Reuben W. Hills Conference Room
Bechtel Conference Center
Encina Hall
616 Serra Street
Stanford, CA 94305-6055
Gabriela Calderon holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Stanford University. Her research interests include policies that affect gender differences in developing countries, policy evaluation, violence in Latin America and the effect of institutions and governance on the provision of public goods and health/education outcomes. She did her master's degree in economic theory and bachelor's degree in economics at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México. Currently, in the Program on Poverty and Governance, her research analyzes the way institutions and democracy affect the provision of public goods, and the impact they have on health outcomes like infant mortality trends. She is also studying the effects of government interventions that combat drug-trafficking organizations over violence in Mexico.
Her research has focused on the topics of development, public finance, and the evaluation of public policy programs in Mexico. For example, during the summers of 2009/2010, she conducted a field experiment in Zacatecas, Mexico with Giacomo de Giorgi, an assistant professor from Stanford University, and Jesse Cuhna, a former Stanford student. The main task was to evaluate the impact of financial literacy classes on underprivileged women entrepreneurs in the region. To successfully complete an evaluation in an untreated region, they proposed collaborating with the Mexican NGO CREA on a joint project. They contacted local interviewers, trained them, and identified all women entrepreneurs in the 17 communities, in which we conducted the experiment. Preliminary results suggest that the female entrepreneurs who were randomly assigned to treatment earned higher profits, had larger revenues, and served a greater number of clients. They also found that they were more likely to implement formal accounting techniques.
She has also studied programs that are not randomly assigned as an experiment. For example, she has analyzed the effects of a national policy in Mexico of child care services, called Estancias Infantiles para apoyar a Madres Trabajadoras (EI), using administrative, census and household data. Her empirical research strategy identifies the effects of the program on both the men and women who were eligible for the program. She used time, location and eligibility variation, and considered a major threat to identification of the actual effects: for example, a manufacturer who moves into a municipality at approximately the same time as the EI program and who happens to disproportionately demand the skills of women who were eligible to the program happened to have. To ensure that such scenarios do not affect her results, she chose not triple difference strategy, in which all ineligible people are treated as “controls” for the EI-eligible families. Instead, she employs Synthetic Control Methods, using the same methodology as Abadie and Gardeazabal (2003) and Abadie, Diamond and Hainmueller (2010) to ensure that her control group has the same mix of skills and preferences as the EI-eligible group. She adapted the Synthetic Control Method to analyze repeated cross-sectional household data, which are data that are typically available in developing countries
Speaker Bio:
John Prendergast is an author and human rights activist who for over 25 years has worked for peace in Africa. He is Co-Founder of the Enough Project, an initiative to end genocide and crimes against humanity. During the Clinton administration, Prendergast was involved in a number of peace processes in Africa while he was Director of African Affairs at the National Security Council and Special Advisor to Susan Rice at the Department of State. Prendergast has also worked for two members of Congress, UNICEF, Human Rights Watch, the International Crisis Group, and the U.S. Institute of Peace. He has also been a youth counselor, a basketball coach and a Big Brother for over 25 years.
He has authored ten books on Africa, including Not on Our Watch: The Mission to End Genocide in Darfur and Beyond, a New York Times bestseller and NAACP non-fiction book of the year that he co-authored with actor Don Cheadle. His most current book, The Enough Moment, also co-authored with Mr. Cheadle and released on September 7, 2010, focuses on building a popular movement against genocide and other human rights crimes. His other forthcoming book draws on his many years in the Big Brothers/Big Sisters program.
Prendergast has worked with a number of television shows to raise awareness about human rights issues in Africa. He has appeared in four episodes of “60 Minutes,” for which the team won an Emmy Award, and has consulted on two episodes of “Law and Order: Special Victims Unit,” one focusing on the recruitment of child soldiers and the other on rape as a war strategy. He has also traveled to Africa with ABC’s Nightline, PBS’ The Lehrer NewsHour, and CNN’s Inside Africa.
He has appeared in several documentaries including: "Sand and Sorrow," "Darfur Now," "3 Points," and "War Child." He also co-produced "Journey into Sunset," about Northern Uganda, and partnered with Downtown Records and Mercer Street Records to create the compilation album “Raise Hope for Congo,” which shines a spotlight on sexual violence against women and girls in the Congo.
