Desai
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 69318 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Desai |
| APELLIDO | Desai |
| FIRMA | DESAI |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Maryland, College Park |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3562-8853 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 53 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 865 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 53 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1989 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 17 |
The Trinity of Support
Drawing on nationally representative data from two waves of the India Human Development Survey, this paper examines how family structures, functional health, work participation, and state support interact to shape the well-being of Indians aged 60 and above. We document a gradual decline in intergenerational co-residence, alongside rising proportions of older adults living alone or only with a spouse. While family remains the primary source of ca…
Changes in the household expenditure basket in India during Covid-19
BACKGROUNDThe COVID-19 pandemic wreaked havoc across countries, causing an unprecedented healthcare crisis and supply chain disruptions.Our paper focuses on how households coped and the role of expanded Indian government food subsidies in mitigating food insecurity. OBJECTIVEWe use panel data from two rounds of household surveys (2019 and 2021) to examine changes in per capita household expenditure and how these differed across occupation and inc…
NailaKabeerRenegotiating Patriarchy
Being Single in India
Gone and forgotten? Predictors of birth history omissions in India
Background: Fertility histories are subject to measurement errors such as incorrect birth dates, incorrect birth orders, incorrect sex, and omissions. These errors can bias demographic estimates such as fertility rates and child mortality rates. Objective: We focus on births missing in fertility histories. We estimate the prevalence of such omissions and study their associated factors. Methods: We leverage a panel survey (the India Human Developm…
Gender and Generation
While increased access to household assets has been shown to improve older individuals' autonomy and bargaining power at home, the role of gender hierarchy in shaping differential impacts of household assets has received far less attention. This article explores the gender asymmetry in the association of older people's (age 60 years or more) decision-making power at home and survival probability with their ownership of and managerial control over…
Aligning household decision-making with work and education
Although womenâ s empowerment is one of the key concepts in development, it has proven challenging to measure it. Empirical studies have tended to focus on a cause-and-effect analysis of empowerment and using composite measures to compare different national
The paradox of declining fertility and declining contraceptive use in India
Ensuring data quality in large scale surveys is challenging.•The trend and pattern of declining fertility and declining contraceptive use in India is puzzling.•Interview privacy setting and interviewer effect can partially explain the anomaly.•Large scale surveys impose severe demands on survey supervision and ability to ensure privacy.•Innovative ways of data collection for sensitive issues can be explored for proper reporting
Measuring Women's Empowerment in the Global South
Over the past two decades, we have seen an explosion in research on the topic of women's empowerment and its related dimensions, yet there remains much to be done in terms of clarifying conceptual pathways and best practices in measurement. This review traces the intellectual and historic context in which women's status and empowerment in lower- and middle-income countries have been measured, the conceptual and operationalization challenges in sh…
Precarity in a Time of Uncertainty
India implemented one of the world's most stringent lockdowns in response to the COVID-19 crisis. This paper examines whether the impacts of the lockdown on employment differed by gender in areas surrounding Delhi. An ongoing monthly employment survey between March 2019 and May 2020 allows for comparison in employment before and after the lockdown. Estimates based on random-effects logistic regression models show that for men, the predicted proba…
Lack of access to clean fuel and piped water and children’s educational outcomes in rural India
Investments in clean fuel and piped water are often recommended in developing countries on health grounds. This paper examines an alternative channel, the relationship between piped water and access to liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) and children's educational outcomes. Results based on the second round of the India Human Development Survey (2011-12) for rural India show that children aged 6-14 years, living in households that rely on free collecti…
IsabelWilkersonCaste
Some years ago, I attended the Fez Sacred Music Festival. Arab music was fascinating. The rhythm, the instruments, and the cadences were often similar to the Indian musical traditions I am familiar with. However, this familiarity created a dissonance—instead of just enjoying the music, I kept trying to understand the words, an expectation I don't have when I listen to an Italian opera. Reading Isabel Wilkerson's Caste: The Origins of Our Disconte…
Male out-migration and the health of left-behind wives in India
