Seema Jayachandran will present descriptive data related to COVID-19 that was collected as part of an ongoing evaluation in Punjab that will assess the effectiveness of conditional cash transfers in reducing crop burning and, thereby, improving air quality and child health.
Alongside this evaluation the team has recently been collecting data through phone surveys on how the COVID-19 lockdown has impacted agricultural households. This includes questions related to: production, output marketing, price expectations, food security and other coping strategies.
She will be joined by Namrata Kala, who has been doing similar work on the effects of the COVID-19 lockdown on agricultural households in Bihar, including effects on migration and income.
Seema Jayachandran is a professor of economics at Northwestern University. Her research focuses on economic issues in developing countries, including environmental conservation, gender equality, labor markets, health, and education.
She is a recipient of a Sloan Research Fellowship, National Science Foundation Early Career Development Award, and the Ecological Society of America’s Sustainability Science Award. She currently serves as co-editor for the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics and associate editor for the Quarterly Journal of Economics. She is also a board member and chair of the gender sector for the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), and is co-director of the National Bureau of Economic Research’s program in Development Economics. In addition, she writes regularly for The New York Times as one of its Economic View columnists. Prior to joining Northwestern, she was a faculty member at Stanford University.
She earned a doctorate in economics from Harvard University, a master’s degree in physics and philosophy from the University of Oxford where she was a Marshall Scholar, and a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from MIT.
Namrata Kala is the W.Maurice Young (1961) Career Development Professor of Management and an Assistant Professor in Applied Economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
She is an economist with research interests in environmental and development economics. Her current research projects include studying how firms and households learn about and adapt to environmental change and regulation, the returns to environmental technologies, and the returns to worker training and incentives.
From fall 2015 to 2017, Namrata was a Prize Fellow in Economics, History, and Politics at Harvard University and a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She received her PhD in environmental economics from the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale. She also holds a BA (Honors) in Economics from Delhi University, and an MA in International and Development Economics from Yale University.