Vyjayanthi Rao
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 96956 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Vyjayanthi Rao |
| NOMBRES | Vyjayanthi |
| APELLIDO | Rao |
| FIRMA | RAO V |
| AFILIACIONES | World Bank Group |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6725-8984 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 60 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 537 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 60 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1976 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 13 |
Using Large Language Models for Qualitative Analysis can Introduce Serious Bias
Large language models (LLMs) are quickly becoming ubiquitous, but their implications for social science research are not yet well understood. We ask whether LLMs can help code and analyse large-N qualitative data from open-ended interviews, with an application to transcripts of interviews with Rohingya refugees and their Bengali hosts in Bangladesh. We find that using LLMs to annotate and code text can introduce bias that can lead to misleading i…
Uneasy Solidarities
Using Large Language Models for Qualitative Analysis can Introduce Serious Bias
Large Language Models (LLMs) are quickly becoming ubiquitous, but the implications for social science research are not yet well understood. This paper asks whether LLMs can help us analyse large-N qualitative data from open-ended interviews, with an application to transcripts of interviews with displaced Rohingya people in Cox’s Bazaar, Bangladesh. The analysis finds that a great deal of caution is needed in using LLMs to annotate text as there i…
Urbanism beyond the City
Counting the Uncountable
Sustainable urban transformation increasingly relies upon technicities of computation and interoperability among variegated registers and domains. In contrast, the notion of an "urban majority," first introduced by the authors nearly a decade ago, points to a different "mathematics" of combination. Here the ways in which different economic practices, demeanors, behavioral tactics, forms of social organization, territory, and mobility intersect an…
Conjunctures
The preceding issue (January 2021) was completed in the spring of 2020 as a pandemic was disrupting every arena of social life. Even then, we aimed to see “the virus in the context of the planet” and not to succumb to “the temptation to see the planet solely through the lens of the virus.” (3) We've taken those words to heart. The present issue offers a somewhat dispersed set of articles about apps and air filters, shopping malls and circuses, ur…
Flies without Borders
India's cities face key challenges to improving public health outcomes. First, unequally distributed public resources create insanitary conditions, especially in slums - threatening everyone's health, as suggested by poor child growth even amongst the wealthiest. Second, devolving services to elected bodies works poorly for highly technical services like public health. Third, services are highly fragmented. This paper examines the differences in …
Relief from usury
Provision of low-cost credit to the poor through self-help groups (SHGs) has been embraced as a key poverty-reduction strategy in developing countries, but evidence on the impact of this approach is thin. Using a randomized program rollout over 180 panchayats, we evaluate the impact of a government-led SHG initiative in the Indian state of Bihar. Two years after the start of the program, we find a dramatic increase in SHG membership, borrowing fr…
Evidence-based development needs a diversity of tools, with a bottom-up process of “embedded” dialogue
Process-Policy & Outcome-Policy
Process matters not just for diagnosing the causes of inequality, but also for how policy is shaped. The dominant paradigms for policy-making – neoliberalism, neo-Keynesianism, and neopaternalism – largely address inequality via “outcome-policies” that manipulate the levers of government and, more recently, draw on randomized trials and “nudges” to change behavior, in a manner that is not only easy to measure, but also easy to reverse. This comme…
How Women Talk in Indian Democracy
Deliberative Democracy in an Unequal World
This paper opens the "black box" of real-world deliberation by usingtext-as-datamethods on a corpus of transcripts from the constitutionally mandatedgram sabhas, or village assemblies, of rural India. Drawing on normative theories of deliberation, we identify empirical standards for "good" deliberation based on one's ability both to speak and to be heard, and use natural language processing methods to generate these measures. We first show that, …
Deliberative Democracy in India
This chapter traces the evolution of deliberative institutions in India, as well as the ways in which deliberative bodies influence, and are in influenced by, entrenched social inequality. The paper first unpacks the historical roots of Indian deliberation, emphasizing the ways in which religious traditions fostered a culture of debate and dialogue. The paper then explores the interplay between Western liberal philosophers, most notably Henry Mai…
Who Should Be at the Top of Bottom-Up Development? A Case-Study of the National Rural Livelihoods Mission in Rajasthan, India
It is widely acknowledged that top-down support is essential for bottom-up participatory projects to be effectively implemented at scale. However, which level of government, national or sub-national, should be given the responsibility to implement such projects is an open question, with wide variations in practice. This paper analyses qualitative and quantitative data from a natural experiment of a large participatory project in the state of Raja…
Oral Democracy
