Inclusive Innovator: Rohini Pande of Yale University
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- Authors: PETER J WALKER
- Published: June 1, 2021
Biography and career highlights
- In 2019, Pande was named the Henry J. Heinz II Professor of Economics at Yale University and director of the Economic Growth Center.
- She spent the previous 13 years as a senior professor at the Harvard Kennedy School.
- She co-founded Evidence for Policy Design while at Harvard.
- Pande won the 2018 Carolyn Shaw Bell Award for furthering the status of women in economics.
- PETER J. WALKER is on the staff of Finance and Development.
- Pande is 49 years old (as reported in the profile).
Political economy: representation, institutions, and redistribution
- Doctoral thesis at the London School of Economics studied India’s “political reservation” policy (allowing only disadvantaged castes to contest elections in specified jurisdictions).
- Found that at the state level the practice increased redistribution in favor of disadvantaged groups, indicating a causal link between political representation and policy influence.
- Key analytical thrusts:
- Successfully tackling poverty depends less on direct aid and more on creating effective democratic institutions so vulnerable populations can push representatives to implement redistributive policies.
- Functional democracy requires more than periodic voting; it requires well-informed citizens and protection of democratic institutions from corruption.
- Personal context:
- Pande’s mother, Mrinal Pande, is noted as one of India’s leading journalists and was recently accused of sedition for reporting on a major farmers’ protest.
- Pande emphasizes the necessity of a vigorous free press for effective democracy.
Challenging conventional thinking on finance, microfinance, and infrastructure
- Rural banks (2005 paper with Robin Burgess):
- Challenged the view that unprofitable public rural banks were a poor development tool.
- Showed rural banks were designed to reach poor households and reduce poverty; on that metric, they achieved primary goals in India.
- IMF mission chief Petia Topalova: the paper established a causal relationship between credit and poverty reduction.
- Microfinance:
- Challenged the view that frequent repayments are necessary to prevent defaults.
- Found benefits to more flexible repayment periods: lower transaction costs, less financial stress for recipients, and greater business investment.
- Dams (collaboration with Esther Duflo):
- Showed dams increase poverty in areas where they are built due to disruption and inadequate compensation for displacement; downstream poverty reductions do not offset local worsening.
- Findings challenged prevailing pro-infrastructure beliefs circa 2005.
- Research approach highlighted:
- Empathy-driven field research that traces intuitions to publishable evidence.
Gender politics and female leadership
- Study of female local leader quotas in India:
- Constitutional amendment in 1993 reserved one-third of local government seats for women.
- Between 1992 and 2005, the proportion of female local leaders rose from 5 to 40 percent.
- Surveyed 7,000 households in 495 randomly selected villages in Birbhum, West Bengal; interviewed one male adult, one female adult, and all 11-to 15-year-olds in each household.
- Findings:
- Greater experience with female leadership increased perceptions of leaders’ effectiveness.
- Female leadership raised parents’ aspirations for daughters and girls’ own ambitions (role model effect).
- No evidence in the study of changes in young women’s labor market opportunities.
- Policy-relevant insights and interventions:
- Focus on changing social norms that discourage women from employment.
- Letting women manage their earned income and providing financial education are important.
- Study with Simone Schaner: basic bank skills training plus direct deposit, relative to just having an account or no account, increases women’s participation in both the government workfare program and the private sector labor market.
- Peer networks are valuable for normalizing women’s work and creating learning/dependence networks.
Corruption, information, and climate policy
- Corruption research with Benjamin Olken:
- Contested the view that poorer countries are more susceptible to corruption because citizens are more willing to tolerate it.
- Argued that people are potentially as corrupt in rich and poor countries; what varies is institutions — implying the need to improve transparency and strengthen control mechanisms.
- Entry into climate research via data quality and conflicts of interest:
- Worked on improving emissions information by addressing conflicts between emitters and regulators.
- Policy recommendation: move away from allowing emitters to choose their own auditors; instead assign auditors randomly and pay a fixed rate to reduce corruption.
- Caution noted: random assignment and fixed pay may forfeit valuable soft information from some monitors — a delicate trade-off.
- Emissions monitoring and abatement impacts:
- Estimated that perfect information on factory emissions, potentially enabled by innovations in continuous monitoring, would increase total abatement by 30 percent.
- Policy action:
- In 2019, through Harvard’s Evidence for Policy Design, Pande helped to launch the world’s first particulate emissions trading system in Gujarat.
Mentoring, inclusion, and institutional reform in economics
- Mentorship and authorship norms:
- Pande is a committed mentor who insists on listing as authors every person involved in academic papers, regardless of seniority.
- Praised for generosity and dedication as a teacher and mentor by peers and former mentees.
- Recommendations for improving gender balance and inclusivity in economics:
- Tackle stereotypes and acknowledge diverse perspectives.
- Standardize candidate assessment processes.
- Give greater visibility to female role models.
- Ensure at least one female speaker in each seminar series; Pande has threatened to boycott conferences lacking sufficient gender balance.
- Institutional initiative:
- Inclusion Economics, led by Pande and Charity Troyer Moore and headquartered at Yale, uses data-driven approaches to identify ways for the poor to increase influence and claim a fair share of growth.
- Pande’s overarching concern: “There’s a vicious circle of rising inequality and weakening institutions—particularly democratic institutions—which is going to be exacerbated by planetary limits on growth.”
- Central question posed by Pande: “What kind of institutional reforms might help us reverse this vicious circle and create instead a virtuous circle of better institutions and lower inequality?”
Profile by Peter J. Walker for F&D Magazine, June 2021.
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