Seema Jayachandran

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

Seema Jayachandran
Alma materMassachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Oxford, Harvard University
AwardsSloan Research Fellowship, 2011; NSF CAREER Award, 2011
Scientific career
FieldsEconomics
InstitutionsUniversity of California at Berkeley, Stanford University, Northwestern University
Websitehttp://www.seemajayachandran.com

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 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.[2]

In addition to her research, she has written for The New York Times,[3] appeared on Science Friday,[4] and done a "Science Ask Me Anything" on Reddit.[5]

Research

Seema Jayachandran's research focuses on health, development economics, and environmental economics.[6] Her research has been acknowledged through several awards, including a Sloan Research Fellowship in 2011,[7] an NSF CAREER Award in 2011,[8] and the Sustainability Science Award from the Ecological Society of America in 2018.[9]

Much of Jayachandran's work is in development economics, including maternal and child health in Africa and South Asia.[10] 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.[11] She estimates that fertility decline can explain one-third to one-half of the increase in the number of "missing women" in India.[12] In work with Erica Field and R 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.[13]

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.[14] In 2017, she published research showing that landowners in Uganda would preserve forests if they were paid to preserve forest cover.[1]

However, her most cited article[15] 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.[16] This was the first economics paper she wrote.[17]

Selected Works
  • Jayachandran, Seema (October 1, 2006). "The Jeffords effect". Journal of Law and Economics. 49 (2): 397–425. doi:10.1086/501091. ISSN 0022-2186.
  • Jayachandran, Seema. "Selling labor low: Wage responses to productivity shocks in developing countries." Journal of political Economy 114, no. 3 (2006): 538-575.
  • Jayachandran, Seema, and Adriana Lleras-Muney. "Life expectancy and human capital investments: Evidence from maternal mortality declines." The Quarterly Journal of Economics 124, no. 1 (2009): 349-397.
  • 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.
  • Jayachandran, Seema, and Ilyana Kuziemko. "Why do mothers breastfeed girls less than boys? Evidence and implications for child health in India." The Quarterly journal of economics 126, no. 3 (2011): 1485-1538.
  • Field, Erica, Seema Jayachandran, and Rohini Pande. "Do traditional institutions constrain female entrepreneurship? A field experiment on business training in India." American Economic Review 100, no. 2 (2010): 125-29.
  • Jayachandran, Seema, and Michael Kremer. "Odious debt." American Economic Review 96, no. 1 (2006): 82-92.
gollark: What dißcord server?
gollark: Yes.
gollark: LyricLy = utter wavelength division multiplexing.
gollark: How about "legoids"?
gollark: Well, in that case, I shall refer to them as "legological cuboids".

References
  1. "Faculty Spotlight: Seema Jayachandran: Institute for Policy Research - Northwestern University". www.ipr.northwestern.edu. Retrieved October 11, 2018.
  2. Curriculum vitae of Seema Jayachandran from her personal webpage. Retrieved October 11th, 2018.
  3. "Think Positive, Climb Out of Poverty? It Just Might Work". Retrieved October 11, 2018.
  4. "Seema Jayachandran - Science Friday". Science Friday. Retrieved October 11, 2018.
  5. "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. Retrieved October 11, 2018.
  6. "Seema Jayachandran | The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab". www.povertyactionlab.org. Retrieved October 11, 2018.
  7. "Scholars receive Sloan Fellowships". The Stanford Daily. February 16, 2011. Retrieved October 11, 2018.
  8. "NSF Award Search: Award#1156941 - CAREER: Health, Environmental Issues, and Price Effects in Developing Countries". www.nsf.gov. Retrieved October 11, 2018.
  9. "Ecological Society of America announces 2018 award recipients | Ecological Society of America". www.esa.org. Retrieved October 11, 2018.
  10. India, Ideas For. "Seema,Jayachandran". www.ideasforindia.in. Retrieved October 11, 2018.
  11. Jayachandran, Seema. (2017). Fertility Decline and Missing Women. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 9(1), pp. 118-139.
  12. "Seema Jayachandran". The Indian Express. Retrieved October 11, 2018.
  13. 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.
  14. 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.
  15. "Seema Jayachandran - Google Scholar Citations". scholar.google.com. Retrieved October 11, 2018.
  16. Jayachandran, Seema (October 1, 2006). "The jeffords effect". Journal of Law and Economics. 49 (2): 397–425. doi:10.1086/501091. ISSN 0022-2186.
  17. "Seema Jayachandran on Twitter". Twitter. Retrieved October 11, 2018.
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