Oral Democracy studies citizens' voices in civic and political deliberations in India's gram sabhas (village assemblies), the largest deliberative institution in human history. It analyses nearly three hundred transcripts of gram sabhas, sampled within the framework of a natural experiment, allowing the authors to study how state policy affects the quality of discourse, citizens' discursive performances and state enactments embodied by elected le…
Unheard voices
Deliberative Democracy in India
This paper traces the evolution of \n deliberative institutions in India to understand the role of \n deliberation in democratic life, as well as the ways in \n which deliberative bodies influence, and are influenced by, \n entrenched social inequality. The paper first unpacks the \n historical roots of Indian deliberation in the pre-colonial \n and colonial periods, emphasizing the ways in which \n religious traditions fostered a culture of deba…
The Anatomy of Failure
Recasting Culture to Undo Gender
This paper brings together sociological theories of culture and gender to answer the question – how do large-scale development interventions induce cultural change? Through three years of ethnographic work in rural Bihar, the authors examine this question in the context of Jeevika, a World Bank-assisted poverty alleviation project targeted at women, and find support for an integrative view of culture. The paper argues that Jeevika created new “cu…
Long-run impacts of land regulation
Localizing Development
Conducting Ethical Economic Research Complications from the Field
This essay discusses practical issues confronted when conducting surveys as well as designing appropriate field trials. First, it looks at the challenge of ensuring transparency while maintaining confidentiality. Second, it explores the role of trust in light of asymmetric information held by the surveyor and by the respondents as well as the latter's expectations as to what their participation will set in motion. The authors present case studies…
Can participation be induced? Some evidence from developing countries 1
Influenced by Amartya Sen, over the last decade, The World Bank has allocated nearly US$80 billion to local participatory development projects targeting poverty, improved public service delivery, and strengthened social cohesion and government accountability. But the success of these programs is hindered by both endogenous local factors and flawed program design and implementation. Two especially important local obstacles are (1) entrenched inter…
Culture and Public Action
How does culture matter for development? Do certain societies have cultures which condemn them to poverty? Led by Arjun Appadurai, Mary Douglas, and Amartya Sen, the anthropologists and economists in this volume contend that culture is central to development, and that processes are neither inherently good nor bad and never static. Rather, they are contested and evolving, and can be a source of profound social and economic transformation through t…
Oral Democracy
Oral Democracy studies citizens' voices in civic and political deliberations in India's gram sabhas (village assemblies), the largest deliberative institution in human history. It analyses nearly three hundred transcripts of gram sabhas, sampled within the framework of a natural experiment, allowing the authors to study how state policy affects the quality of discourse, citizens' discursive performances and state enactments embodied by elected l…
Wife-beating in rural South India
The Rising Price of Husbands
Dowries of South Asia have steadily risen over the last forty years and now often amount to over 50 percent of a household's assets. This paper attempts to investigate the reasons behind this increase. It adapts Rosen's implicit market model to the Indian marriage market and tests predictions from the model with data from six villages in south central India and from the Indian census. It is found that a 'marriage squeeze' caused by population gro…
Governance in the Gullies
Slum as theory
Deliberative Democracy in an Unequal World
This paper opens the "black box" of real-world deliberation by usingtext-as-datamethods on a corpus of transcripts from the constitutionally mandatedgram sabhas, or village assemblies, of rural India. Drawing on normative theories of deliberation, we identify empirical standards for "good" deliberation based on one's ability both to speak and to be heard, and use natural language processing methods to generate these measures. We first show that, …
The Determinants of Gender Equity in India
In revisiting the influential Dyson and Moore (1983) hypothesis as to why women in South India enjoy relatively more agency than in the North, we conducted an econometric analysis of the determinants of women's mobility and decisionmaking authority. Data for the study come from a household data survey carried out in the Northern state of Uttar Pradesh and in the Southern state of Karnataka in 1995. We find that cross-cousin and uncle-niece marria…
Tokenism or Agency? The Impact of Women's Reservations on Village Democracies in South India
There is increasing interest in whether improving the participation of women in government will lead to more gender equality. We test this with data collected from South India, using a natural experiment that randomly reserves one‐third of all presidencies in democratically elected village councils (panchayats) for women candidates. Previous research has found that such “reservations” result in policy decisions that are closer to the preferences …
Sex workers and the cost of safe sex
Can participation be induced? Some evidence from developing countries 1
Influenced by Amartya Sen, over the last decade, The World Bank has allocated nearly US$80 billion to local participatory development projects targeting poverty, improved public service delivery, and strengthened social cohesion and government accountability. But the success of these programs is hindered by both endogenous local factors and flawed program design and implementation. Two especially important local obstacles are (1) entrenched inter…
Long-run impacts of land regulation
