Economics

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In the year 1975, the Indian government initiated the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS), the largest national programme in the world targeting long-term nutrition and holistic development of children, to be implemented through the Anganwadi Centres (AWC). Combining differences across villages in the year of AWC construction with birth-year of children, we capture the variation in ‘exposure’ to the programme, to estimate the impact of the ICDS exposure through access to AWCs on later life health outcomes of children. Our findings suggest that a 10–13 year old cohort fully exposed to the scheme during first three years of life has higher height (by 2.3 cm) and weight (by 1 kg) as compared to the same cohort, not exposed to the services in initial three years. The Z score of height-for-age (ZHFA) and Z score of weight-for-age ZWFA, although not statistically significant, seem to increase as well. The average impacts seem to be as high as 0.74 cm and 0.33 kg for an extra year of exposure, for measures of height and weight, respectively. Our findings are robust to changing age cohorts and several specifications. The effects seem to be larger among girls and in poor households. © 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

(SoHSS) School of Humanities and Social Sciences

Journal of Development Studies

Lasting Impact of Early Life Interventions: Evidence from India’s Integrated Child Development Services

This paper develops a potential Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) based agroforestry mechanism for removing nitrate contaminants from a groundwater plume. Under a PES arrangement, farmers are incentivized to grow nitrate removing poplar trees which yield timber revenues along with PES incomes for cleaning a contaminated aquifer. Optimal land use allocation decisions between a traditional agricultural crop and poplar based agroforestry are derived using a dynamic bio-economic model of groundwater nitrate assimilation in trees, where rate of biomass accumulation is influenced by the length of rotation, PES payments and revenues from poplar and wheat. Results, derived through an application of the model to Uttar Pradesh, India, suggest that the rate of nitrate removal from contaminated plumes can get constrained by the total land area dedicated to poplar farming as well as by the rotation length of poplar plantation. Revenues generated through poplar biomass sale play a crucial role in land use decisions in favor of poplar afforestation. In absence of biomass income, afforestation decisions become sensitive to PES price. Findings also indicate that nitrate remediation of highly contaminated aquifers would require large-scale conversion of farmlands and a long-term time frame, for which it is important to make PES-based agroforestry financially attractive to the farmers. © 2020 Elsevier Ltd

Journal of Cleaner Production

Payments for ecosystems services-based agroforestry and groundwater nitrate remediation: The case of Poplar deltoides in Uttar Pradesh, India

I study the evolutionary stability of behavioural rules in a bargaining game. Each individual bargains in a pairwise manner with all other individuals over the division of a pie of fixed size by claiming a share for himself; individuals in a pair receive their respective claims if and only if the sum of the claims does not exceed unity. Each individual is associated with a behavioural rule which determines the share he chooses to claim. A behavioural rule is a correspondence that maps from a set of demands that were claimed by individuals in the recent history of the game into a set of shares, and each share in the latter set is chosen by the individual with positive probability. The evolutionary fitness of a behavioural rule is determined by the shares obtained by individuals who follow that particular rule, and fitter behavioural rules are selected over rules that are less fit. A state, i.e. a profile of claims made by the individuals in the population, is defined to be stable (neutrally stable) if the population continues to be comprised only of the incumbent behavioural rules (all incumbent behavioural rules continue to exist) even in the face of an appearance of a mutant behavioural rule. I formalise this in terms of two conditions. Firstly, internal stability requires the incumbent behavioural rules in the population to be equally fit. Secondly, external stability (neutral external stability) requires incumbent behavioural rules to be fitter (to not be less fit) than any mutant behavioural rule. I show that: (i) a necessary condition for stability of a state is that the state must be such that each individual responds by claiming a time-invariant share of the pie, and (ii) the state where all individuals demand half of the pie is the only state that is both internally stable and neutrally externally stable. © 2021 Elsevier B.V.

Fulltext

Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization

Evolutionary stability of behavioural rules in bargaining

This paper develops an integrated framework for modeling payment for ecosystem services (PES) mechanisms that deliver multiple environmental services. Specifically, under a community-led PES, forest conservation is promoted to deliver carbon and stream water benefits. The upstream community is paid for avoided fuelwood harvesting through a United Nations programme on reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) program, whereas additional income is generated from water sales to the downstream communities. A bio-economic model derives optimal level of fuelwood harvesting, which in conjunction with the changing species composition of forests, streamflow hydrology and fire risks, impacts on the carbon and water generation potential of the PES project. Results indicate that forest conservation outcomes are better when water and carbon services are combined, however overall cost to the program is lower under a carbon-based PES. Changing species composition of forests creates tradeoffs between water and carbon benefits. Forest fires further challenge the viability of PES schemes through reducing streamflow and carbon sequestration potential. Recommendations for Resource Managers: Linking two or more environmental services under a single payment for ecosystem services (PES) scheme could improve forest conservation through making it more attractive to the participating communities. PES programs that combine multiple environmental services become economically attractive to participating communities through increasing their incomes. For instance, water and carbon driven services complement each other due to the overlapping benefits from improving forest biomass. However, fire risks can lower the benefits from PES and dissuade community participation. Similarly, the ecological and hydrological dimensions of PES projects that offer carbon and water benefits need to be understood and incorporated within PES framework design to enhance their durability. Conservation of mixed forests is more responsive to water-based PES payments, in comparison to monoculture oak forests, however, mixed forests are also more vulnerable to degradation in absence of cooking fuel subsidies. © 2021 The Authors. Natural Resource Modeling published by Wiley Periodicals LLC.

