Linking from the IDinsight blog.
By Siobhan McDonough, Karan Nagpal, and Andrés L. Parrado
In December 2019, IDinsight Financial Inclusion team members attended the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) conference on Economic Growth and Development. Manager Andrés Parrado presented a paper on the results of sending SMS reminders to banking agents in rural India. A future blog post will discuss these findings in detail. In this post, IDinsight attendees share takeaways from the conference including findings on health, education, history and other economics topics.
To those not familiar with India’s academic landscape, the ISI conference is the economics conference to attend. In 2019, for example, about 174 papers were presented in 64 parallel sessions and three plenary lectures, covering both empirical and theoretical work across every field of economics. This post showcases the diversity of topics, highlighting public employment programs, girls’ education, history of urbanization, and more. It’s the Indian equivalent of the American Economic Association’s annual meetings, but without the stresses of job recruiting. Instead, you find Indian and international economists having long conversations over lunch in the winter-sunlit gardens of the Indian Statistical Institute.