Stanford University

Can Bureaucrats be Paid Like CEOs? School Principal Incentives for Anemia Reduction in Rural China

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A large literature examines performance pay for managers in the private sector, but less is known about the use of performance pay for their public sector counterparts. Improving public service delivery may nonetheless depend heavily on aligning the incentives of public sector managers with social objectives. In this paper we study performance incentives for school administrators and how their responses to incentives vary with the amount of resources under their control. Our specific focus is the implementation of new, school-based programs to reduce childhood anemia in rural China. We randomly assigned 170 schools to three levels of performance pay for reductions in student anemia across which we orthogonally assign two levels of block grants. We emphasize three key findings. First, with a smaller block grant, large incentives were effective, but smaller incentives (10% of the size) were ineffective in reducing anemia. Second, absent explicit anemia-based incentives, increasing the size of block grants under the control of school administrators lead to sizeable reductions (but was nearly twice as costly as incentives alone). Third, we find that incentives crowd out the effect of additional resources (or vice-versa). Our evidence suggests that this crowding-out result is attributable, at least in part, to risk avoidance and the nature of existing ‘bureaucratic incentives’ facing school administrators.

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Grant Miller

Encina Commons Room 101,
615 Crothers Way,
Stanford, CA 94305-6006

(650) 723-2714 (650) 723-1919
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Henry J. Kaiser, Jr. Professor
Professor, Health Policy
Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research
Professor, Economics (by courtesy)
grant_miller_vert.jpeg PhD, MPP

As a health and development economist based at the Stanford School of Medicine, Dr. Miller's overarching focus is research and teaching aimed at developing more effective health improvement strategies for developing countries.

His agenda addresses three major interrelated themes: First, what are the major causes of population health improvement around the world and over time? His projects addressing this question are retrospective observational studies that focus both on historical health improvement and the determinants of population health in developing countries today. Second, what are the behavioral underpinnings of the major determinants of population health improvement? Policy relevance and generalizability require knowing not only which factors have contributed most to population health gains, but also why. Third, how can programs and policies use these behavioral insights to improve population health more effectively? The ultimate test of policy relevance is the ability to help formulate new strategies using these insights that are effective.

Faculty Fellow, Stanford Center on Global Poverty and Development
Faculty Affiliate, Stanford Center for Latin American Studies
Faculty Affiliate, Woods Institute for the Environment
Faculty Affiliate, Interdisciplinary Program in Environment & Resources
Faculty Affiliate, Stanford Center on China's Economy and Institutions
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Texting for Sexual Health: Effects of Information Provision on Health-Seeking Behavior in Kenya

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In hopes of increasing awareness that could minimize sexual health risks, the team will promote a mobile health counseling service, which will enable young people in Nairobi’s Mathare slums to receive private and reliable answers from health counselors through text messaging. 

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Joshua Cohen

Program on Global Justice
Encina Hall West, Room 404
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305

(650) 723-0256
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Marta Sutton Weeks Professor of Ethics in Society, and Professor of Political Science, Philosophy, and Law
cohen.jpg MA, PhD

Joshua Cohen is a professor of law, political science, and philosophy at Stanford University, where he also teaches at the d.school and helps to coordinate the Program on Liberation Technology. A political theorist trained in philosophy, Cohen has written extensively on issues of democratic theory—particularly deliberative democracy and the implications for personal liberty, freedom of expression, and campaign finance—and global justice. Cohen is author of On Democracy (1983, with Joel Rogers); Associations and Democracy (1995, with Joel Rogers); Philosophy, Politics, Democracy (2010); The Arc of the Moral Universe and Other Essays (2011); and Rousseau: A Free Community of Equals (2011). Since 1991, he has been editor of Boston Review, a bi-monthly magazine of political, cultural, and literary ideas. Cohen is currently a member of the faculty of Apple University.

