Rohini Pande
Biographic Data
| ID | 3960727 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Rohini Pande |
| GIVEN NAMES | Rohini |
| FAMILY NAME | Pande |
| SIGNATURE | PANDE R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Yale University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1289-1117 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 36 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 152 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 36 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
The end of the offset
Measuring time use in rural India
Time use data facilitate understanding of labor supply, especially for women who often undertake unpaid care and home production. Although assisted diary-based time use surveys are suitable for low-literacy populations, they are costly and rarely used. We create a low-cost, scalable alternative that captures contextually-determined broad time categories; here, allocations across market work, household labor, and leisure. Using fewer categories an…
Barriers to the Inclusion of Women and Marginalized Groups in Nigeria’s ID System
An estimated one billion people around the world do not have an officially recognized means of identification (ID). The majority live in low-income countries (LICs), particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. This study contributes to an overarching goal of building global knowledge about increasing women’s and marginalized groups’ access to and use of IDs to promote development. There is little systematic evidence about the causes of gender ga…
On Her Own Account
Can increasing control over earnings incentivize a woman to work, and thereby influence norms around gender roles? We randomly varied whether rural Indian women received bank accounts, training in account use, and direct deposit of public sector wages into their own (versus husbands’) accounts. Relative to the accounts only group, women who also received direct deposit and training worked more in public and private sector jobs. The private sector…
Improving use of maternal care services among married adolescent girls
This study examined the effect of the Safe Adolescent Transition and Health Initiative (SATHI) programme on the use of maternal care services among rural, pregnant adolescents in India. This was an intensive community-based, multi-site intervention project conducted in Maharashtra state between 2008 and 2011. Its aims were to improve the reproductive health of married adolescent girls and avert the adverse consequences of early motherhood. It had…
For the Sake of Family and Tradition
The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) estimates that the annual worldwide number of honour killings is as high as 5,000 women and girls, though some non-governmental organizations (NGOs) estimate as many as 20,000 honour killings annually worldwide. Despite limited statistics, research shows that honour killings occur amongst women of different ages, religions, and social status, wealth, education, and location. The limited understanding of …
Voices to Choices
This book analyzes advances in women's economic engagement and empowerment in rural and urban Bangladesh. It concludes that despite notable improvement, women's economic choices and control remain limited. Female labor force participation rose 10 percentage points between 2003 and 2016, and the gender wage gap shrank; societal attitudes toward women's land ownership are evolving; and women's financial inclusion and entrepreneurship rates are impr…
The Demographic Transition and Women's Economic Participation in Tamil Nadu, India
This study analyzes the co-evolution of economic, social, governmental, and gender systems; the demographic transition; and women’s extra-domestic productive opportunities in Tamil Nadu, India. It examines how gender norms for women’s extra-domestic productive and domestic reproductive (motherhood) roles interacted with other upheavals in demography, society, and economy, and how these interweaving trends were reflected in women’s actual particip…
Ending Global Poverty
Between 1981 and 2013, the share of the global population living in extreme poverty fell by 34 percentage points. This paper argues that such rapid reductions will become increasingly hard to achieve for two reasons. First, the majority of the poor now live in middle-income countries where the benefits of growth have often been distributed selectively and unequally. Second, a reservoir of extreme poverty remains in low-income countries where grow…
Why Are Indian Children So Short? The Role of Birth Order and Son Preference
Child stunting in India exceeds that in poorer regions like sub-Saharan Africa. Data on over 168,000 children show that, relative to Africa, India's height disadvantage increases sharply with birth order. We posit that India’s steep birth order gradient is due to favoritism toward eldest sons, which affects parents' fertility decisions and resource allocation across children. We show that, within India, the gradient is steeper for high-son-prefer…
Women's Political Empowerment and Investments in Primary Schooling in India
Long-run impacts of land regulation
Do Group Dynamics Influence Social Capital Gains Among Microfinance Clients? Evidence From a Randomized Experiment in Urban India
As an intrinsic part of the classic microfinance model, group meetings are intended to employ social capital to ensure timely repayment. Recent research suggests that more frequent meetings can increase social capital among first‐time clients. Using randomized variation in group meeting frequency for 174 microfinance groups in India, we demonstrate that social capital gains associated with more frequent meetings continue to accrue across multiple…
