neonatalRead More..

Local social inequality, economic inequality, and disparities in child height in India

By Diane Coffey, on January 10th, 2019

This paper investigates disparities in child height — an important marker of population-level health — among population groups in rural India. India is an informative context in which to study processes of health disparities because there is wide heterogeneity inRead More..