CDDRL Affiliated Faculty
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Joshua Cohen Marta Sutton Weeks Professor of Ethics in Society, and Professor of Political Science, Philosophy, and Law Speaker Stanford University
Risa Kitagawa PhD Candidate, Political Science Speaker Stanford University
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Tuberculosis Control and its Benefits to the Rural Poor

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Jeremy Goldhaber-Fiebert

Encina Commons, Room 220
615 Crothers Way
Stanford, CA 94305-6006

(650) 721-2486 (650) 723-1919
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Professor, Health Policy
jeremy-fisch_profile_compressed.jpg PhD

Jeremy Goldhaber-Fiebert, PhD, is a Professor of Health Policy, a Core Faculty Member at the Center for Health Policy and the Department of Health Policy, and a Faculty Affiliate of the Stanford Center on Longevity and Stanford Center for International Development. His research focuses on complex policy decisions surrounding the prevention and management of increasingly common, chronic diseases and the life course impact of exposure to their risk factors. In the context of both developing and developed countries including the US, India, China, and South Africa, he has examined chronic conditions including type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular diseases, human papillomavirus and cervical cancer, tuberculosis, and hepatitis C and on risk factors including smoking, physical activity, obesity, malnutrition, and other diseases themselves. He combines simulation modeling methods and cost-effectiveness analyses with econometric approaches and behavioral economic studies to address these issues. Dr. Goldhaber-Fiebert graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College in 1997, with an A.B. in the History and Literature of America. After working as a software engineer and consultant, he conducted a year-long public health research program in Costa Rica with his wife in 2001. Winner of the Lee B. Lusted Prize for Outstanding Student Research from the Society for Medical Decision Making in 2006 and in 2008, he completed his PhD in Health Policy concentrating in Decision Science at Harvard University in 2008. He was elected as a Trustee of the Society for Medical Decision Making in 2011.

Past and current research topics:

  1. Type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular risk factors: Randomized and observational studies in Costa Rica examining the impact of community-based lifestyle interventions and the relationship of gender, risk factors, and care utilization.
  2. Cervical cancer: Model-based cost-effectiveness analyses and costing methods studies that examine policy issues relating to cervical cancer screening and human papillomavirus vaccination in countries including the United States, Brazil, India, Kenya, Peru, South Africa, Tanzania, and Thailand.
  3. Measles, haemophilus influenzae type b, and other childhood infectious diseases: Longitudinal regression analyses of country-level data from middle and upper income countries that examine the link between vaccination, sustained reductions in mortality, and evidence of herd immunity.
  4. Patient adherence: Studies in both developing and developed countries of the costs and effectiveness of measures to increase successful adherence. Adherence to cervical cancer screening as well as to disease management programs targeting depression and obesity is examined from both a decision-analytic and a behavioral economics perspective.
  5. Simulation modeling methods: Research examining model calibration and validation, the appropriate representation of uncertainty in projected outcomes, the use of models to examine plausible counterfactuals at the biological and epidemiological level, and the reflection of population and spatial heterogeneity.
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Rethinking the First World War from the Perspective of International Law

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About the Topic: Re-establishing and strengthening the rule of international law in international affairs was a central Allied aim in the First World War. Revisionism in its many forms has erased this from our memory, and with it the meaning of the war. Imperial Germany’s actions and justifications for its war conduct amounted to proposing an entirely different set of international-legal principles from those that other European states recognized as public law. This talk examines what those principles were and what implications they had for the legal world order.

About the Speaker: Isabel V. Hull received her Ph.D. from Yale University in 1978 and has since then been teaching at Cornell University, where she is the John Stambaugh Professor of History. A German historian, her work has reached backward to 1600 and forward to 1918 and has focused on the history of sexuality, the development of civil society, military culture, and imperial politics and governance. She has recently completed a book comparing Imperial Germany, Great Britain, and France during World War I and the impact of international law on their respective conduct of the war. It will appear in Spring 2014 under the title, A Scrap of Paper: Breaking and Making International Law in the First World War. Her talk is based on this latest research.

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Isabel Hull John Stambaugh Professor of History, Cornell University Speaker
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HUNGER, PEACE & JUSTICE CONVERSATION WITH KAVITA SRIVASTAVA

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Kavita Srivatsava, one of India's leading activists will be joining us for an informal conversation on activism around hunger, peace and justice in India.  Kavita is Secretary of People's Union for Civil Liberties, that has been at the forefront of the struggle for civil, political and socio-economic justice in India.  She is the petitioner in the internationally renowned ‘Right to food’ litigation in the Supreme Court of India, one of the most impactful socio-economic litigations in India.  She has also played a prominent role in women's movements in Rajasthan and has worked on numerous cases of violence against women. 

In addition these core issues, Kavita has also worked on issues such as communal violence, landmines in the Indo-Pak border, election monitoring in Kashmir, supporting Dalits networks an on practically every major social issue in North India.  Come join us for an informal conversation on hunger, peace and justice with this versatile activist.