Are Poor Voters Indifferent to Whether Elected Leaders Are Criminal or Corrupt? A Vignette Experiment in Rural India
Although in theory elections are supposed to prevent criminal or venal candidates from winning or retaining office, in practice voters frequently elect and reelect such candidates. This surprising pattern is sometimes explained by reference to voters' underlying preferences, which are thought to favor criminal or corrupt candidates because of the patronage they provide. This article tests this hypothesis using 2010 data from the Indian state of U…
The Economic Returns to Social Interaction
Microfinance clients were randomly assigned to repayment groups that met either weekly or monthly during their first loan cycle, and then graduated to identical meeting frequency for their second loan. Long-run survey data and a follow-up public goods experiment reveal that clients initially assigned to weekly groups interact more often and exhibit a higher willingness to pool risk with group members from their first loan cycle nearly 2 years aft…
Truth-telling by Third-party Auditors and the Response of Polluting Firms
In many regulated markets, private, third-party auditors are chosen and paid by the firms that they audit, potentially creating a conflict of interest. This article reports on a two-year field experiment in the Indian state of Gujarat that sought to curb such a conflict by altering the market structure for environmental audits of industrial plants to incentivize accurate reporting. There are three main results. First, the status quo system was la…
Two Sons and a Daughter
This article examines how the sex composition of women's current children at the start of a pregnancy interval influences both fertility desires and the full range of reproductive actions women may take to realize them, including temporary contraception, abortion and sterilization, in Madhya Pradesh, India, where popular notions of ideal family size and sex composition are dominated by son preference. The analysis is conducted using a dataset of …
Female Leadership Raises Aspirations and Educational Attainment for Girls
Girl Power The potential of affirmative action policies to reduce overall outcomes because of lower individual performance has been discussed widely and at length. But do quotas or preferential treatment of applicants alter the pool of candidates? Balafoutas and Sutter (p. 579 ; see the Perspective by Villeval ) used an existing laboratory-based task to assess the change in composition of winning candidates and the overall outcome as a function o…
Corruption in Developing Countries
Recent years have seen a remarkable expansion in economists' ability to measure corruption. This in turn has led to a new generation of well-identified, microeconomic studies. We review the evidence on corruption in developing countries in light of these recent advances, focusing on three questions: how much corruption is there, what are the efficiency consequences of corruption, and what determines the level of corruption? We find robust evidenc…
Can Informed Voters Enforce Better Governance? Experiments in Low-Income Democracies
This article evaluates a body of recent work that uses field and natural experiments to answer the question of whether informed voters can enforce better governance. A common finding in the literature is that voter behavior is malleable and that information about the political process and politician performance improves electoral accountability. Limited availability of information thus provides one explanation for the persistence of low-quality p…
Son preference and sterilisation use among young married women in two slums in Bengaluru city, India
This paper explores the ways in which women's sterilisation decisions are influenced by the combination of a preference for male children and a desire for smaller family size among young married women in two urban slums in Bengaluru, India. While both son preference and an emphasis on sterilisation are well-known demographic characteristics of most South Asian countries, relatively little research has been conducted that links the two. We take ad…
Do Traditional Institutions Constrain Female Entrepreneurship? A Field Experiment on Business Training in India
Do Traditional Institutions Constrain Female Entrepreneurship? A Field Experiment on Business Training in India by Erica Field, Seema Jayachandran and Rohini Pande. Published in volume 100, issue 2, pages 125-29 of American Economic Review, May 2010
Challenging assumptions about women's empowerment
BACKGROUND: Although considerable research has documented the widespread prevalence of spousal violence in India, little is known about specific risk or protective factors. This study examines the relationships between factors that are often considered to be social and economic resources for women and recent occurrence of domestic violence. METHODS: Data were collected from 744 young married women in slum areas of Bangalore, India. Unadjusted and…
Powerful Women
We exploit random assignment of gender quotas for leadership positions on Indian village councils to show that prior exposure to a female leader is associated with electoral gains for women. After ten years of quotas, women are more likely to stand for, and win, elected positions in councils required to have a female chief councilor in the previous two elections. We provide experimental and survey evidence on one channel of influence—changes in v…
Dams
This paper studies the productivity and distributional effects of large irrigation dams in India. Our instrumental variable estimates exploit the fact that river gradient affects a district's suitability for dams. In districts located downstream from a dam, agricultural production increases, and vulnerability to rainfall shocks declines. In contrast, agricultural production shows an insignificant increase in the district where the dam is located …