In developing countries, labor out-migration has led to millions of married couples living apart from each other. Male out-migration brings economic benefits to the families in places of origin, but also leads to profound changes in the lives of the left-behind wives. It is unclear how the husband's out-migration influences the health of wives, let alone the mechanisms through which any effects are transmitted. Using data from the Indian Human De…
The Emergence of Educational Hypogamy in India
With rising education among women across the world, educational hypergamy (women marrying men with higher education) has decreased over the last few decades in both developed and developing countries. Although a decrease in hypergamy is often accompanied by increasing homogamy (women marrying men with equal levels of education), our analyses for India based on a nationally representative survey of India (the India Human Development Survey), docum…
Physical versus imagined communities
India has about 400 million internal migrants (UNESCO 2013). The proportion of permanent internal migrants in India has risen between 1983 and 2007-08, and much of this increase is attributed to female marriage migrants. However, there is limited literature analyzing the well-being of female marriage migrants in India. This paper seeks to examine whether women's autonomy in the public sphere is a function of: a) the geographical community where t…
Fathers' migration and nutritional status of children in India
BACKGROUND: Due to international and internal migration, millions of children in developing countries are geographically separated from one or both of their parents. Prior research has not reached a consensus on the impacts of parental out-migration on children's growth, and little is known about how community contexts modify the impact of parental out-migration. OBJECTIVE: We aim to assess the overall impacts of fathers' previous and current mig…
Frederick F.Wherry, Kristin S.Seefeldt, and AnthonyAlvarezCredit Where It's DueNew York
It is hard to imagine life in the contemporary United States without a credit score. Renting an apartment, buying a car on installment, and often even finding a job requires a credit score. A higher credit score results in credit at more favorable terms; a borrower with poor credit score may pay as much as extra $70,000 over the life of a home mortgage of $100,000. We assume that most people have a credit score and individuals who have a low cred…
The Impact of Transportation Infrastructure on Women's Employment in India
Indian women's labor force participation is extremely low and they are much less likely than men to work in the non-farm sector. Earlier research explained women's labor supply by individual characteristics, social institutions, and cultural norms, but not enough attention has been paid to the labor market opportunity structure that constrains women's labor market activities. Using data from the India Human Development Survey (IHDS) in 2004-05 an…
Designing programs to improve diets for maternal and child health
Improving maternal and child nutrition in resource-poor settings requires effective use of limited resources, but priority-setting is constrained by limited information about program costs and impacts, especially for interventions designed to improve diet quality. This study utilized a mixed methods approach to identify, describe and estimate the potential costs and impacts on child dietary intake of 12 nutrition-sensitive programs in Ethiopia, N…
Indian paradox
BACKGROUND: Theories of human capital would suggest that with more education, women acquire greater skills and their earnings increase, resulting in higher labor force participation. However, it has been long known that in India, women's education has a U-shaped relationship with labor force participation. Part of the decline at moderate levels of education may be due to an income effect whereby women with more education marry into richer familie…
Families in Southeast and South Asia
Southeast and South Asia are home to one-third of the world's population. Their great economic and cultural diversity makes generalization about family patterns and trends hazardous. We review literature on trends in fertility, marriage, divorce, and living arrangements in the past half century. The explanations for these trends focus on structural and ideological changes related to socioeconomic development; cultural factors including kinship sy…
Mothers' work patterns and Children's cognitive achievement
Getting a Child through Secondary School and to College in India
In the classic formulations of social capital theory, families employ their social capital resources to enhance other capitals, in particular their human capital investments. Social capital would seem to be especially important in the case of India, where, in recent years, higher education has been under considerable stress with rising educational demand, inadequate supply, and little parental experience to guide children's transition through the…
Escaping and Falling into Poverty in India Today
Economic Status and Adult Mortality in India
Women's Employment During Pregnancy and After the First Birth
Using data on womens employment in the US the authors examined the argument that predominantly occupations attract women because they are relatively easy to combine with family responsibilities. Some traditionally female occupations offer relatively low penalties for labor force withdrawal but others reduce the costs of employment to mothers by facilitating the combination of worker and mother roles. The authors test the hypothesis that a womans …
Maternal education and child health
Using data from the first round of Demographic and Health Surveys for 22 developing countries, we examine the effect of maternal education on three markers of child health: infant mortality, children s height-for-age, and immunization status. In contrast to other studies, we argue that although there is a strong correlation between maternal education and markers of child health, a causal relationship is far from established. Education acts as a p…
