Browsing by Author "Mohanan, Manoj"

Social norms can play an important role in economic decision-making. Individuals face costs if they deviate from cultural norms in their families or communities, and firms seek to preserve reputation in order to bolster their position in their market. In this dissertation, I explore the role of cultural norms and reputation in individual, household, and firm decision-making in developing countries. The first chapter is comprised of information and priming experiments on a job search platform in urban Pakistan identifying the role of social norms and workplace attributes on educated women's job search and occupational choice. The second chapter studies the relationship between gold price in year of birth and household decision-making at adulthood using nationally representative data in India. The third chapter combines a lab-in-field generosity game with field-based measures of healthcare provider effort to document that a sizable proportion of healthcare providers in this setting in rural India exert clinical effort with patients in ways consistent with maintaining reputation in their communities.

There is a very high prevalence of folic acid deficiency in developing countries and women suffering from this deficiency during their pregnancies are at an increased risk of having a child with neural tube defects (NTDs). NTDs affects approximately 400,000 births annually. Newborns affected by neural tube defects suffer lifelong physical and mental handicaps, and in cases of severe NTDs, die. NTDs, however, are preventable with proper folic acid interventions for women of reproductive age, often reducing the risk of having a child with NTDs by 72%. This paper aims to conduct a systematic review in order to understand, formulate and propose a framework for assessing the cost-effectiveness of the Indian Institute of Public Health's (IIPH) prospective folic acid interventions in India. Several limitations to the proposal of such a framework (particularly on efficacy vs. effectiveness) are highlighted alongside key findings on integral components to include when conducting a cost-effectiveness analysis on folic acid interventions. These findings (costs/benefits/effectiveness), best practices, and lessons from a programmatic and post-hoc perspective are reported and discussed in the results section. Findings are succinctly summarized into a framework in the discussion section as a recommended checklist for IIPH to utilize when conducting a cost-effectiveness analysis on their future intervention.

This dissertation investigates how politically-expedient decisions and resource constraints create winners and losers on the path toward development, focusing on slum evictions, public recordkeeping, and public health crisis response. This manuscript extends findings from prior scholarship on the politics and consequences of redistribution to understand decision-making in the context of urban informality and Covid-19 crisis response in India. I combine survey data with webscraping and remote sensing techniques to study why some urban slums were evicted while others were left intact; which areas experienced underreporting of Covid-19 mortality; and where government directed limited Covid-19 vaccine stocks. I find evidence that greater local economic activity was associated with evictions, that Covid-19 mortality counts were lower in areas aligned with the ruling coalition, and that Covid-19 vaccination supplies were strategically directed to areas of electoral importance to the ruling coalition. Taken together, these findings show that, even during crises, electoral incentives shape policy.

Low work productivity has caused large indirect cost to many employers. Evidence shows that physical activity can improve health status, thus enhancing work productivity. In view of the benefits of physical activities, the World Health Organization (WHO) issued a guideline on age-specific physical activity standards in 2010. According to the guideline, two weekly physical activity standards (the WHO standard and the WHO additional standard) have been introduced in order to prevent non- communicable disease and relieve mental pressure.

In this study, the association between work productivity and physical activity has been explored. The work productivity is measured by presenteeism and absenteeism together. Presenteeism implies a situation where a mentally or physically sick employee attend to work despite a medical illness that makes their job performance sub-optimal. It is recorded as a self-reported percentage of work efficiency loss in the study. Absenteeism implies having work absence because of medical condition. It is recorded as whether participants have medical absence in the past week. 928 valid responses from Singapore full-time employees have been analyzed using logistic models.

Results show that participants who had not met the WHO additional standard are less likely to have medical absence (OR=2.51, P<0.05). The longer time spent on physical activity is associated with lower work productivity (OR=1.001, P<0.05). I also found that the more frequent individual keeps healthy lifestyle, the lower presenteeism and absenteeism one will have.

The findings could be explained by several reasons. First, physically active participants have higher chance of physical injuries, leading to medical absence from work. Secondly, participants who had met the WHO additional standard are more likely to have lower income. Because of the labor leisure tradeoff theory, people who have lower income are less incentivized to trade leisure time for work. Therefore, the participants who had met the WHO additional standard have a lower medical absence rate. Thirdly, findings show that frequent healthy lifestyle is associated with higher work productivity. However, People who had met the WHO additional standard are less likely to have a frequent healthy lifestyle due to the lower social and economic status they have. Therefore, even though they have longer time spent on physical activity, the work productivity is still lower. Lastly, because of the work ethics in Singapore, employees ask for medical absence only due to urgent and serious medication conditions and such urgent and serious medical conditions cannot be prevented by physical activities.