Dowry 'Inflation' in Rural India
Dowries in most regions of South Asia have steadily become larger over the last 40 years, causing widespread destitution among families with daughters to be married. This paper attempts to investigate the reasons behind dowry ‘inflation’ with data on marriage transactions and other individual and household information from six villages in south-central India, and from the Indian census. It is found that a ‘marriage squeeze’ caused by population g…
Securing the Majority
Drawing on research in Jakarta, this article reconsiders the importance of heterogeneous economic practices in the remaking of central-city districts in ways that provide ongoing platforms of residence and operation for residents from wide-ranging walks of life. The emphasis on good governance and rights-based discourses have sometimes occluded the operations of urban real economies that, even if waning in the face of the proliferation of mega-de…
Dignity through Discourse
Employing a view of culture as a communicative phenomenon involving discursive engagement, the authors argue that the struggle to break free of poverty is as much a cultural process as it is political and economic. The authors analyze public meetings in Indian village democracies, gram sabhas, where villagers are constitutionally empowered to make decisions regarding budgetary allocations for village development and beneficiary selection for anti…
Relief from usury
Provision of low-cost credit to the poor through self-help groups (SHGs) has been embraced as a key poverty-reduction strategy in developing countries, but evidence on the impact of this approach is thin. Using a randomized program rollout over 180 panchayats, we evaluate the impact of a government-led SHG initiative in the Indian state of Bihar. Two years after the start of the program, we find a dramatic increase in SHG membership, borrowing fr…
How to Read a Bomb
Bombay within a period of about two hours. The timed explosions were caused by large quantities of an explosive known as RDX, a black soap – like substance, which was loaded onto several four- and two-wheelers. Planted strategically in and around important city buildings, crowded marketplaces, and hotels, each vehicle exploded within fifteen or thirty minutes of the previous one. Their itiner-ary not only was timed serially but also, perhaps acci…
The Anatomy of Failure
The Marriage Squeeze Interpretation of Dowry Inflation
Counting the Uncountable
Sustainable urban transformation increasingly relies upon technicities of computation and interoperability among variegated registers and domains. In contrast, the notion of an "urban majority," first introduced by the authors nearly a decade ago, points to a different "mathematics" of combination. Here the ways in which different economic practices, demeanors, behavioral tactics, forms of social organization, territory, and mobility intersect an…
Who has voice in a deliberative democracy? Evidence from transcripts of village parliaments in south India
Writing the Lines of Connection
Across urban studies there is an increasing preoccupation with the forms of articulation that link a multiplicity of cities across a region often known as the 'Global South'. How do cities such as Jakarta, São Paolo, Dakar, Lagos, Mumbai, Hanoi, Beirut, Dubai, Karachi, for example, take note of each other and engage in various transactions with each other in ways that are only weakly mediated by the currently predominant notions of urbanism? What…
Diet, mortality and life expectancy A cross national analysis
How Women Talk in Indian Democracy
Unheard voices
A new urban type
This article examines the concept of urban charisma as a quality that circulates through urban imaginaries and in the gestures and practices of everyday urban figures. Specifically exploring the figure of the gangster in Bombay cinema in the context of recent events of militant attacks in Mumbai, and tracing the empirical and cinematic transformation of the gangster into terrorist, this article argues that the cultural biographies of these figure…
Embracing Urbanism
This article explores notions of archive and infrastructure in the construction of metropolitan urbanism in the West. Building on this exploration, the author proposes the concept of "city-as-archive" as a tool for studying contemporary urbanism and for moving beyond the political geography of disciplinary epistemology in the social sciences. The notion of "city-as-archive" elaborates a new way of understanding archives-as principles of ordering …
Rural Nutrition in Monsoon Asia
The Structure of an Indian Metropolis
Diet, mortality and life expectancy A cross national analysis
The Rising Price of Husbands
Dowries of South Asia have steadily risen over the last forty years and now often amount to over 50 percent of a household's assets. This paper attempts to investigate the reasons behind this increase. It adapts Rosen's implicit market model to the Indian marriage market and tests predictions from the model with data from six villages in south central India and from the Indian census. It is found that a 'marriage squeeze' caused by population gro…
Dowry 'Inflation' in Rural India
Dowries in most regions of South Asia have steadily become larger over the last 40 years, causing widespread destitution among families with daughters to be married. This paper attempts to investigate the reasons behind dowry ‘inflation’ with data on marriage transactions and other individual and household information from six villages in south-central India, and from the Indian census. It is found that a ‘marriage squeeze’ caused by population g…
Dowry's Inflation in Rural India
The marriage squeeze and the rise in informal marriage in Brazil