Families in Southeast and South Asia
Southeast and South Asia are home to one-third of the world's population. Their great economic and cultural diversity makes generalization about family patterns and trends hazardous. We review literature on trends in fertility, marriage, divorce, and living arrangements in the past half century. The explanations for these trends focus on structural and ideological changes related to socioeconomic development; cultural factors including kinship sy…
Gender scripts and age at marriage in India
Research on marriage in developing countries has been somewhat narrow in scope because of both conceptual and data limitations. While the feminist literature recognizes marriage as a key institutional site for the production and reproduction of gender hierarchies, little is known about the processes through which this relationship operates. This article uses data from the newly collected India Human Development Survey 2005 for 27,365 ever-married…
Doing Development Research
PART ONE: INTRODUCTION The Raison d'etre of Doing Development Research PART TWO: STRATEGIC ISSUES IN PLANNING SOUND RESEARCH Doing Fieldwork in Developing Countries - Tony Binns Planning and Logistics Ethical Practices in Doing Development Research - Lynne Brydon Working in Different Cultures - Caesar R A Apentiik and Jane L Parpart Issues of Race, Ethnicity and Identity Women, Men and Fieldwork - Janet Henshall Momsen Gender Relations and Power …
Negotiated identities
Mother or Market? Effects of Maternal Employment on the Intellectual Ability of 4-Year-Old Children
This article uses the 1986 Children of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth data set to investigate the impact of maternal employment on children's intellectual ability, as measured at the age of 4 by using the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT). Results from multivariate regression analysis show a statistically significant adverse effect of mother's employment on children's intellectual ability, but only for boys in higher income famili…
Children at Risk
Models of the family proposed by the "new household economics" have had a strong influence on researchers and policymakers alike. In extending these models to developing countries, however, relatively little attention has been directed to the applicability of some of their underlying assumptions in diverse cultural settings. Two aspects of these models seem particularly problematic: the assumption of a cohesive family unit with perfect altruism w…
Changing educational inequalities in india in the context of affirmative action
Indian society suffers from substantial inequalities in education, employment, and income based on caste and ethnicity. Compensatory or positive discrimination policies reserve 15% of the seats in institutions of higher education and state and central government jobs for people of the lowest caste, the Scheduled Caste; 7.5% of the seats are reserved for the Scheduled Tribe. These programs have been strengthened by improved enforcement and increas…
Children's living arrangements in developing countries
Indian paradox
BACKGROUND: Theories of human capital would suggest that with more education, women acquire greater skills and their earnings increase, resulting in higher labor force participation. However, it has been long known that in India, women's education has a U-shaped relationship with labor force participation. Part of the decline at moderate levels of education may be due to an income effect whereby women with more education marry into richer familie…
Linkages between maternal education and childhood immunization in India
Maternal Employment and Changes in Family Dynamics
Sonalde Desai, Devaki Jain, Maternal Employment and Changes in Family Dynamics: The Social Context of Women's Work in Rural South India, Population and Development Review, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Mar., 1994), pp. 115-136
When Are Children from Large Families Disadvantaged? Evidence from Cross-National Analyses
Using data from Demographic and Health Surveys for 16 less developed countries, this paper examines the impact of family size on children's physical growth. To explore the conditions under which children in large families are disadvantaged compared with those from smaller families, results from country-specific regressions of children's height-for-age on family size are interpreted in light of a variety of socio-economic indicators. This exercise…
Male out-migration and the health of left-behind wives in India
In developing countries, labor out-migration has led to millions of married couples living apart from each other. Male out-migration brings economic benefits to the families in places of origin, but also leads to profound changes in the lives of the left-behind wives. It is unclear how the husband's out-migration influences the health of wives, let alone the mechanisms through which any effects are transmitted. Using data from the Indian Human De…
Escaping and Falling into Poverty in India Today
Measuring Women's Empowerment in the Global South
Over the past two decades, we have seen an explosion in research on the topic of women's empowerment and its related dimensions, yet there remains much to be done in terms of clarifying conceptual pathways and best practices in measurement. This review traces the intellectual and historic context in which women's status and empowerment in lower- and middle-income countries have been measured, the conceptual and operationalization challenges in sh…
