Assignment:
Bring the Deolalikar article to class.
Read Deolalikar, Anil (1988), "Nutrition and Labor Productivity in Agriculture: Estimates for Rural South India," The Review of Economics and Statistics, 70(3), pp. 406-413.
1. What is the research question this paper seeks to answer? Another way of saying this question is "What is the paper trying to do?"
2. There are numerous citations of other economics journal articles in the introduction section of this paper. How is Deolalikar's paper related to those cited papers? You don't need to talk about every single paper cited, but concentrate on "clumpings" of paper citations, and any that are particularly singled out for discussion in the paper.
3. What are the conclusions of this article? Note: conclusions are not quite the same as empirical results. The empirical results are the evidence from which conclusions are drawn.
4. How does the author go about trying to answer the research question? You should describe this in educated lay reader terms (not statistical or economic jargon). You need enough detail to be able to read this answer in two months and have a good idea of what the paper did.
Note: You are not expected to know statistics or econometrics. You should be able to summarize an article from the written parts even if you don't understand all the details of their analytical methods.
Readings:
Nutrition and Labor Producvivity in Agriculture: Estimates for Rural South India
By Anil B. Deolalikar