With Tracy McGrady and other NBA stars, John co-founded the Darfur Dream Team Sister Schools Program to fund schools in Darfurian refugee camps and create partnerships with schools in the United States. He also helped create the Raise Hope for Congo Campaign, highlighting the issue of conflict minerals that fuel the war in Congo. John is a board member and serves as Strategic Advisor to Not On Our Watch, the organization founded by George Clooney, Matt Damon, Don Cheadle, and Brad Pitt.
Prendergast’s op-eds have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The Washington Post, and The International Herald Tribune, and he has been profiled in Vanity Fair, Men's Vogue, Time, Entertainment Weekly, GQ Magazine, Oprah Magazine, Capitol File, Arrive Magazine, Interview Magazine, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and Kenneth Cole’s Awearness.
Prendergast has been a visiting professor at the University of San Diego, Eckerd College, St. Mary’s College, the University of Maryland, and the American University in Cairo, and will be at Columbia University and the University of Pittsburgh. He has been awarded six honorary doctorates.
Philippines Conference Room
This seminar explores whether and to what extent the relative circumstances of men and women following marital dissolution affect sex selection behavior within marriages. China's new divorce law, which was enacted in 2001, reduced divorce costs, especially for women, by granting the right to divorce and claim damages in the case of domestic violence and extra-marital relationships and by securing women's property rights upon divorce. Ang Sun has modeled the legal change as a decrease in women's divorce costs in a household in which all the marital surplus accrues to the husband. Sun shows: (1) that the new divorce law predicts an increase in divorce rates after the birth of a daughter; (2) that the new law results in fewer sex-selective abortions for the second birth if the first birth produced a daughter; and (3) that the effect of the new law on the sex ratio should have diminishing returns to divorce cost reduction for women. All the predictions are supported by the empirical evidence. Most importantly, she finds that most of the decline occurred in historically high divorce-cost regions, which is consistent with the predictions of the model and helps rule out concomitant changes in household income and relative returns to male and female children.
Ang Sun received her PhD from Brown University’s Department of Economics. Sun’s research interests encompass development economics, labor and demographic economics, and health economics. She focuses on intra-household allocations, gender differences, and household formation. In particular, she studies how a combination of different forces in China—including traditional values, rapid growth, and the population structure—is affecting Chinese families.
Philippines Conference Room
Walter H. Shorenstein
Asia-Pacific Research Center
616 Serra St C335
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-6055
Ang Sun joins the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) from Brown University’s department of economics where she recently received her PhD.
Sun’s research interests encompass development economics, labor and demographic economics, and health economics. She focuses on intra-household allocations, gender differences, and household formation. In particular, she studies how a combination of different forces in China—including traditional values, rapid growth, and the population structure—is affecting Chinese families. During her time at Shorenstein APARC, Sun will participate in an interdisciplinary study of the impact of the aging process in Asia on economic growth.
Sun holds a PhD and an MA in economics from Brown University, and an MA from the China Center of Economic Research. She also received a BA in economics and a BS in information and computer science from Beijing University.
Abstract:
There is a wide diversity in the provision of public services in India. In some states one can go for miles without seeing a functional school or public health centre, where roads are poorly maintained, and electricity has not yet been introduced. In other places, governments tend to function remarkably in extending basic public services to all, with tremendous consequences to human lives. In this talk, Vivek Srinivasen will explore why some parts of India have developed an impressive social commitment to such services unlike others. In this context, he will also discuss the remarkable changes in Bihar and other parts of North India in the recent years.
Speaker Bio:
Vivek Srinivasen joined the Liberation Technology Program as the manager in February 2011 after completing his Ph.D. in Social Sciences from the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. Prior to this, Srinivasen worked with campaigns on various socio-economic rights in India, including the right to food, education and the right to information. Based on these experiences he has written (and co-authored) extensively on issues surrounding the right to food, including Notes from the right to food campaign: people's movement for the right to food (2003), Rights based approach and human development: An introduction (2008), Gender and the right to food: A critical re-examination (2006), Food Policy and Social Movements: Reflections on the Right to Food Campaign in India (2007).
