Early Career Researchers Series

Early Career Researchers Series, building on the success and intellectual foundation of our previous project, “Expanding the Frontier of Economics 1.0,” we are thrilled to announce the launch of a new webinar series.

Objective

The primary objective of this webinar series is to explore and expand the boundaries of economic thought, with a particular focus on the Global South. By doing so, we aim to foster a deeper understanding of various critical issues shaping our world today.

Key Themes

The webinar will cover a wide range of topics, including but not limited to:

1. Health: Investigating the economic aspects of healthcare systems, public health policies, and the socio-economic determinants of health in developing countries.
2. Inequality: Exploring the root causes and consequences of economic inequality, focusing on income disparity, access to resources, and social mobility.
3. Social Protection: Evaluating social protection mechanisms, their effectiveness, and their role in reducing poverty and vulnerability in the Global South.
4. Climate Change: Analyzing the economic impacts of climate change, adaptation strategies, and sustainable development practices.
5. Decolonial Thoughts: Engaging with decolonial perspectives to understand and critique the legacy of colonialism in contemporary economic practices and theories.
6. Planning Issues: Addressing urban and rural planning challenges, infrastructure development, and policy-making processes that affect economic growth and development.
7. Labour and Development Economics: Examining labour market dynamics, informal employment, wage policies, and the role of labour in economic development, with a focus on structural transformation and inclusive growth.

Format

The webinar series will include monthly sessions featuring presentations by selected young scholars and early career researchers.

Each session will include:

• Presentations: Short presentations of research findings (30-45 min)
• Q&A Sessions: Opportunities for attendees to engage with the presenters. (15-20 min)

Webinar Topics:

Session 1: Transportation, employment and gender norms: Evidence from Indian cities

Dr Arun Balachandran, Post-doctoral Research Scientist at the Columbia Aging Center, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University in New York.

June 20, 2024, 6.30 PM Indian Standard Time

• Exploring how labor market opportunity structure limit women’s labor market participation.
• Analyzing the role of transport infrastructure in gender-gap in labour force participation and its variations by gender-norms across communities in urban India.
• ⁠India Human Development Survey and city-level data on transport infrastructure are used.
• ⁠The causal effects of differential employment status of women and men are analyzed against the size and quality of transport in Indian cities.
• ⁠Exploring the Interaction effects to understand varying impacts of transport on employment by gender-context in communities.

(Session 2: Cancelled & will be rescheduled on a future date, please be patient with us)

Session 2: Analysis of Returns to Education-Occupation Mismatch in Presence of Informality Evidence from Urban Labour market  in India

September 27, 2024, 6.30 PM Indian Standard Time

Speaker: Dr. Ravikiran Naik, Assistant Professor – of Economics. FLAME University, India. He received his Doctorate Degree in Economics from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and has completed his master’s in Economics from Gokhale Institute of Politics & Economics-Pune. He was also a Post-Doctoral Fellow at Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS), Bangalore. Prof. Ravikiran has over nine years of work experience and was associated with the Institute of Rural Management Anand (IRMA), Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS), and Christ University- Lavasa. He is an applied economist by training and has a keen interest in the research areas involving Labor Economics, Informal employment and Entrepreneurship, Intergenerational economic mobility, and economics of education. He has published peer review articles in national & international journals. He has also co-authored a book titled ‘Women Entrepreneurs in The New Indian Middle Class: Macro & Micro Perspectives.

Abstract

This study examines the impact of education-occupation mismatch (EOM) on wages in India’s urban labor market, where informal employment is widespread. While it is generally accepted that higher education leads to higher earnings, concerns arise when the number of highly educated individuals outpaces the availability of jobs requiring their qualifications, potentially leading to credentialism rather than a more skilled workforce. Our research fills a gap in the existing literature by analyzing the combined effects of EOM and labor market informality on earnings. We estimate the returns to over-education, under-education, and adequate education across both formal and informal sectors. The findings indicate that returns to education are consistently lower in the informal sector compared to the formal sector. Workers with adequate education receive significantly higher returns in both sectors, while those with under-education suffer wage penalties regardless of their employment type. The returns to education also vary across the wage distribution: in the formal sector, adequate education yields higher returns in lower wage segments but decreases in the upper segments. Conversely, in the informal sector, returns increase steadily across the wage distribution, with the highest returns in the top decile, suggesting a convergence with the formal sector at the upper end. Additionally, returns to over-education rise along the wage distribution in both sectors, while returns to under-education remain consistently lower. These results hold across different econometric models and definitions of informality. The study underscores a significant wage penalty for workers in the informal sector who have invested in education, suggesting that policies aimed at reducing labor market informality could help mitigate EOM and decrease the associated earnings penalties.

