Vijayendra Rao
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 3710151 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Vijayendra Rao |
| PRENOMES | Vijayendra |
| SOBRENOME | Rao |
| ASSINATURA | RAO V |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Development Research Group of the World Bank |
| VERIFICADO | Não |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 35 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 175 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 34 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 1 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1993 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 5 |
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…
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…
Can Economics Become More Reflexive? Exploring the Potential of Mixed-Methods
This paper argues that Economics can \n learn from Cultural Anthropology and Qualitative Sociology \n by drawing on a judicious mix of qualitative and \n quantitative methods to become more “reflexive.” It argues \n that reflexivity, which helps reduce the distance between \n researchers and the subjects of their research, has four key \n elements: cognitive empathy, the analysis of narratives \n (potentially enhanced by machine learning), unders…
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 …
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
Jati Inequality in Rural Bihar
Caste is a persistent driver of inequality in India, and it is generally analyzed with government-defined broad categories, such as Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe. In everyday life, however, caste is lived and experienced as jati, which is a local system of stratification. Little is known about economic inequality at the jati level. This paper uses data from poor rural districts in Bihar to explore expenditure inequality at the jati level. I…
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…
Are caste categories misleading?
This paper examines the relationship between caste and gender inequality in three states in India. When households are grouped using conventional, government-defined categories of caste we find patterns that are consistent with existing literature: lower-caste women are more likely to participate in the labour market, have greater decision-making autonomy within their households, and experience greater freedom of movement. When households are gro…
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…
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…
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…
How and Why Does History Matter for Development Policy
The consensus among scholars and policy-makers that ‘institutions matter’ for development has led inexorably to a conclusion that ‘history matters’, since institutions clearly form and evolve over time. Unfortunately, however, the next logical step has not yet been taken, which is to recognise that historians (and not only economic historians) might also have useful and distinctive insights to offer. This article endeavours to open and sustain a …
Revisiting Between-Group Inequality Measurement
Standard approaches to decomposing how much group differences contribute to inequality rarely show significant between-group inequality, and are of limited use in comparing populations with different numbers of groups. This study applies an adaptation to the standard approach that remedies these problems to longitudinal household data from two Indian villages -- Palanpur in the north, and Sugao in the west. The authors find that in Palanpur the l…
The Political Economy of Village Sanitation in South India
Despite efforts to mandate and finance local governments' provision of environmental sanitation services, outcomes remain poor in the villages surveyed in the four South Indian states. The analysis indicates some key issues that appear to hinder improvements in sanitation. Local politicians tend to capture sanitary infrastructure and cleaning services for themselves, while also keeping major village roads reasonably well-served. Their decisions s…
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…
Dignity Through Discourse
Employing a view of culture as a communicative phenomenon involving discursive engagement, which is deeply influenced by social and economic inequalities, the authors argue that the struggle to break free of poverty is as much a cultural process as it is political and economic. In this paper, they analyze important examples of discursive spaces - public meetings in Indian village democracies (gram sabhas), where villagers make important decisions…
The Political Economy Of Village Sanitation In South India
Despite efforts to mandate and finance local governments' provision of environmental sanitation services, outcomes remain poor in the villages surveyed in the four South Indian states. The analysis indicates some key issues that appear to hinder improvements in sanitation. Local politicians tend to capture sanitary infrastructure and cleaning services for themselves, while also keeping major village roads reasonably well-served. Their decisions s…
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 …
On “Inequality Traps” and Development Policy
There are inequalities in the world, \n among individuals and among groups that get reproduced \n across generations. In the World Development Report 2006 \n these are referred to as inequality traps. Inequality traps \n are similar to poverty traps in that they serve to keep \n people poor and destitute. But equality traps differ from \n poverty traps in that they refer to a reinforcing system of \n economic, political and social structures that…
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…
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.
Wife-beating in rural South India
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 …
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…
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…
How Women Talk in Indian Democracy
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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
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.
Culture and Public Action
The anthropologists and economists in this volume contend that culture is central to development, and that cultural 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 their influence on aspirations and collections action : yet they can also be exploitative, exclusionary, and can lead to inequality." "This book will be o…
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…
On “Inequality Traps” and Development Policy
There are inequalities in the world, \n among individuals and among groups that get reproduced \n across generations. In the World Development Report 2006 \n these are referred to as inequality traps. Inequality traps \n are similar to poverty traps in that they serve to keep \n people poor and destitute. But equality traps differ from \n poverty traps in that they refer to a reinforcing system of \n economic, political and social structures that…
The Political Economy Of Village Sanitation In South India
Despite efforts to mandate and finance local governments' provision of environmental sanitation services, outcomes remain poor in the villages surveyed in the four South Indian states. The analysis indicates some key issues that appear to hinder improvements in sanitation. Local politicians tend to capture sanitary infrastructure and cleaning services for themselves, while also keeping major village roads reasonably well-served. Their decisions s…
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 …
Dignity Through Discourse
Employing a view of culture as a communicative phenomenon involving discursive engagement, which is deeply influenced by social and economic inequalities, the authors argue that the struggle to break free of poverty is as much a cultural process as it is political and economic. In this paper, they analyze important examples of discursive spaces - public meetings in Indian village democracies (gram sabhas), where villagers make important decisions…
Revisiting Between-Group Inequality Measurement
Standard approaches to decomposing how much group differences contribute to inequality rarely show significant between-group inequality, and are of limited use in comparing populations with different numbers of groups. This study applies an adaptation to the standard approach that remedies these problems to longitudinal household data from two Indian villages -- Palanpur in the north, and Sugao in the west. The authors find that in Palanpur the l…
The Political Economy of Village Sanitation in South India
Despite efforts to mandate and finance local governments' provision of environmental sanitation services, outcomes remain poor in the villages surveyed in the four South Indian states. The analysis indicates some key issues that appear to hinder improvements in sanitation. Local politicians tend to capture sanitary infrastructure and cleaning services for themselves, while also keeping major village roads reasonably well-served. Their decisions s…
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…
How and Why Does History Matter for Development Policy
The consensus among scholars and policy-makers that ‘institutions matter’ for development has led inexorably to a conclusion that ‘history matters’, since institutions clearly form and evolve over time. Unfortunately, however, the next logical step has not yet been taken, which is to recognise that historians (and not only economic historians) might also have useful and distinctive insights to offer. This article endeavours to open and sustain a …
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…
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…
Are caste categories misleading?
This paper examines the relationship between caste and gender inequality in three states in India. When households are grouped using conventional, government-defined categories of caste we find patterns that are consistent with existing literature: lower-caste women are more likely to participate in the labour market, have greater decision-making autonomy within their households, and experience greater freedom of movement. When households are gro…
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…
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