Encina Ground Floor Conference Room
Abstract:
Haber and Menaldo (2011) claim there is little evidence that oil is harmful to democracy, and that previous studies to the contrary were corrupted by omitted variable bias. Michael Ross professor of political science at UCLA will present findings from a paper co-authored with Jørgen Juel Andersen to show there is little evidence of the bias they allege, and point out that they decline to test the most credible version of the resource curse hypothesis. The versions that they do test, moreover, are based on two implausible assumptions: that oil will effect a country’s regime type immediately, rather than over a period of several years; and that the relationship between oil wealth and political power did not change over the 200 year period covered by their data. We argue that oil only had strong anti-democratic effects after the 1970s, when most oil-producing autocracies nationalized their industries; and show their main results are overturned when we add to their models a dummy variable for the post-1979 period, and allow the effects of oil to take place over a period of three, five, or seven years, instead of just one year.
Speaker Bio:
Michael L. Ross is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and Director of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies.
He has published widely on the political and economic problems of resource-rich countries, civil war, democratization, and gender rights; his articles have appeared in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Annual Review of Political Science, British Journal of Political Science, International Organization, Journal of Confiict Resolution, Journal of Peace Research, Politics and Gender, and World Politics. In 2009, he received the Heinz Eulau Award from the American Political Science Association for the best article published in the American Political Science Review.
His work has also appeard in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Harper's, The Los Angeles Times, and been featured in The Washington Post, Newsweek, and many other publications.
Ross currently serves on the advisory boards of the Review Watch Institute, the Natural Resource Charter, and Clean Trade, and was previously a member of the Advisory Group for the World Bank's Extractive Industries Review. He is also a member of the Political Instability Task Force and the APSA Task Force on Democracy Audits and Governmental Indicators.
Reuben W. Hills Conference Room
"Transforming ripples into waves of transformational change across the world"
Come to EAST House for another installment of the 5-part Women, War & Peace series! Join us for a screening of Peace Unveiled, a captivating story of how three women in Afghanistan are risking their lives to ensure women's rights amidst peace negotiations with the Taliban.
Directly after the screening, stay for an engaging conversation with Kavita Ramdas, former President and CEO of the Global Fund for Women, and Professor Christine Min Wotipka from the Stanford School of Education.
Learn more about Peace Unveiled.
When: Thursday October 27, 7:00-9:00 PM
Where: Education and Society Theme House (EAST)
RSVP at east.stanford.edu
Refreshments will be served.
Education and Society Theme House (East)
520 Galvez Mall
Graduate School Of Education Stanford University
Stanford CA 94305-3001
Christine Min Wotipka is Associate Professor (Teaching) of Education and (by courtesy) Sociology and Director of the Master’s Programs in International Comparative Education (ICE) and International Education Policy Analysis (IEPA) at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. She is Co-Resident Fellow and Co-Founder of EAST House — the Equity, Access, & Society Theme House.
Dr. Wotipka’s research contributes to the comparative scholarship in gender, diversity, leadership, and higher education and has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the Spencer Foundation. Her articles have appeared in such journals as Social Forces, Sociology of Education, Gender & Society, Sociological Forum, and Comparative Education Review.
Before joining the faculty at Stanford in 2006, Dr. Wotipka was a visiting assistant professor/global fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles, and an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. Between her undergraduate and graduate studies, she proudly served as a United States Peace Corps volunteer in rural northeast Thailand and worked in the Republic of Korea at an economic research firm. Among Dr. Wotipka’s professional activities, she has consulted on girls' education policies for the Ministry of Education in Afghanistan.
Dr. Wotipka earned her BA (summa cum laude) in International Relations and French at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, and MA in Sociology and Ph.D. in International Comparative Education at Stanford University.
Please join the Center on Philanthropy and Civic Society, the Program on Social Entrepreneurship, Spark, and the Clayman Institute for Gender Research for a special evening screening of:
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
Friday, November 4, 2011
Doors Open 6:30 pm, Film Program 7:00 pm-9:30 pm
CEMEX Auditorium at the Knight Management Center,
Stanford Graduate School of Business
This film is set in 19th century China and centered on the lifelong friendship between two girls who develop their own secret code as a way to contend with the rigid cultural norms imposed on women.
The film will be followed by a Q&A with Director Wayne Wang and producers Wendi Murdoch and Florence Sloan, and author Lisa See.
This program will also launch a new Stanford initiative to facilitate an intergenerational conversation on the women’s movement. As such, the Q&A will focus on a historical framing of the women’s movement, the role of culture in shaping feminism and the ways in which leadership within the movement is transferred between generations.
To RSVP, visit the Stanford PACS website at:
CEMEX Auditorium at the Knight Management Center,
Stanford Graduate School of Business