Seema Jayachandran

Last updated

Seema Jayachandran
Alma mater Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Oxford, Harvard University
Awards Sloan Research Fellowship, 2011; NSF CAREER Award, 2011
Scientific career
FieldsEconomics
Institutions University of California at Berkeley, Stanford University, Northwestern University, Princeton University
Doctoral advisor Michael Kremer
Website www.seemajayachandran.com

Seema Jayachandran is an economist who currently works as Professor of Economics at Princeton University. Her research interests include development economics, health economics, and labor economics.

Contents

Biography

Seema Jayachandran earned a BS in Electrical Engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1993. As a Marshall Scholar, she studied Physics and Philosophy at the University of Oxford. In 1997, she began graduate studies in Physics at Harvard University, [1] but completed a PhD in Economics in 2004.

After her graduation and a term as post-doctoral fellow as RWJ Scholar in Health Policy at The University of California at Berkeley, she became an assistant professor of economics at Stanford University (2006–11). In 2011, Jayachandran moved to Northwestern University as Associate Professor of Economics before becoming a full professor in 2018. In 2022, she moved to Princeton University. [2] In parallel, she has held visiting appointments at Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She also maintains affiliations as a Research associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), as a fellow of the Bureau for Research in Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD) as well as with the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL). Moreover, she performs editorial duties for the academic journals American Economic Journal: Applied Economics , Quarterly Journal of Economics , Journal of Economic Perspectives , and Science . Finally, she has worked as a consultant for United Nations Development Program and the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. [3]

In addition to her research, she has written for The New York Times, [4] appeared on Science Friday, [5] and done a "Science Ask Me Anything" on Reddit. [6]

Research

Seema Jayachandran's research focuses on health, development economics, and environmental economics. [7] Her research has been acknowledged through several awards, including a Sloan Research Fellowship in 2011, [8] an NSF CAREER Award in 2011, [9] and the Sustainability Science Award from the Ecological Society of America in 2018. [10]

Much of Jayachandran's work is in development economics, including maternal and child health in Africa and South Asia. [11] A substantial body of her research concerns gender differences. [1] In India, she finds that there is a tension between the desire for smaller families and the desire to have at least one son, making son preference stronger as family sizes shrink. [12] She estimates that fertility decline can explain one-third to one-half of the increase in the number of "missing women" in India. [13] In work with Erica Field and Rohini Pande, she also finds evidence that patriarchic gender norms in India constrain female entrepreneurship, with Muslim women (the sociocultural group with the most restrictions) being unable to benefit from business training. [14]

Another important focus of Jayachandran's research revolves around deforestation in Indonesia and Uganda. In a 2008 publication, she showed that massive forest fires in Indonesia caused air pollution that had adverse impacts on pregnant women and babies in poor communities, leading to more than 15,000 fetal and infant deaths. [15] In 2017, with a group of collaborators, she published research in Science showing that landowners in Uganda would preserve forests if they were paid to preserve forest cover. [1] She found that landowners who were offered a conservation contract only cleared 4% of land as opposed to the 9% cleared in villages without a contract. [16] This delayed 3000 metric tons of carbon dioxide at a cost of 46 cents per ton. [16] These results were covered in the New York Times. [17]

However, her most cited article [18] is about the impact that the departure of US Senator Jim Jeffords from the Republican to the Democratic Parties in 2001 had on the valuation of companies that had previously donated large sums of money to Republican Senators. [19] This was the first economics paper she wrote. [20]

Selected works

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">National Science Foundation</span> United States government agency

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States federal government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National Institutes of Health. With an annual budget of about $8.3 billion, the NSF funds approximately 25% of all federally supported basic research conducted by the United States' colleges and universities. In some fields, such as mathematics, computer science, economics, and the social sciences, the NSF is the major source of federal backing.

In international law, odious debt, also known as illegitimate debt, is a legal theory that says that the national debt incurred by a despotic regime should not be enforceable. Such debts are, thus, considered by this doctrine to be personal debts of the government that incurred them and not debts of the state. In some respects, the concept is analogous to the invalidity of contracts signed under coercion. Whether or not it is possible to discharge debts in this manner is a matter of dispute.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Angus Deaton</span> British microeconomist (born 1945)

Sir Angus Stewart Deaton is a British economist and academic. Deaton is currently a Senior Scholar and the Dwight D. Eisenhower Professor of Economics and International Affairs Emeritus at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and the Economics Department at Princeton University. His research focuses primarily on poverty, inequality, health, wellbeing, and economic development.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Immigration</span> Movement of people into another country or region to which they are not native

Immigration is the international movement of people to a destination country of which they are not natives or where they do not possess citizenship in order to settle as permanent residents or naturalized citizens. Commuters, tourists, and other short-term stays in a destination country do not fall under the definition of immigration or migration; seasonal labour immigration is sometimes included, however.

