Sept. 1, 2009
Fall Kick-off Event
Welcome Lunch for Affiliates
12:00-1:30 p.m., ISS Conference Room (146 Myron Taylor Hall)
To become an affiliate, please send an email to socialsciences@cornell.edu specifying that you would like to join the Poverty theme project .
Sept. 8, 2009
Seminar
Hunger and Food Insecurity in the US: History, Correlates and Dynamics
Christine Olson, Poverty Team Member and Prof. of Nutritional Science
12:00-1:30 p.m., ISS Conference Room (146 Myron Taylor Hall)
“How many hungry people are there is the US?” In the mid-1980s this question set off a flurry of activity that ultimately resulted in annual measurements of the proportion of US households and individuals who are food insecure and hungry. This seminar will address the history of food insecurity measurement and the antecedents and consequences of food insecurity and hunger in the US. It will also describe current research addressing the dynamics of food insecurity, particularly addressing the question, “What allows some poor families to move out of food insecurity over time?”
September 9, 2009
Public Forum
The Future of U.S. Poverty Policy and Research
2:00-5:30 p.m., Biotech G10
September
12-13, 2009
Related Campus Workshop
Inequality: New Directions
Time and location TBA
Sponsored by Cornell University and the London School of Economics
September 15, 2009
Seminar
Poverty, Stress and the Intergenerational Transmission of Human Capital
Anna Aizer, Economics, Brown University
12 p.m., ISS Conference Room (146 Myron Taylor Hall)
We study how maternal stress affects child outcomes. We find that in-utero exposure to elevated levels of the stress hormone cortisol negatively affects the cognition, health and educational attainment of offspring. These findings are based on comparisons between siblings to control for unobserved differences between mothers that could bias estimates. Our results are consistent with recent experimental results in the neuro-biological literature linking exogenous exposure to coritsol in-utero with reduced growth in the hippocampal region of the brain and declines in offspring cognitive, behavioral and motor development. Moreover, we find that poor mothers have both higher average levels of cortisol and greater variability, suggesting that prenatal stress may play an important role in explaining why relatively few children born into poverty are able to escape it as adults.
September 17, 2009
Related University Lecture
Collective Action and the Commons: What Have We Learned?
Elinor Ostrom, Political Science, Indiana University
Time and location tba
Sponsored by CCSF, AEM, Development Sociology, Government and Natural Resources
September 22, 2009
Seminar
The Political Representation of the Poor
Karen Jusko, Political Science, Stanford University
12 p.m., ISS Conference Room (146 Myron Taylor Hall)
How do electoral rules affect the poor? This election-motivated account of antipoverty policy breaks with conventional economic explanations, power resources, and cultural accounts of social policy, emphasizing instead the electoral power of a low-income voting block to secure responsive policy. Specifically, I demonstrate that distributions to low-income citizens reflect legislators’ electoral incentives to be responsive to the poor, and that these electoral incentives are determined by electoral geography, or the joint geographic distribution of legislative seats and voters across electoral districts.
September 25-26, 2009
Related Campus Workshop
Making Welfare States Work: Citizens, Workers, and Welfare States in Comparative Perspective
Time and location tba
Sponsored by the Center for the Study of Inequality and the Institute for European Studies
September 29, 2009
Seminar
Pat Sharkey, Sociology, NYU
12 p.m., ISS Conference Room (146 Myron Taylor Hall)
October 6 , 2009
Seminar
Parke Wilde, Nutritional Science & Policy, Tufts University
12 p.m., ISS Conference Room (146 Myron Taylor Hall)
October 13, 2009
Workshop
Current Frontiers in the Study of Economic Mobility in Developing Countries
8:30 a.m.-5:15 p.m., 423 ILR Conference Center
October 20, 2009
Measuring Mobility with
Repeated Cross-Sections
David McKenzie, Development Research Group, World Bank
12 p.m., ISS Conference Room (146 Myron Taylor Hall)
Efforts to measure persistent poverty and economic mobility require
following
individuals over long periods of time. However, panel data on individuals is
still rare in developing countries, and in many cases when it is available, the
time frame is short. A complementary approach may therefore be to utilize the
regular cross-sectional surveys carried out in many countries. We develop new
methods for constructing mobility measures using repeated cross-sections, and
compare them to the results from using genuine panel data in Vietnam, in order
to assess how promising such approaches may be.
