Current Projects

Women’s Agency: One of the most fundamental kinds of social exclusion is exclusion from the ability to contribute to society’s shared pool of knowledge. The philosopher Miranda Fricker calls this “epistemic injustice.” It is one way that legitimacy may follow power. Epistemic injustice against women would deepen women’s poverty since a woman whose word is devalued is constrained in every direction—in making contracts, communicating ideas, exercising authority, and defending herself from violence. But little work has examined whether prejudice devalues the credibility judgments of what women say. This project develops new games and experiments and uses them with 500 husband-and-wife pairs in the representative villages of Bihar, India, to study this question. In the follow up evaluation project on women’s agency, Dr. Rahman and his collaborators use members of women’s self-help groups from 146 villages, in only half of which JEEViKA has been active for an extensive period [over 4 years] to study the impact of JEEViKA on women’s agency (e.g., executive function, mental and emotional health, gender norms, and epistemic discrimination). [Collaborators: Karla Hoff and Vijayendra Rao, World Bank] In related project, Dr. Rahman (with Jane Bambauer and Pengfan Zhang), utilizing longitudinal data from the career trajectory of young lawyers, examines the impact of macroeconomic shocks on gender gaps in labor market outcomes and provides insights into the role of asymmetric cultural acceptance of female under-employment.

Women’s Empowerment as a Tool for Fighting Poverty: Behavioral Impacts: Identifying effective ways to reduce poverty is one of the most important intellectual challenges before economists. To gauge the effectiveness of a program, changes in income, business formation, and nutrition resulting from anti-poverty programs are tracked, and this is a well-established area of research. However, what has not been subject to careful investigation is the relevance of an indirect channel of poverty reduction whereby an anti-poverty program changes the overall economic attitudes and orientations of the targeted individuals, and this change in attitude leads to the observed increase in income and entrepreneurial activity. To study such changes in economic behavioral orientations, this project develops incentivized tasks, which are adaptations of protocols developed in experimental economics for participants who have only a minimal level of education. Literacy and numeracy are not necessary to complete the tasks. The goal is to understand what the underlying attitudinal drivers of women’s empowerment and its capacity might be to lift individuals and families out of poverty. Thus, this project contributes to experimental methodology by adapting the tasks, to empirical evaluation of poverty reduction programs, and potentially to the theoretical modeling of the relationship between female empowerment and economic development. [Collaborators: Charles Noussair, Professor of Economics, and Tamar Kugler, Professor of Organizational Management, University of Arizona]

Climate Information Service, Adaptation, and Rural Livelihoods: This is a collaborative project with the Bihar Rural Livelihood Promotion Society (BRLPS), an initiative of the Government of Bihar and the World Bank for poverty alleviation. This research involves two randomized experiments (146 villages in a drought-prone region, and 146 villages in a flood-prone region) in India to study the impacts of a climate information service (CIS) provided to rural communities on their livelihoods. The objectives are four-fold: (a) estimate the impacts of the CIS on the modernization of agriculture, climate-resilient agricultural practices, sectoral allocation of labor, livelihood diversification, saving and investment behavior, and long-term behavioral change, among other outcomes; (b) provide new insights on efficient designs of CISs; (c) provide results on relative efficacies of the CIS in two agro-climatic (drought-prone and flood-prone) regions; and finally (d), demonstrate evidence-based templates for the programming of CISs in other drought and flood-prone regions of the world, and the designing of climate-resilient rural livelihoods (anti-poverty) programs. Baseline data was collected during 2017. [Collaborators: JEEViKA, Government of Bihar]