The Emergence of Educational Hypogamy in India
With rising education among women across the world, educational hypergamy (women marrying men with higher education) has decreased over the last few decades in both developed and developing countries. Although a decrease in hypergamy is often accompanied by increasing homogamy (women marrying men with equal levels of education), our analyses for India based on a nationally representative survey of India (the India Human Development Survey), docum…
Muslim and Hindu Women’s Public and Private Behaviors
Prior research on fundamentalist religious movements has focused attention on the complicated relationship among gender, family, and religion. Using data from a nationally representative survey of 30,000 Hindu and Muslim women, this study compares the daily public and private behaviors of women in India to examine how gender and family norms are shaped in the context of communalized identity politics. Building on the theoretical framework of “doi…
Precarity in a Time of Uncertainty
India implemented one of the world's most stringent lockdowns in response to the COVID-19 crisis. This paper examines whether the impacts of the lockdown on employment differed by gender in areas surrounding Delhi. An ongoing monthly employment survey between March 2019 and May 2020 allows for comparison in employment before and after the lockdown. Estimates based on random-effects logistic regression models show that for men, the predicted proba…
Access to power and participation
Lack of access to clean fuel and piped water and children’s educational outcomes in rural India
Investments in clean fuel and piped water are often recommended in developing countries on health grounds. This paper examines an alternative channel, the relationship between piped water and access to liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) and children's educational outcomes. Results based on the second round of the India Human Development Survey (2011-12) for rural India show that children aged 6-14 years, living in households that rely on free collecti…
Physical versus imagined communities
India has about 400 million internal migrants (UNESCO 2013). The proportion of permanent internal migrants in India has risen between 1983 and 2007-08, and much of this increase is attributed to female marriage migrants. However, there is limited literature analyzing the well-being of female marriage migrants in India. This paper seeks to examine whether women's autonomy in the public sphere is a function of: a) the geographical community where t…
The Impact of Transportation Infrastructure on Women's Employment in India
Indian women's labor force participation is extremely low and they are much less likely than men to work in the non-farm sector. Earlier research explained women's labor supply by individual characteristics, social institutions, and cultural norms, but not enough attention has been paid to the labor market opportunity structure that constrains women's labor market activities. Using data from the India Human Development Survey (IHDS) in 2004-05 an…
Hopes, dreams and anxieties
While rapid fertility decline in India in the last two decades has received considerable attention, much of the discourse has focused on a decline in high parity births. However, this paper finds that, almost hidden from the public gaze, a small but significant segment of the Indian population has begun the transition to extremely low fertility. Among the urban, upper income, educated, middle classes, it is no longer unusual to find families stop…
Mother or Market? Effects of Maternal Employment on the Intellectual Ability of 4-Year-Old Children
This article uses the 1986 Children of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth data set to investigate the impact of maternal employment on children's intellectual ability, as measured at the age of 4 by using the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT). Results from multivariate regression analysis show a statistically significant adverse effect of mother's employment on children's intellectual ability, but only for boys in higher income famili…
Later Phases of the Family Cycle
Women, Work, and Fertility, 1900-1986
Women, Work, and Child Welfare in the Third World
The Changing American Family and Public Policy
Married women and mothers working outside the home, divorce, and single-parent households have become part of American society for a variety of economic and cultural reasons, and government policy is unlikely to alter these features. Government should therefore be directed toward easing immediate problems by, for example, providing child care and easing strain on working mothers. Practical and limited assistance of this type, according to the edi…
Women and Population Dynamics
PART ONE: WOMEN IN ASIAN COUNTRIES Women in China Today - Chi-hsien Tuan Status of Women in Thailand - Suchart Prasith-rathsint Status of Women in Taiwan - Lan-hung Nora Chiang Status of Women in Malaysia - Hamid Arshat and Masitah Mohd Yatim Bangladesh Women in Transition - Asfia Duza Dynamics and Issues Female Status in Pakistan - Nasra M Shah Where Are We Now? Status of Women in Iran - Akbar Aghajanian Staus of the Kuwaitian Women - Mohmmed A …
Development Policies
Unlike other social scientists, sociologists have not been closely involved in formulating development policies for the Third World nor in their implementation. This volume challenges such a disengaged stance and demonstrates ways in which a sociological perspective can strengthen policy-making. Apart from raising general issues of principle, the book examines sociological involvement in foreign aid, social research, community participation, wome…