Nov. 2, 2009
Public Lecture
Chris Blattman, Political Science, Yale
4:30 p.m., 423 ILR Conference Center
Co-sponsored by CCSF
Nov. 3, 2009
Seminar
Chris Blattman, Political Science, Yale
12:00-1:30 p.m., ISS Conference Room (146 Myron Taylor Hall)
Sponsored by CCSF
Nov. 10, 2009
Seminar
Nik Theodore, City & Regional Planning, University of Illinois at Chicago
12:00-1:30 p.m., ISS Conference Room (146 Myron Taylor Hall)
November 16-17, 2009
Conference
Institutions, Behavior and the Escape from Persistent Poverty
423 ILR Conference Center
Tues., Nov. 24, 2009
Seminar
Dan Lichter,
Poverty Team Member and Prof. of PAM & Sociology
12:00-1:30 p.m., ISS Conference Room (146 Myron Taylor Hall)
Tues., Dec. 1, 2009
Seminar
TBA
12:00-1:30 p.m., ISS Conference Room (146 Myron Taylor Hall)
Tues. Jan. 26, 2010
Seminar
Why Poor People Don’t Vote: Income, Inequality, and Voter Turnout in Comparative Perspective
Chris Anderson,
Poverty Team Member and Prof. of Government
12:00-1:30 p.m., ISS Conference Room (146 Myron Taylor Hall)
Feb. 2, 2010
Seminar
Precarious Employment: Potential Consequences of the Economic Downturn
Susan Christopherson, Poverty Team Member and Prof. of City & Regional Planning
12:00-1:30 p.m., ISS Conference Room (146 Myron Taylor Hall)
Feb. 9, 2010
Seminar
Improving Job Access and Outcomes: The Ways to Work Program
Matthew Freedman, Poverty Team Member and Prof. of Labor Economics
12:00-1:30 p.m., ISS Conference Room (146 Myron Taylor Hall)
February 11-12, 2010
Workshop
Moving Out of Poverty: The Economic and Environmental Impacts of Programs Aimed at Mitigating Spatial Mismatch
225 ILR Conference Center
Feb. 16, 2010
Stutter-Step Models of College Entry
Steven Morgan, Poverty Team Member and Prof. of Sociology
12:00-1:30 p.m., ISS Conference Room (146 Myron Taylor Hall)
February 23, 2010
Index Based Livestock Insurance for Managing Asset Risk in Northern Kenya: Ex Ante Impact On Welfare Dynamics
Chris Barrett, Poverty Team Leader and Prof. of Applied Economics & Management
12:00-1:30 p.m., ISS Conference Room (146 Myron Taylor)
This paper evaluates the expected effectiveness of index-based livestock
insurance (IBLI) designed to address drought-related livestock mortality loss
among pastoralists in northern Kenya. Index insurance obviates adverse
selection, moral hazard and administrative costs that effectively preclude
insuring herds in remote areas, but it introduces basis risk that can compromise
insurance policy performance. We use panel data and experimentally-elicited risk preferences to simulate the impact of IBLI on welfare dynamics. The presence of a bifurcation in livestock dynamics has nonlinear effect on pastoralists’ insurance valuation.
March 2, 2010
Early Academic Performance, Grade Repetition, and School Attainment in Senegal: A Panel Data Analysis
David Sahn, Poverty Team Member and Prof. of Economics in the Division of Nutritional Sciences
12:00-1:30 p.m., ISS Conference Room (146 Myron Taylor Hall)
Little is known about how early academic ability is related to subsequent educational outcomes
in developing country environments, because the panel data needed to analyze this question
have been lacking. In this study we take advantage of unique data from Senegal, combining
test score data for children from the second grade with information on their subsequent school
progression from a follow-up survey conducted seven years later. We find that measures of
skills from early in primary school, corrected for measurement error using multiple test
observations per child, are very strongly positively associated with later school progression. A
plausible interpretation is that parents invest more in a child’s education when the returns to
doing so are higher. The results point to the need for remedial policies to target lagging
students early on to reduce early dropout. A current policy targeting poorly performing
students is grade repetition, which is pervasive in Francophone Africa. Using variation across
schools in test score thresholds for promotion to identify the effects of second grade repetition,
we find that a repeated student is more likely to leave school before completing primary than a
student with similar ability who is not held back, pointing to the need for alternative measures
to improve skills of lagging children.