Session 3: Women’s Time Use Patterns of Paid and Unpaid Work in India

November 7, 6.30 PM IST Indian Standard Time

Speaker: Dr. Vijayamba R, Assistant Professor – of Economics. NLSIU, India.

Vijayamba is a development economist interested in studying women’s work in the labour markets. She completed her postdoctoral stint at the Centre for Sustainable Employment, Azim Premji University, and was part of the research team behind the State of Working India (SWI) Report 2023, focusing on the role of social identities on labour market outcomes. Her PhD research focused on women’s role in the livestock economy, including their ownership of livestock assets, labour contribution, and decision-making in the livestock economy. She is currently awarded a Non-Resident Post-Doctoral fellowship by the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER)-National Data Innovation Centre (NDIC) to explore measurement issues of women’s work using secondary data. Her research interests include women’s work, the utilization of time, decision-making, social norms, and issues of measurement. Her other interests include reading, travelling, and practising music.

Abstract

This talk presents estimates of women in economic activity using the Time Use Survey of India (TUS 2019). In India, the broad patterns of time use reveal that women engage in a predominant share of unpaid work leaving less time for employment and leisure. This paper asks if engagement in employment results in an offsetting reduction on unpaid work across different levels of education and types of employment. Identifying self-employment and wage employment from the International Classification of Activities for Time Use Statistics (ICATUS 2016), for women engaged in self-employment, there is a slight trade off with unpaid work. Whereas urban graduate women face an increased burden of unpaid work.

Session 4: Justice For All? The Impact of Legal Aid in India

February 6, 2025, 6.30 PM IST Indian Standard Time

Speaker: Dr. Nitin Kumar Bharti, Postdoctoral Associate, NYU Abu Dhabi

Nitin Bharti is a postdoctoral scholar in the Economics department of the New York University-Abu Dhabi. He received his Ph.D. from the Paris School of Economics and the University of Namur in 2022. Before that, he earned his bachelor’s degree from IIT-Kharagpur and has two years of experience working in the corporate sector. He is an applied micro-economist, and his research interests lie in understanding the development of educational systems and their linkage with economic growth and inequality. He is also interested in studying the long-term evolution of economic inequalities in the South Asia region.

Abstract

Barriers to justice perpetuate poverty and inequality. We study a large expansion of access to legal representation in India: the establishment of prison legal aid clinics. We collect the opening dates of 763 clinics and link them with data on 13 million criminal
cases and prison populations. Using a staggered difference-in-differences design, we find that defendants with access to legal aid are more likely to receive definitive judgements, favorable outcomes, and acquittals, with more cases dismissed early. This reform reduces prison populations, sparing 31,055 individuals annually and yielding a welfare gain of $7.60 for every dollar invested in legal aid.

Session 5: Role of informal economy in the process of economic development

March 11, 2025, 6.30 PM IST Indian Standard Time

Speaker: Surbhi Kesar, Senior Lecturer, Department of Economics, SOAS University of London

Surbhi Kesar is a development and political economist, who currently works as a Senior Lecturer in Department of Economics at SOAS University of London. Her recent and ongoing work focusses on labour and informal economy and the reproduction of the structure of economic dualism in India with high economic growth, thereby critiquing the imaginary of development-as-capitalist-transition; relation between identities and social exclusion; political economy of crises; a critical engagement with the social reproduction theory; and approaches towards decolonising the field of economics. Her research is embedded in Marxian Political Economy and South-centric critical frameworks of economics.

Abstract

Despite a high economic growth experienced by the India, a vast majority of its workforce derives livelihoods from the informal economy. In this talk, we reflect on how different strands of literature – both mainstream and critical – have explained the persistence of the informal economy and what role it plays in the process of economic development. Using data from individual and firm level surveys, over the period of high growth, we assess various dynamics of India’s informal economy . We reflect on why India’s experience does not square with the dominant theories and posit an alternative framework, following the works of Kalyan Sanyal, that can help us make sense of the current reality. Building on it, we derive the research agenda on informal economy and post-colonial capitalist development and posit the questions that need answering.