The Watson Institute awarded Birkelund funds to five faculty research projects during the 2023 - 2024 academic year. Projects ranged from studying civilian-military coordination during the pandemic to creating a study group between Brown students and faculty, and quilombola communities in Brazil.
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Bryce Millett Steinberg
IJC Assistant Professor of Economics and International and Public Affairs
Robinson 303B
Research Interests
Children & Families, Education, Global Health
Areas of Interest
Development economics, labor economics, public economics.
Biography
Bryce Millett Steinberg received her Ph.D. in economics from Harvard in 2015, and her A.B. from Brown in 2009. Her work focuses on health and education in the developing world, particularly the effect of market forces and government programs on families’ decisions to invest in human capital.
Research
Bryce's research focuses on households' decisions to invest in education in the developing world, and how market forces and government programs can affect these decisions. Her dissertation work shows that while increased wages can be good for investment in very young children in rural India, for older children higher wages can lead families to substitute out of human capital investment and into productive work. Positive rainfall shocks were associated with lower test scores and enrollment rates for these children, even though family incomes went up. In addition, she shows that government workfare programs that increase labor demand can have a similar effect: in rural India, a large workfare program increased dropout rates for adolescents. These results suggest that opportunity cost of schooling matters greatly for households' decisions to invest in human capital.
Publications
"Workfare and Human Capital Investment: Evidence from India", Journal of Human Resources, 2020 (with Manisha Shah).
"The Right to Education Act: Trends in Enrollment, Test Scores, and School Quality", AEA Papers and Proceedings, 2019 (with Manisha Shah).
"Drought of Opportunities: Contemporaneous and Long-Run Impacts of Rainfall Shocks on Human Capital", Journal of Political Economy, 2017.
"Do IT Service Centers Increase School Enrollment? Evidence from India", Journal of Development Economics, 2013.
Teaching
MPA 2455 (Microeconomics)
ECON 2510 (Graduate Development Economics)
ECON 0510 (Undergraduate Development Economics)
Recent News
This year six Watson research proposals were awarded a total of $121,486 in Birkelund Funds. The funds are used to support faculty research — especially in the early stages — and to encourage student engagement in research.
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Bryce Steinberg ’09 is the IJC Assistant Professor Economics at the Watson Institute at Brown University. She focuses her research on education and health in the developing world. After earning her Ph.D. in economics from Harvard, she served as a postdoctoral fellow at the Watson Institute.
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A study co-authored by Bryce Millett Steinberg found India's monsoon season may not be a boon for everyone. The study suggests that with torrential rains, school children are often stuck at home and turned into farmers.
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