Contraception and Reproduction
Women's Employment During Pregnancy and After the First Birth
Using data on womens employment in the US the authors examined the argument that predominantly occupations attract women because they are relatively easy to combine with family responsibilities. Some traditionally female occupations offer relatively low penalties for labor force withdrawal but others reduce the costs of employment to mothers by facilitating the combination of worker and mother roles. The authors test the hypothesis that a womans …
The Politics of Children's Survival
Preface Patterns of Mortality Individual Factors Household Factors The Child Survival and Development Movement Criticism of Child Survival Programs Food Poverty War Repression Population Alternative Social Systems Should Children be Treated as Human Capital? Motivating The Powerful Children's Survival and Community Development Localized Multiparty Planning Laws and Institutions Selected References Index
Children's living arrangements in developing countries
Dance Civet Cat
In this, the first comprehensive study of the Tonga people in Zimbabwe, Pamela Reynolds focuses on children s work in a subsistence agricultural system, assessing how much work they do, the value of their work to their families and how it both limits their opportunities and fosters their personal growth and knowledge. Set in the context of the history of the Tonga people south of the Zambezi river and a discussion of their current position as a m…
Children at Risk
Models of the family proposed by the "new household economics" have had a strong influence on researchers and policymakers alike. In extending these models to developing countries, however, relatively little attention has been directed to the applicability of some of their underlying assumptions in diverse cultural settings. Two aspects of these models seem particularly problematic: the assumption of a cohesive family unit with perfect altruism w…
Health Care in Asia
Maternal Employment and Changes in Family Dynamics
Sonalde Desai, Devaki Jain, Maternal Employment and Changes in Family Dynamics: The Social Context of Women's Work in Rural South India, Population and Development Review, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Mar., 1994), pp. 115-136
Gender and Population in the Adjustment of African Economies
When Are Children from Large Families Disadvantaged? Evidence from Cross-National Analyses
Using data from Demographic and Health Surveys for 16 less developed countries, this paper examines the impact of family size on children's physical growth. To explore the conditions under which children in large families are disadvantaged compared with those from smaller families, results from country-specific regressions of children's height-for-age on family size are interpreted in light of a variety of socio-economic indicators. This exercise…
Access to power and participation
Maternal education and child health
Using data from the first round of Demographic and Health Surveys for 22 developing countries, we examine the effect of maternal education on three markers of child health: infant mortality, children s height-for-age, and immunization status. In contrast to other studies, we argue that although there is a strong correlation between maternal education and markers of child health, a causal relationship is far from established. Education acts as a p…
Maternal Education and Child Health
In recent years, feminist scholarship has transformed the field of international development by articulating a strong case for the in clusion of women in development planning.1 However, as the field has matured, a curious dilemma has emerged: strategic choices that served an emerging field have become problematic for a mature field. Feminist scholars initially approached the field of international development by arguing that development plan ni…
Doing Development Research
PART ONE: INTRODUCTION The Raison d'etre of Doing Development Research PART TWO: STRATEGIC ISSUES IN PLANNING SOUND RESEARCH Doing Fieldwork in Developing Countries - Tony Binns Planning and Logistics Ethical Practices in Doing Development Research - Lynne Brydon Working in Different Cultures - Caesar R A Apentiik and Jane L Parpart Issues of Race, Ethnicity and Identity Women, Men and Fieldwork - Janet Henshall Momsen Gender Relations and Power …
Negotiated identities
Changing educational inequalities in india in the context of affirmative action
Indian society suffers from substantial inequalities in education, employment, and income based on caste and ethnicity. Compensatory or positive discrimination policies reserve 15% of the seats in institutions of higher education and state and central government jobs for people of the lowest caste, the Scheduled Caste; 7.5% of the seats are reserved for the Scheduled Tribe. These programs have been strengthened by improved enforcement and increas…
Gender Trouble Makers
Gender scripts and age at marriage in India
Research on marriage in developing countries has been somewhat narrow in scope because of both conceptual and data limitations. While the feminist literature recognizes marriage as a key institutional site for the production and reproduction of gender hierarchies, little is known about the processes through which this relationship operates. This article uses data from the newly collected India Human Development Survey 2005 for 27,365 ever-married…
Sociology (35 obras) · Economics (34 obras) · Political science (27 obras) · Economic growth (23 obras) · Poverty, Education, and Child Welfare (20 obras) · Demographic economics (19 obras) · Geography (18 obras) · Demography (17 obras) · Gender, Labor, and Family Dynamics (17 obras) · Population (17 obras)