Time: 3 pm

Date: 12 Nov, 2013 (Tuesday)

Location: E008 Encina Hall (East)

Supported by:

Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law

Center for South Asia

San Jose Peace and Justice Center

E 008, Encina Hall (East)
616 Serra St., Stanford University

Kavita Srivastava Secretary Speaker People's Union for Civil Liberties
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GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES ON URBANIZATION

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China’s record breaking economic growth has yielded an equally startling rate of urbanization, as millions move from the countryside to the cities.  In many villages one finds only the old and the very young.  Old institutions are decaying while new ones may or may not yet exist.   We have brought together an international group of social scientists who are interested in the process and consequences of urbanization and who study a diverse set of countries.   They will discuss challenges of urbanization in different political and economic settings to examine new urban formation that will help put China’s experience in a global perspective.

Topics and Speakers:

Urbanization in Southern Africa: Jim Ferguson, Dept. of Anthropology, Stanford University

Urbanization in India: Thomas Hansen, Dept. of Anthropology, Stanford University

Urbanization in Italy: Sylvia Yanagisako, Dept. of Anthropology, Stanford University

Urbanization in Latin America: Austin Zeiderman, London School of Economics

Urbanization in China: Zhou Qiren, National School of Development, Peking University

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Stanford Center at Peking University

Jim Ferguson Dept. of Anthropology Speaker Stanford University
Thomas Hansen Dept. of Anthropology Speaker Stanford University
Sylvia Yanagisako Dept. of Anthropology Speaker Stanford University
Austin Zeiderman Speaker London School of Economics
Zhou Qiren National School of Development Speaker Peking University
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The Changing Field of Power in Post-Martial Law Taiwan

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Abstract:

Professor Gold will make a presentation that is part of a larger book project that applies the theory of fields as elaborated by Pierre Bourdieu, Neil Fligstein and Doug McAdam to the remaking of Taiwan since the end of martial law in 1987. He argues that political democratization is only one part of the larger dispersal of all forms of power (what Bourdieu terms “capital”) away from the tight centralized control of the mainlander—dominated KMT to broader segments of Taiwan’s society. This talk will look at this process of the breakdown and reconstruction of the old order of various fields, in particular the political, economic and cultural fields, and the effect of this on the overarching field of power.

 

Speaker Bio:

Thomas B. Gold is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and Executive Director of the Inter-University Program for Chinese Language Studies, whose executive office is at Berkeley and teaching program at Tsinghua University in Beijing. He received his B.A. in Chinese Studies from Oberlin College, and M.A. in Regional Studies – East Asia and PhD in Sociology from Harvard University. He taught English at Tunghai University in Taiwan. He was in the first group of U.S. government-sponsored students to study in China, spending a year at Shanghai’s Fudan University from 1979-1980. Prof Gold’s research has examined numerous topics on the societies on both sides of the Taiwan Strait. These include: youth; guanxi; urban private entrepreneurs (getihu); non-governmental organizations; popular culture; and social and political change. He is very active in civil society in the United States, currently serving on the boards of several organizations such as the Asia Society of Northern California, International Technological University, Teach for China, and the East Bay College Fund.  His books include State and Society in the Taiwan Miracle, and the co-edited volumes Social Connections in China: Institutions, Culture, and the Changing Nature ofGuanxi, The New Entrepreneurs of Europe and Asia: Patterns of Business Development in Russia, Eastern Europe and China, and Laid-Off Workers in a Workers’ State: Unemployment With Chinese Characteristics.  

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Thomas B. Gold Professor of Sociology Speaker UC Berkeley
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Why Do Parents Abort Girls? Patrilocality and Its Historical Origin

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Co-sponsored by the Stanford Center for International Development

Recent scholarship has documented an alarming increase in the sex ratio at birth in parts of East Asia, South Asia and the Caucuses. In this paper, I argue that parents in these regions engage in sex selection because of patrilocal norms that dictate elderly coresidence between parents and sons. Sex ratios and coresidence rates are positively correlated when looking across countries, within countries across districts, and within districts across ethnic groups. The paper then examines the roots of patrilocality and biased sex ratios using the Ethnographic Atlas (Murdock 1965). I find that ethnic groups in areas with land conducive to intensive agriculture have stronger patrilocal norms, higher modern coresidence rates, and higher sex ratios at birth. The paper concludes with an examination of the expansion to old age support in South Korea. Consistent with the paper’s argument, I find that the program was associated with a normalization in the sex ratio at birth.