Are Poor Voters Indifferent to Whether Elected Leaders Are Criminal or Corrupt? A Vignette Experiment in Rural India
Although in theory elections are supposed to prevent criminal or venal candidates from winning or retaining office, in practice voters frequently elect and reelect such candidates. This surprising pattern is sometimes explained by reference to voters' underlying preferences, which are thought to favor criminal or corrupt candidates because of the patronage they provide. This article tests this hypothesis using 2010 data from the Indian state of U…
Explaining son preference in rural India
What's in a country average? Wealth, gender, and regional inequalities in immunization in India
Long-run impacts of land regulation
Women's Political Empowerment and Investments in Primary Schooling in India
Do Group Dynamics Influence Social Capital Gains Among Microfinance Clients? Evidence From a Randomized Experiment in Urban India
As an intrinsic part of the classic microfinance model, group meetings are intended to employ social capital to ensure timely repayment. Recent research suggests that more frequent meetings can increase social capital among first‐time clients. Using randomized variation in group meeting frequency for 174 microfinance groups in India, we demonstrate that social capital gains associated with more frequent meetings continue to accrue across multiple…
The Demographic Transition and Women's Economic Participation in Tamil Nadu, India
This study analyzes the co-evolution of economic, social, governmental, and gender systems; the demographic transition; and women’s extra-domestic productive opportunities in Tamil Nadu, India. It examines how gender norms for women’s extra-domestic productive and domestic reproductive (motherhood) roles interacted with other upheavals in demography, society, and economy, and how these interweaving trends were reflected in women’s actual particip…
Ending Global Poverty
Between 1981 and 2013, the share of the global population living in extreme poverty fell by 34 percentage points. This paper argues that such rapid reductions will become increasingly hard to achieve for two reasons. First, the majority of the poor now live in middle-income countries where the benefits of growth have often been distributed selectively and unequally. Second, a reservoir of extreme poverty remains in low-income countries where grow…
Measuring time use in rural India
Time use data facilitate understanding of labor supply, especially for women who often undertake unpaid care and home production. Although assisted diary-based time use surveys are suitable for low-literacy populations, they are costly and rarely used. We create a low-cost, scalable alternative that captures contextually-determined broad time categories; here, allocations across market work, household labor, and leisure. Using fewer categories an…
Why Have Women Become Left-Wing? The Political Gender Gap and the Decline in Marriage
The last three decades have witnessed the rise of a pohtical gender gap in the United States wherein more women than men favor the Democratic party. We trace this development to the decline in marriage, which we posit has made men richer and women poorer. Data for the United States support this argument. First, there is a strong positive correlation between state divorce prevalence and the political gender gap—higher divorce prevalence reduces su…
Can Mandated Political Representation Increase Policy Influence for Disadvantaged Minorities? Theory and Evidence from India
A basic premise of representative democracy is that all those subject to policy should have a voice in its making. However, policies enacted by electorally accountable governments often fail to reflect the interests of disadvantaged minorities. This paper exploits the institutional features of political reservation, as practiced in Indian states, to examine the role of mandated political representation in providing disadvantaged groups influence …
Selective gender differences in childhood nutrition and immunization in rural India
This article examines the role of the sex composition of surviving older siblings on gender differences in childhood nutrition and immunization, using data from the National Family Health Survey, India (1992–1993). Logit and ordered logit models were used for severe stunting and immunization, respectively. The results show selective neglect of children with certain sex and birth-order combinations that operate differentially for girls and boys. B…
Selective Gender Differences in Childhood Nutrition and Immunization in Rural India
This article examines the role of the sex composition of surviving older siblings on gender differences in childhood nutrition and immunization, using data from the National Family Health Survey, India (1992–1993). Logit and ordered logit models were used for severe stunting and immunization, respectively. The results show selective neglect of children with certain sex and birth-order combinations that operate differentially for girls and boys. B…
What's in a country average? Wealth, gender, and regional inequalities in immunization in India
The Politics of Public Good Provision
This paper uses village and household survey data from South India to examine how political geography and politician identity impacts on public good provision. We provide evidence that the nature of this relationship varies by type of public good. For high spillover public goods residential proximity to elected representative matters. In contrast, for low spillover public goods sharing the politician's group identity is what matters.
