Dr  Vegard Iversen - Research

With funding from the International Growth Centre (IGC), Farzana Afridi, M.R Sharan and I undertake an evaluation of the impacts of gender and social audits on the governance of projects implemented under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act in Andhra Pradesh. Richard Palmer-Jones, Kunal Sen and I jointly research the colonial origins of agricultural development in India. Richard Palmer-Jones and I, with funding from 3ie, are also working on principles of replication in economics using Robert Jensen and Emiliy Oster's study of the impacts of cable TV on women's status in rural India as an example. I am also doing joint theoretical and empirical research with Amrita Dhillon and Gaute Torsvik using data from North-India to study social network mechanisms in markets for low and unskilled jobs. I have recently completed an extensive empirical study on the impacts of village level upper caste or own group dominance on the economic performance of Scheduled Castes and other minority groups in rural India. My chapter titled 'Caste and Upward Mobility' has just been published in The Oxford Handbook of the Indian Economy. I was awarded the Dudley Seers Memorial Prize for the best article published by Journal of Development Studies in 2008. The article, jointly with Richard Palmer-Jones, re-examines intrahousehold externalities from literate husbands to illiterate wives using secondary data from Bangladesh and India. 

Keywords: Labour markets; networks; identity and discrimination; gender, children and intrahoushold allocation; experimental economics (skeptic); impact evaluation