March 11-12, 2010
Conference
Human Capital Interventions Targeting Poor Children
423 ILR Conference Center
March 16, 2010
Democracy and the African Middle Class, in Comparative Perspective
Nic van de Walle, Poverty Team Member and Prof. of Government
12:00-1:30 p.m., ISS Conference Room (146 Myron Taylor Hall)
March 23, 2010
Seminar cancelled due to spring break.
March 30 , 2010
Seminar
TBA
12:00-1:30 p.m., ISS Conference Room (146 Myron Taylor Hall)
April 1, 2010
University Lecture
More than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City
William Julius Wilson, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard Univ.
7:00 p.m.; Location TBA
Sponsored by the ISS Poverty Team, CSI, BLCC and University Lectures Program
April 6, 2010
Seminar
TBA
12:00-1:30 p.m., ISS Conference Room (146 Myron Taylor Hall)
April 13, 2010
Seminar
The Wealth Gap Between High and Low Castes in India
Seema Jayachandran, Economics ,Stanford University
12:00-1:30 p.m., ISS Conference Room (146 Myron Taylor Hall)
People from low castes in India have considerably less wealth than high-caste counterparts with the same income. This pattern is analogous to the finding in the U.S. that the black-white wealth gap is larger than the black-white income gap. This project uses data from India's National Sample Survey to explore several hypotheses about why wealth accumulation is lower among disadvantaged groups in India.
April 20, 2010
Poster Session
Student Research Grant Presentations: Part I
12:00-1:30 p.m., ISS Conference Room (146 Myron Taylor Hall)
April 27, 2010
Poster Session
Student Research Grant Presentations: Part II
12:00-1:30 P.M., ISS Conference Room (146 Myron Taylor Hall)
May 4, 2010
Seminar
TBA
12:00-1:30 P.M., ISS Conference Room (146 Myron Taylor Hall)
Past Events
May 12, 2008
Poverty Traps and Social Protection
Sponsored by the AEM Seminar Series
Chris Barrett, Team Leader and Stephen B. and Janice G. Ashley Professor of Applied Economics and Management
1:30-3:00 p.m., 401 Warren Hall
This paper demonstrates that there are potentially large returns to social protection policy that stakes out a productive safety net below the vulnerable and keeps
them from slipping into a poverty trap. Much of the value of the productive safety
net comes from mitigating the ex ante effects of risk and crowding in additional
investment. The analysis also explores the implications of different mechanisms of
targeting social protection transfers. In the presence of poverty traps, modestly
regressive targeting based on critical asset thresholds may have better long-run
poverty reduction effects than traditional needs-based targeting.
May 14, 2008
CAPE Business Meeting and Lecture by Int. Professor Christopher B. Barrett
Chris Barrett, Team Leader and Stephen B. and Janice G. Ashley Professor of Applied Economics and Management
1:30-2:30 p.m., Boyce Thompson Institute Auditorium
Following a reception and business meeting from 1:30 to 2:15, Professor Barrett will speak on Stimulating Agricultural and Rural Transformation in sub-Saharan Africa. Professor Barrett will discuss the necessity and prospects for igniting agricultural productivity improvements and rural transformation in Sub-Saharan Africa today, considering both food systems and the non-farm rural economy. This will focus primarily on Cote d'Ivoire, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya and Madagascar, in particular, but will speak to regional issues more generally.
April 22, 2009
Kick-off Lecture
Persistent Poverty and Upward Mobility
4:30-6:00 p.m., 423 ILR Conference Center
Opening Remarks by President Skorton
Please join us for this lecture introducing the 2008-2011 theme project. President Skorton will give opening remarks regarding the theme project's motivation. Chris Barrett, Team Leader and Janice G. Ashley Professor of Applied Economics and Management, will discuss the team's key research questions, specific research projects, and public activities. Team members will be on hand for Q & A following the lecture.