Do Rural Banks Matter? Evidence from the Indian Social Banking Experiment
Lack of access to finance is often cited as a key reason for why poor people remain poor. This paper uses data on the Indian rural branch expansion program to provide empirical evidence on this issue. Between 1977 and 1990, the Indian central bank mandated that a commercial bank can open a branch in a location with one or more bank branches only if it opens four locations with no bank branches. We show that, between 1977 and 1990, this rule cause…
Unmarried Parenthood and Redistributive Politics
Political survey data for nine West European countries show that women have become increasingly left-wing compared to men, and that this trend is positively correlated with the rise of nonmarriage in these countries. This pattern is mirrored in German longitudinal data (GSOEP), where transitions out of marriage make women, but not men, significantly more left-leaning. Analysis of public spending data for high-income OECD countries (1980–1998) sug…
Coordinating development
Profits and politics
Dams
This paper studies the productivity and distributional effects of large irrigation dams in India. Our instrumental variable estimates exploit the fact that river gradient affects a district's suitability for dams. In districts located downstream from a dam, agricultural production increases, and vulnerability to rainfall shocks declines. In contrast, agricultural production shows an insignificant increase in the district where the dam is located …
Explaining son preference in rural India
Challenging assumptions about women's empowerment
BACKGROUND: Although considerable research has documented the widespread prevalence of spousal violence in India, little is known about specific risk or protective factors. This study examines the relationships between factors that are often considered to be social and economic resources for women and recent occurrence of domestic violence. METHODS: Data were collected from 744 young married women in slum areas of Bangalore, India. Unadjusted and…
Powerful Women
We exploit random assignment of gender quotas for leadership positions on Indian village councils to show that prior exposure to a female leader is associated with electoral gains for women. After ten years of quotas, women are more likely to stand for, and win, elected positions in councils required to have a female chief councilor in the previous two elections. We provide experimental and survey evidence on one channel of influence—changes in v…
Do Traditional Institutions Constrain Female Entrepreneurship? A Field Experiment on Business Training in India
Do Traditional Institutions Constrain Female Entrepreneurship? A Field Experiment on Business Training in India by Erica Field, Seema Jayachandran and Rohini Pande. Published in volume 100, issue 2, pages 125-29 of American Economic Review, May 2010
Can Informed Voters Enforce Better Governance? Experiments in Low-Income Democracies
This article evaluates a body of recent work that uses field and natural experiments to answer the question of whether informed voters can enforce better governance. A common finding in the literature is that voter behavior is malleable and that information about the political process and politician performance improves electoral accountability. Limited availability of information thus provides one explanation for the persistence of low-quality p…
Son preference and sterilisation use among young married women in two slums in Bengaluru city, India
This paper explores the ways in which women's sterilisation decisions are influenced by the combination of a preference for male children and a desire for smaller family size among young married women in two urban slums in Bengaluru, India. While both son preference and an emphasis on sterilisation are well-known demographic characteristics of most South Asian countries, relatively little research has been conducted that links the two. We take ad…
Two Sons and a Daughter
This article examines how the sex composition of women's current children at the start of a pregnancy interval influences both fertility desires and the full range of reproductive actions women may take to realize them, including temporary contraception, abortion and sterilization, in Madhya Pradesh, India, where popular notions of ideal family size and sex composition are dominated by son preference. The analysis is conducted using a dataset of …
Female Leadership Raises Aspirations and Educational Attainment for Girls
Girl Power The potential of affirmative action policies to reduce overall outcomes because of lower individual performance has been discussed widely and at length. But do quotas or preferential treatment of applicants alter the pool of candidates? Balafoutas and Sutter (p. 579 ; see the Perspective by Villeval ) used an existing laboratory-based task to assess the change in composition of winning candidates and the overall outcome as a function o…
Corruption in Developing Countries
Recent years have seen a remarkable expansion in economists' ability to measure corruption. This in turn has led to a new generation of well-identified, microeconomic studies. We review the evidence on corruption in developing countries in light of these recent advances, focusing on three questions: how much corruption is there, what are the efficiency consequences of corruption, and what determines the level of corruption? We find robust evidenc…
The Economic Returns to Social Interaction
Microfinance clients were randomly assigned to repayment groups that met either weekly or monthly during their first loan cycle, and then graduated to identical meeting frequency for their second loan. Long-run survey data and a follow-up public goods experiment reveal that clients initially assigned to weekly groups interact more often and exhibit a higher willingness to pool risk with group members from their first loan cycle nearly 2 years aft…
Truth-telling by Third-party Auditors and the Response of Polluting Firms
In many regulated markets, private, third-party auditors are chosen and paid by the firms that they audit, potentially creating a conflict of interest. This article reports on a two-year field experiment in the Indian state of Gujarat that sought to curb such a conflict by altering the market structure for environmental audits of industrial plants to incentivize accurate reporting. There are three main results. First, the status quo system was la…
Do Group Dynamics Influence Social Capital Gains Among Microfinance Clients? Evidence From a Randomized Experiment in Urban India
As an intrinsic part of the classic microfinance model, group meetings are intended to employ social capital to ensure timely repayment. Recent research suggests that more frequent meetings can increase social capital among first‐time clients. Using randomized variation in group meeting frequency for 174 microfinance groups in India, we demonstrate that social capital gains associated with more frequent meetings continue to accrue across multiple…
Are Poor Voters Indifferent to Whether Elected Leaders Are Criminal or Corrupt? A Vignette Experiment in Rural India
Although in theory elections are supposed to prevent criminal or venal candidates from winning or retaining office, in practice voters frequently elect and reelect such candidates. This surprising pattern is sometimes explained by reference to voters' underlying preferences, which are thought to favor criminal or corrupt candidates because of the patronage they provide. This article tests this hypothesis using 2010 data from the Indian state of U…
Long-run impacts of land regulation
Economics (26 works) · Political science (22 works) · Sociology (18 works) · Economic growth (15 works) · Population (13 works) · Demography (11 works) · Geography (11 works) · Demographic economics (10 works) · Psychology (10 works) · Demographic Trends and Gender Preferences (9 works)