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Adjunct Assistant Professor, Division of Social Science

Sujata Balasubramanian

PhD in Political Economy and Public Policy, University of Southern California

Adjunct Assistant Professor, Division of Social Science

Sujata Balasubramanian

PhD in Political Economy and Public Policy, University of Southern California

CEP Research Areas

Development

Areas of Expertise

Development Economics, Public Policy, Gender and Development, Welfare and Poverty

Biography

Sujata Balasubramanian is a development economist who works on public policy issues related to South Asia, and especially India. She has a Ph.D. in Political Economy and Public Policy from the University of Southern California.

 

Her research has focused on issues such as the effect of government subsidies on food consumption in India, and the negative impact of micro-credit on women in an intra-household bargaining context. In one of her recent projects she examines the issue of why high economic growth has not led to greater gender equality in India. She is also currently working on projects related to welfare transfers, as well as the issue of manufacturing stagnation and female employment in India. Her work has appeared in journals like the Journal of Development Studies and the Asian Development Review. 

Related

Development
Conference, Symposium, Forum, Workshop Roundtable meeting on Empowerment and Wellness of Migrant Domestic Workers: Explorations for Cross-sector Collaborations between Field & Academic Experts Migrant domestic workers (MDWs) contribute to Hong Kong society both through their care work, and by enabling labour force participation, mainly of Hong Kong women. Many observers implicitly assume this is “win-win” for both sides, and specifically that this “importation” of low-skilled labour creates both short and long-term gain for the migrants.
  • 2023-03-20
  • 2:00pm - 5:30pm
Development
Publications Why Micro-Credit May Leave Women Worse Off: Non-Cooperative Bargaining and the Marriage Game in South Asia Micro-credit programmes targeting women continue to grow in South Asia, although research suggests that wives frequently hand over loans to their husbands. Women may also be unable to control the income generated by micro-enterprises. This article presents an intra-household bargaining model explaining these findings and showing how credit may leave women worse off, while benefiting men. This game-theoretic model also shows why a woman might rationally choose to give her loan to her husband even though she does not expect to benefit and knows he may not repay. By Sujata Balasubramanian
Development
Publications Is the PDS Already a Cash Transfer? Rethinking India’s Food Subsidy Policies Critics argue that India’s mismanaged Public Distribution System (PDS), which sells subsidised cereals to poor families, should be replaced by cash transfers. Others fear cash may be misused. Using National Sample Survey data, this article demonstrates that families treat additional PDS subsidies wholly as a source of cash – exactly like a cash transfer. More worryingly, cereal consumption has not increased, despite higher real subsidies. Moreover, neither the PDS nor cash transfers are likely to raise total food expenditure in poor families. By Sujata Balasubramanian
Development
Publications Expanding Footprints: The Impact of Passenger Transportation on Corporate Locations This article investigates how transportation networks shape firms' geographic footprint by reducing monitoring costs of distant investments. Exploiting the staggered expansions of China's passenger high-speed rail (HSR) network, the authors document that the amount of intercity investment between a pair of cities increases by 45% with the introduction of an HSR line connecting the cities. They enhance the causal inference by applying high-dimensional fixed effects, and focusing on city pairs that are "accidentally" connected in the network. By Yatang Lin, Yu Qin, Johan Sulaeman, Jubo Yan, Jialiang Zhang
Development
Publications When student incentives do not work: Evidence from a field experiment in Malawi James Berry, Hyuncheol Bryant Kim and Hyuk Harry Son study how the structure of tournament incentive schemes in education can influence the level and distribution of student outcomes. Through a field experiment among upper-primary students in Malawi, they evaluate two scholarship programs: a Population-based scholarship that rewarded overall top performers on an exam and a Bin-based scholarship that rewarded the top performers within smaller groups of students with similar baseline scores. By Hyuncheol Bryant Kim (on leave), James Berry, Hyuk Harry Son
Competition
Publications Agglomeration, Misallocation, and (the Lack of) Competition Industrial agglomeration policies may limit competition. This study develops, validates, and applies a novel approach for measuring competition based on the comovement of markups and market shares among firms in the same location and industry. Then this study develops a model of how this reduction in competition affects aggregate income. In this paper, the authors apply their approach to the well-known special economic zones (SEZs) of China. This paper estimates that firms in SEZs exhibit cooperative pricing almost three times as intensively as firms outside SEZs. By Yao Amber Li, Wyatt J. Brooks, Joseph P. Kaboski
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