Avi Ebenstein received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of California, Berkeley in 2007 is a Lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in the Department of Economics. His fields of interest include environmental economics, economic demography, and international trade. Avi's past research has focused primarily on issues related to  China, including the health impacts of air and water pollution, causes and consequences for the country’s high sex ratio at birth, internal migration, and the impact of China’s entry into the global economy on wage patterns domestically and in the United States. He is currently a Visiting Research Scholar at the Center for Health and Wellbeing at Princeton University.

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Avraham Ebenstein Lecturer Speaker The Hebrew University of Jerusalem in the Department of Economics
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Can We Measure Shared Understandings? A Network-Based Approach to the Analysis of Culture

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ABOUT THE TOPIC: Culture is often understood as a system of "shared understandings." But what does that mean? Amir Goldberg argues that having a shared understanding with others does not necessarily imply espousing similar beliefs or attitudes. Rather, culture prescribes which beliefs and attitudes go with one another; sharing an understanding therefore suggests being in agreement about the structures of relevance and opposition that make symbols and actions meaningful. Amir uses relational class analysis - a network-based method for analyzing survey data - to map these structures, and find groups of people who share distinctive cultural schemes. This approach lends new insights into understanding the social underpinnings of Americans' complex understandings of music, politics, economic morality, and more.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Professor Goldberg received bachelors' degrees in Computer Science and Film Studies from Tel Aviv University, and an MA in Sociology from Goldsmith’s College, University of London. Before pursuing a PhD in Sociology at Princeton University, he worked for several years as a software programmer, an IT consultant and a technology journalist. An Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior in Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, his research projects all share an overarching theme: the desire to understand the social mechanisms that underlie how people construct meaning, and consequently pursue action. His work has been published in the American Journal of Sociology, and he was awarded Princeton University’s Harold W. Dodds Honorific Fellowship.

ABOUT THE COMMENTATOR: Marc Ventresca is University Lecturer in Strategic Management at Said Business School (University of Oxford), England's foremost graduate school of business. Dr. Ventresca, who earned his PhD in Sociology at Stanford, specializes in governance, entrepreneurship, market and network formation, and technology strategy.

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Amir Goldberg Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior, Stanford Graduate School of Business; Assistant Professor (by courtesy) of Sociology, School of Humanities and Sciences Speaker
Marc Ventresca University Lecturer in Strategic Management, Said Business School, University of Oxford; PhD, Sociology, Stanford University Commentator
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Disrupting the Security Landscape

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About the Topic: The cyber security landscape has seen dramatic changes in recent years with the advent and evolution of new, growing, and ever-present adversaries. As targeted attacks and advanced adversaries continue to evolve and become increasingly sophisticated, it becomes difficult to keep pace and stay protected. Existing security technologies are incapable of identifying determined adversaries and protecting your intellectual property. Enterprises must combat these threats with targeted attack detection, prevention, and monitoring. By leveraging big data technologies and security intelligence, companies can proactively respond to advanced threats while also gaining the ability to hunt, query, and gain insight into all activity across the enterprise.

About the Speaker: Serial entrepreneur George Kurtz co-founded CrowdStrike, a cutting-edge, big data, security technology company focused on helping enterprises and governments protect their most sensitive intellectual property and national security information. Kurtz is an internationally recognized security expert, author, entrepreneur, and speaker. He has more than 20 years of experience in the security space, including extensive experience driving revenue growth and scaling small and large organizations. His entrepreneurial background and ability to commercialize nascent technologies has enabled him to drive innovation throughout his career by identifying market trends and correlating them with customer feedback, resulting in rapid growth for the businesses he has run.

His prior roles at McAfee, a $3-billion security company, include Worldwide Chief Technology O­cer and GM, as well as SVP of Enterprise. Prior to joining McAfee, Kurtz started Foundstone in October 1999 as the founder and CEO responsible for recruiting the other six founding team members. Foundstone, a world wide security products and services company, had one of the leading incident response practices in the industry, and was acquired by McAFee in October of 2004. He also authored the best-selling security book of all time, Hacking Exposed: Network Security Secrets & Solutions.

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George Kurtz President/CEO & Co-Founder, CrowdStrike Speaker
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