19 March 2025
- Title: Born too soon? The educational costs of early elective deliveries (with Parijat Maitra)
- Speaker: Professor Libertad Gonzalez, Universitat Pompeu Fabra and The Barcelona School of Economics
- Location: 3 East, Room 2.2
- Time: 2.45pm – 4pm
About this seminar
In this seminar, Professor Libertad Gonzalez will discuss the below research:
Low birthweight is linked to adverse long-term outcomes, including lower educational attainment. However, disentangling the causes of this association is challenging, as low birthweight can result from both shortened gestation and impaired fetal growth. This study leverages a natural experiment in Spain, where a surge in early elective deliveries (triggered by the cancellation of a generous child benefit) led to lower birthweight and reduced gestational age for non-medical reasons. Using a difference-in-differences approach with adjacent cohorts as controls, we find that while early birth had no lasting impact on health outcomes, affected children performed significantly worse in school, pointing to detrimental effects on cognitive development.
Please contact Dr Judith Delaney (jmd97@bath.ac.uk) if you would like to join Professor Libertad Gonzalez for lunch or dinner (or meet with him during the day).
To be arranged
This seminar has been postponed. We will update this page with a new time and date soon.
- Title: Public Service Delivery, Exclusion, and Externalities: Theory and Experimental Evidence from India
- Speaker: Professor Maitreesh Ghatak, London School of Economics
- Location: Room 2.2, 3 East
- Time: 2.45pm – 4pm
About this seminar
Professor Maitreesh Ghatak will discuss the research work outlined below.
This study explores the interaction between the quality of public services, the implementation of user fees, and the resulting potential for exclusion, that can lead to negative externalities. Our theoretical framework takes account of the possible externalities that result from excluded users accessing alternative options in the context of sanitation, i.e., open defecation, and challenges the conventional wisdom that higher quality unequivocally leads to increased use. Instead, it highlights the ambiguity that results from a simultaneous increase in usage due to improved services (quality effect) and a decrease caused by the fees (price-elasticity effect). We then provide empirical evidence from a randomized controlled trial, where we incentivized the quality of water and sanitation services in the two largest cities of Uttar Pradesh, India. We show that higher service quality increases fee compliance but excludes some users, leading to unintended negative health externalities. Our detailed data provides evidence that results are driven by changes in caretaker behaviour. This finding highlights the need to be cautious regarding user fees, especially for public services involving significant externalities, and in settings where the users are very poor.
Please contact Professor Ajit Mishra if you would like to join for lunch or dinner or meet with Maitreesh during the day.