What am I doing?

Many of you have been asking what exactly I will be doing during my time in India. I actually didn't know myself, up to today! Well, at least it looks like I know what I'm doing, though it seems like that could all change instantly. Today I had my first meeting with Sendhil, the economist I'll be working for. Our first meeting prompted my discovery of a Border's-like bookstore near my flat, which made me feel a bit like home.

The first part of what I'll be doing is already underway; I'll be coming in at the survey stage of a project on sugar mills and the effect of ownership schemes of sugar mills on farmer productivity. Stop here if you're not interested in the technical details. In each sugarcane "command area," all farmers must sell to only one mill, which is either privately owned or a co-op. The goal is to determine, through this constraint, and through studying villages that lie over the border of two command areas, how much the ownership structure of the mill affects the productivity and efficiency of the farmers in that command area. Since it's in the survey stage, it seems like most of what I'll be doing is monitoring the survey and measuring additional variables, like soil quality of land plots.

The second part of my job is more interesting, for me, and more challenging. This one falls under the category of designing financial access products for poor people that will (hopefully) eventually be rolled out by ICICI bank, our strategic partner. It has to do with the rubric used for credit scoring -- in an urban setting, a bank applies basic inputs to a model (like income, consistency of income, age, education, etc.) to determine the credit risk of a borrower. According to this view, one would expect farmers to make bad borrowers -- they face many shocks and have unsteady income. However, farmers are not bad borrowers, and many pay back their loans. Clearly, the model used by an urban bank is missing something more subtle when applied to rural farmers. We need to understand what behavioral characteristics are correlated with a farmer's credit risk, so that banks who lend to rural borrowers can apply an efficient and more fair rubric to this setting. These behaviors could be anything like taking better care of their land, or farming a more intensive crop, or weeding fastidiously, or using a certain type of fertilizer. While figuring these behaviors out, it is also my job to figure out what makes a farmer more or less productive, and what behaviors are associated with planning ahead.

So, how does one figure out these things? Well, you visit Indian rural villages. Lots of them. And you talk to people who don't speak your language, with a translator. This should be the toughest part, since it's where I have no experience or skill set. Not to worry, however, because Sendhil said he hired me because I had no skills (even though it doesn't make sense to me, it makes sense to him, and that's what matters). I'm excited about that aspect of it though, and I think it should be fun. In a primer for doing field research, I'm actually given advice to pretend like my car broke down on the side of the road and ask people for help, as a way to enter a village in a non-threatening way.

Another challenge is that this will involve a lot of daunting background work for me. I have no idea what crops are even farmed in India, let alone which crops would make good areas of study, what techniques farmers use on their land, etc. Even once I figure that out, it will take a lot of trips to "the field" (i.e., the villages) to talk to people and see if my hunches are right. Also, the next crop cycle (for three-month crops) is in Dec-Feb, so I want some concrete idea to at least be underway by then. I guess I'll just have to take it one step at a time, and keep asking questions along the way. Another thing I should mention is that either of these has the potential to completely fall apart at any stage of the game -- by nature of what can and can't be done with ICICI or our survey team capabilities or a lot of other factors. I am really excited about this particular project though because it's right at the intersection of behavioral and development economics, which is what I wanted to learn most about. So I would be sad if it fell through, but not devastated. Either way, I'll still get experience.

A word on organization: I was hired by Sendhil, but I work at the CDF (see link to the right), which seems kind of like his lab in India. He's here until Harvard resumes in September. The IFMR, which is the larger organization over the CDF, is partnered with J-PAL (also see link to the right), which Sendhil is associated with, but I'm not sure if these projects have anything to do with J-PAL or one of the multitudinous other "initiatives" and "centers" he is associated with.