Bryce Millett Steinberg
Bryce Millett Steinberg
IJC Assistant Professor of Economics and International and Public Affairs
Areas of Interest: Development economics, labor economics, public economics.
Biography
Bryce Millett Steinberg received her PhD in economics from Harvard in 2015, and her AB 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)