Natural Resource Modeling

Can combining two environmental services under a single PES program result in better environmental outcomes and lower costs?

Industrial effluents and municipal wastewaters are increasingly finding their way into freshwater bodies, posing serious health and environmental challenges. In this paper, the potential for industrial wastewater remediation through agroforestry is explored for a peri-urban farming region in India. Farmers are incentivized under a payment for ecosystem services (PES) mechanism to convert their farmlands into poplar-based agroforestry and utilize industrial effluents for irrigating trees. Additional income can be derived through sale of poplar timber which enhances the attractiveness of such a PES mechanism. A dynamic optimization model compares farmers' optimal land use allocation to a socially optimal case. Further, the firm's effluent discharge outcomes are compared to an alternative arrangement where it is fined for discharging untreated wastewater into waterbodies in the absence of the agroforestry remediation option. Results support the attractiveness of such PES mechanisms in addressing the industrial effluent discharge problem while simultaneously mitigating the effects of water scarcity through wastewater reclamation. The optimal level of tax required to accomplish complete treatment of effluents by polluting firms is several times higher compared to PES payments. Further, the incentive to convert farmland into poplar plantations improves with PES payments but declines with higher profitability of agricultural crops. © 2021 World Scientific Publishing Company.

Water Economics and Policy

A Potential PES Mechanism for Agroforestry-Led Industrial Wastewater Remediation using Short-Rotation Trees

We estimate higher order risk preferences of farmers from a water scarce region in West Bengal, India. We then examine correlations across risk aversion, prudence and temperance attitudes of farmers, and explore associations of these preferences with household characteristics. Our experimental findings indicate risk seeking behaviour of farmers. We find that farmers took more prudent and temperate decisions. Risk aversion and prudence have a significant negative correlation, whereas prudence and temperance have a significant positive correlation. Individual characteristics such as age, education, and entrepreneurship, income and value of assets are also correlated with various risk preferences. Increased stated drought resilience of farmers is positively correlated with prudence. Farmers affected by water scarcity in the Kharif make imprudent choices. Farmers with higher cropping intensities exhibit high levels of prudence and temperance. These findings have important theoretical and policy implications which we discuss in the paper. © 2021, The Indian Econometric Society.

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Journal of Quantitative Economics

Exploring Higher Order Risk Preferences of Farmers in a Water-Scarce Region: Evidence from a Field Experiment in West Bengal, India

We study the stable market outcome that evolves when firms, that operate in a spatially differentiated duopolistic market, recurrently choose prices and quantities via an imitation dynamic. In particular, given that firms choose both prices and quantities, we do not explicitly impose market clearing. We find that: (i) a market-clearing outcome always belongs to the set of stable long-run outcomes, (ii) when the level of market differentiation is low, non-market-clearing outcomes (with excess supply as well as excess demand) are also stable, (iii) when the level of market differentiation is not too high or too low, the stable long-run outcomes imply market clearing at prices above monopoly level, and (iv) when the level of market differentiation is high, the stable long-run outcome implies market clearing at the monopoly price. © 2019, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.

Dynamic Games and Applications

Evolution of Behavior When Duopolists Choose Prices and Quantities

Endogamy or intra-caste marriage is one of the most resilient of all the caste based practices in India. Even in 2011, the rate of inter caste marriages in India was as low as 5.82\%. In this paper we explore whether education has any relationship with this age-old practice of marrying within one's own caste. Using a nationally representative data set, the Indian Human Development Survey, we find that, in sharp contrast with the findings in the existing literature on out-marriages in the Western countries, education levels of the spouses themselves do not have any association with the likelihood of their own marriage being an inter caste one. However, couples with a more educated mother of the husband have a significantly higher probability of being in an inter caste marriage. One standard deviation increase in the years of education of the husband's mother is associated with a 10.16\% increase in the probability of inter caste marriage over the sample mean. Our analysis highlights the importance of recognizing the institution of arranged marriages in any analysis of Indian marriage markets. © 2020 Elsevier B.V.

Whose education matters? An analysis of inter caste marriages in India

Political Constraints and Sovereign Default Premia

This paper characterizes status quo rules in the binary social choice environment. We consider the full preference domain which allows for indifference. We show that status quo rules are the only rules that satisfy ontoness, strategy-proofness and a solidarity property. The solidarity property that we consider, positively correlates the welfare of a voter to rest of the voters in case of her improvement. It is independent from the usual solidarity axiom of welfare dominance under preference replacement used in the literature. © 2020 Elsevier B.V.