Around the world, populations have experienced shortages of one sex or the other at marriageable ages, as a result of mortality declines. The solutions to this problem vary with the cultural context. Declines in the spousal age difference and increases in dowry payments (India) and polygamy (Africa) are two adjustments to a disequilibrium in the marriage market. We hypothesize that in Brazil the marriage market finds its balance by "recycling" me…
Wife-beating in rural South India
Can Economics Mediate the Relationship Between Anthropology and Demography
CONTEMPORARY DEMOGRAPHERS have increasingly begun to use qualitative methods, traditionally the province of anthropology, and an increasing number of anthropologists study demographic phenomena. Yet, demographic analysis rarely makes use of anthropological theory, while anthropologists who focus on population issues rarely use quantitative demographic data.' Thus, in fundamental ways, anthropology and demography are not yet connected. I will argu…
Sex Workers and the Cost of Safe Sex
May 2000 - Prostitution is often called the world's oldest profession, yet economists almost never study it. The practice of safe sex by commercial sex workers is considered central to preventing the transmission of AIDS in developing countries - yet sex workers in Calcutta who regularly use condoms suffer a 79 percent loss in their average earnings per sex act. The practice of safe sex by commercial sex workers is considered central to preventin…
The Marriage Squeeze Interpretation of Dowry Inflation
Poverty and Public Celebrations in Rural India
Very poor households spend large sums on celebrations. To the extent that these expenditures are central to maintaining the networks essential for social relationships and coping with poverty, these are reasonable expenses. To the extent that they are status competitions, they may merely increase conspicuous consumption. Rao examines the paradox of very poor households spending large sums on celebrations. Using qualitative and quantitative data f…
Poverty and Public Celebrations in Rural India
This article examines the paradox that very poor households spend large sums of money on celebrations. Using qualitative and quantitative data from South India, it demonstrates that expenditures on weddings and festivals can be explained by integrating an understanding of how identity is shaped in the Indian context with an economic analysis of decision making under conditions of extreme poverty and risk. It argues that publicly observable celebr…
Terror as a Bargaining Instrument
Terror as a Bargaining Instrument: A Case Study of Dowry Violence in Rural India by Francis Bloch and Vijayendra Rao. Published in volume 92, issue 4, pages 1029-1043 of American Economic Review, September 2002
Sex workers and the cost of safe sex
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.
The Determinants of Gender Equity in India
In revisiting the influential Dyson and Moore (1983) hypothesis as to why women in South India enjoy relatively more agency than in the North, we conducted an econometric analysis of the determinants of women's mobility and decisionmaking authority. Data for the study come from a household data survey carried out in the Northern state of Uttar Pradesh and in the Southern state of Karnataka in 1995. We find that cross-cousin and uncle-niece marria…
The Social Impact of Social Funds in Jamaica
Qualitative data from a case study of the Jamaica social investment fund reveal that the social fund process is elite-driven and decision-making tends to be dominated by a small group of motivated individuals. However, there is broad-based satisfaction with the outcome. Quantitative data from 500 households mirror these findings by showing that, ex-ante, the social fund does not address the expressed needs of the majority of individuals in the ma…
Risk and the City
Slum as theory
Governance in the Gullies
Venture Capital
Research Article| September 01 2007 Venture Capital Vyjayanthi Rao; Vyjayanthi Rao Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Satya Pemmaraju; Satya Pemmaraju Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google R. Gerard Pietrusko R. Gerard Pietrusko Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Public Culture (2007) 19 (3): 593–609. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-2007-010 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twit…
How to Read a Bomb
Bombay within a period of about two hours. The timed explosions were caused by large quantities of an explosive known as RDX, a black soap – like substance, which was loaded onto several four- and two-wheelers. Planted strategically in and around important city buildings, crowded marketplaces, and hotels, each vehicle exploded within fifteen or thirty minutes of the previous one. Their itiner-ary not only was timed serially but also, perhaps acci…
Writing the Lines of Connection
Across urban studies there is an increasing preoccupation with the forms of articulation that link a multiplicity of cities across a region often known as the 'Global South'. How do cities such as Jakarta, São Paolo, Dakar, Lagos, Mumbai, Hanoi, Beirut, Dubai, Karachi, for example, take note of each other and engage in various transactions with each other in ways that are only weakly mediated by the currently predominant notions of urbanism? What…
Tokenism or Agency? The Impact of Women's Reservations on Village Democracies in South India
There is increasing interest in whether improving the participation of women in government will lead to more gender equality. We test this with data collected from South India, using a natural experiment that randomly reserves one‐third of all presidencies in democratically elected village councils (panchayats) for women candidates. Previous research has found that such “reservations” result in policy decisions that are closer to the preferences …
Political science (42 obras) · Sociology (41 obras) · Economics (31 obras) · Law (23 obras) · Politics (23 obras) · Geography (20 obras) · Economic growth (18 obras) · Social science (16 obras) · Computer Science (14 obras) · Business (12 obras)