Problem 1: Calculating missing women for India at birth:
Suppose the sex ratio at birth (males born/ females born) is 1.076 in India and 1.059 on average in the developed countries. Suppose the birth rate is India is 25.8 per thousand people. We will calculate how many women go missing at birth (due to excess mortality at birth or not being born together).
a. First get the number of births in India in 2000, if the total population was 1.05 billion.
b. If the ratio of male to female births is 1.076, how many females and males were born in India in 2000?
c. How many females should have been born at this over all birth rate for the male female ratio to be 1.059 (the developed country bench mark)
d. How many women go "missing" at birth every year in India?
(Note: We are not accounting for infant mortality in this example)
Problem 2: "How" and "when" does discminitation against women happen? Majority of the women are missing by the stage of early childhood. We saw two papers trying to identify if girls get fewer resources than boys in the same family? Which papers were these and what are the findings?
Problem 3: Read the economist article titled "The plough and the now". What is the paper trying to explain? What is the main argument of the authors? What do they find in the data?
Problem 4: How can disease affect income directly? How can disease affect income through its effect on institution?
Problem 5: Mid-twentieth century malaria eradication campaigns largely eliminated malaria from Paraguay and Sri Lanka. Adrienne Lucas (professor in our department) identifies the effects of malaria on female educational attainment in these countries. We will calculate the average effect for Sri Lanka. Suppose the average years of schooling in highly malarious regions was 4.273 years for females born between 1937-47 (pre eradiction years), but increased to 6.211 years for females born after the eradication. The mean years of schooling in the less malarious regions was 5.714 for cohorts born in the pre eradication period and 6.600 years for cohorts born after. What is the average effect of the malaria eradication on years of schooling? Express this effect as a percentage of the pre-eradication schooling level in the malarious regions.