Rohini Pande is an economist who is currently the Henry J. Heinz II Professor of Economics and Director of the Economic Growth Center at Yale University. She was previously the Rafik Hariri Professor of International Political Economy and Mohammed Kamal Professor of Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. Pande was the Co-Director of Center for International Development at Harvard University's Evidence for Policy Design research program (EPoD) and serves on the board of directors of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, MIT. She also serves on the board of the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD), the Committee on the Status of Women in the Economic Profession (CSWEP) and as a co-editor of the American Economic Association's (AEA) journal American Economic Review: Insights. She is a Faculty Research Associate at NBER, CEPR and the IFPRI. Her research focuses on the economic analysis of the politics and consequences of different forms of redistribution, principally in developing countries. Her outstanding and empirical findings in fields of governance and accountability, women’s empowerment, role of credit in poverty, the economic aspects of the environment and the potential of policy design in these areas, won her the Infosys Prize 2022 in Social Sciences.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robin Burgess</span> British economist

Robin Burgess, is a Professor of Economics, Co-founder and Director of the International Growth Centre, as well as Co-Founder and Director of the Economics of Energy and the Environment (EEE) program at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Erica Marie Field is an economist who currently works as Professor of Economics and Global Health at Duke University. Her research interests include development economics, labour economics, and health economics. In 2010, her research was awarded the Elaine Bennett Research Prize.

Bridget Terry Long is the 12th Dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and the Saris Professor of Education and Economics. She is an economist whose research focuses on college access and success. Long is a Faculty Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a member of the National Academy of Education.

Michèle Tertilt is a German professor of economics at the University of Mannheim. Before, Tertilt was an assistant professor at Stanford University. She also spent a year at the University of Pennsylvania and one year as a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. She is currently a director of the Review of Economic Studies and associate editor of the Journal of Development Economics. In 2017 she received the Yrjö Jahnsson Award – a biennial award by the European Economic Association and the Yrjö Jahnsson Foundation to a European economist no older than 45 years, who has made a contribution in theoretical and applied research that is significant to economics in Europe. In September 2013 she was awarded the Gossen Prize – an annual award by the Verein für Socialpolitik which recognizes the best published economist under 45 working in the German-speaking area. Tertilt is the first woman to win this prestigious German prize in economics. In 2019, she was awarded the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. Her main focus is around development and intra-family interactions. She has also worked on consumer credit and bankruptcies.

Nancy Qian is a Chinese American economist and currently serves as the James J. O'Connor Professor in the Kellogg School of Management Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences and a Professor by Courtesy at the Department of Economics at Northwestern University. Her research interests include development economics, political economy and economic history. She is a leading development economist and an expert of autocracies and the Chinese economy.

Maureen Cropper is an economist who serves as Distinguished University Professor and Chair of the Economics Department at the University of Maryland. She is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.

Sarah Ssali, is a Ugandan social scientist, researcher, academic and academic administrator, who is an associate professor and dean of the School of Gender Studies at Makerere University, Uganda's oldest and largest public university.

Melissa Dell is the Andrew E. Furer Professor of Economics at Harvard University. Her research interests include development economics, political economy, and economic history.

Anna Aizer is a labor and health economist, who currently serves as the Maurice R. Greenberg Professor of Economics at Brown University where she is also a Faculty Associate at the Population Studies and Training Center. Her research focuses on child health and well-being, in particular the effect of societal factors and social issues on children's health.

Adriana Lleras-Muney is a Colombian-American economist. She is currently a professor in the Department of Economics at UCLA. She was appointed as Associate Editor for the Journal of Health Economics in 2014, and she was elected as one of the six members of the American Economic Association Executive committee in 2018. Her research focuses on socio-economic status and health with a particular emphasis on education, income, and economic development. In 2017, she was received the Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers from President Obama.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elizabeth Asiedu</span> Ghanaian economist

Elizabeth Asiedu is a professor of economics at the University of Kansas. She has facilitated research that is centered around foreign aid, foreign directed investment (FDI), and gender. She is a founder of the Association for the Advancement of African Women (AAAWE), as well as the current president of the organization. Asiedu is an editor of the Journal of African Development.

Petra Persson is a Swedish economist and Assistant Professor in Economics at Stanford University. Persson is best known for her work in Public and Labour Economics where her research focuses on the interactions between family decisions and the policy environment. Specifically, Persson's research agenda is centered on studying government policy, family wellbeing, and informal institutions.

Ilyana Kuziemko is a professor of economics at Princeton University, where she has taught since 2014. She previously served as the David W. Zalaznick Associate Professor of Business at Columbia Business School from July 2013 to June 2014 and as associate professor from July 2012 to June 2013. From 2007 to 2012, she was an assistant professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton University and Woodrow Wilson School. She also served as a Deputy Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy at the U.S. Department of the Treasury from 2009 to 2010 under The Office of Microeconomic Analysis. During her tenure, she worked primarily on the development and early implementation of the Affordable Care Act.

Barbara Wolfe is an economist and the Richard A. Easterlin Professor of Economics, Population Health Sciences, and Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Amrita Pande is an Indian sociologist and feminist ethnographer based in South Africa, tenured as a professor at the University of Cape Town. She was the first to publish a detailed ethnographical study on the surrogacy industry in India with her book Wombs in Labor (2014). Pande has also been appointed as the lead for the National Research Foundation project into the surrogacy industry of South Africa.

References

  1. 1 2 3 "Faculty Spotlight: Seema Jayachandran: Institute for Policy Research - Northwestern University". www.ipr.northwestern.edu. Retrieved October 11, 2018.
  2. ↑ "Board approves 15 faculty appointments". Princeton University. Retrieved July 12, 2022.
  3. ↑ Curriculum vitae of Seema Jayachandran from her personal webpage. Retrieved October 11th, 2018.
  4. ↑ Jayachandran, Seema (July 13, 2018). "Think Positive, Climb Out of Poverty? It Just Might Work". The New York Times. Retrieved October 11, 2018.
  5. ↑ "Seema Jayachandran - Science Friday". Science Friday. Retrieved October 11, 2018.
  6. ↑ "r/science - Science AMA: I'm Seema Jayachandran, economist at Northwestern University. Let me tell you why paying poor farmers to not cut down forests is a cheap way to combat climate change. AMA about why small amounts of money for Ugandan farmers helped preserve endangered chimp habitat, and the atmosphere". reddit. August 7, 2017. Retrieved October 11, 2018.
  7. ↑ "Seema Jayachandran | The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab". www.povertyactionlab.org. Retrieved October 11, 2018.
  8. ↑ "Scholars receive Sloan Fellowships". The Stanford Daily. February 16, 2011. Retrieved October 11, 2018.
  9. ↑ "NSF Award Search: Award#1156941 - CAREER: Health, Environmental Issues, and Price Effects in Developing Countries". www.nsf.gov. Retrieved October 11, 2018.
  10. ↑ "Ecological Society of America announces 2018 award recipients | Ecological Society of America". www.esa.org. Retrieved October 11, 2018.
  11. ↑ India, Ideas For. "Seema,Jayachandran". www.ideasforindia.in. Retrieved October 11, 2018.
  12. ↑ Jayachandran, Seema. (2017). Fertility Decline and Missing Women. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 9(1), pp. 118-139.
  13. ↑ "Seema Jayachandran". The Indian Express. February 24, 2018. Retrieved October 11, 2018.
  14. ↑ Field, E., Jayachandran, S., Pande, R. (2010). Do traditional institutions constrain female entrepreneurship? A field experiment on business training in India. American Economic Review, 100(2), pp. 125–129.
  15. ↑ Jayachandran, Seema (October 2, 2009). "Air Quality and Early-Life Mortality Evidence from Indonesia's Wildfires". Journal of Human Resources. 44 (4): 916–954. doi:10.3368/jhr.44.4.916. ISSN   0022-166X. S2CID   15390085.
  16. 1 2 "Testing the Effectiveness of Payments for Ecosystem Services to Enhance Conservation in Uganda". Innovations for Poverty Action. April 22, 2015. Retrieved December 10, 2020.
  17. ↑ Plumer, Brad (July 20, 2017). "A Cheap Fix for Climate Change? Pay People Not to Chop Down Trees (Published 2017)". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved December 10, 2020.
  18. ↑ "Seema Jayachandran - Google Scholar Citations". scholar.google.com. Retrieved October 11, 2018.
  19. ↑ Jayachandran, Seema (October 1, 2006). "The jeffords effect". Journal of Law and Economics. 49 (2): 397–425. doi:10.1086/501091. ISSN   0022-2186. S2CID   233649.
  20. ↑ "Seema Jayachandran on Twitter". Twitter. Retrieved October 11, 2018.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.