• Awards
• Graduate Students

July 5, 2018

ARE Ph.D. students (top row from left) Samuel Bird, Tomoe Bourdier, Maxime Depalle, (bottom row from left) Danae Horn, Natalie Popovich, and Xiurou Wu

Every year, the UC Davis Institute for Social Science in partnership with the Center for Regional Change awards several research and travel grants to social science graduate students in the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences. Six ARE Ph.D. students are among the 2018-19 recipients. Following are their projects descriptions:

Samuel Bird

My job market paper studies how development programs target households when promoting adoption of new agricultural technologies. My research award will support me to participate in the 2018 AAEA Annual Meeting, where I will discuss my research with fellow researchers and prospective employers.

Tomoe Bourdier

I investigate the effect of polygyny on children’s nutrition outcomes, and how it may be mediated through women’s bargaining power. Polygyny (i.e. the marriage of a man to several women) is practiced in many countries of Africa south of the Sahara, and yet the factors that may aggravate or mitigate the impacts of economic shocks on the members of polygynous households are still poorly understood. Studying intra-household decision-making dynamics in non-nuclear households, and the role of women’s empowerment in particular, may help develop more adequate targeting strategies to maximize the impact of resilience-building and empowerment programs, and constitutes an important step in improving both outcomes for children and women in areas where polygyny is common.

Maxime Depalle

This project examines the complex relationship between the spatial and temporal inconsistency of data availability and the impact of the choice of the spatial scale used in a discrete choice model (DCM) of fishing locations. It takes an original empirical approach relying both on simulated and real data, and consisting of estimating the same DCM at varying spatial resolutions.

Danae Horn

My project is an assessment of how patients value quality and technology when choosing a hospital. I will additionally be looking at changes in hospital quality when new technologies are adopted. I am working with Amitabh Chandra (Harvard) and Adam Sacarny (Colombia) and will be traveling back East to move the project forward.

Natalie Popovich

The paper I will be presenting: Using a case study of residential water use, I propose a framework to estimate the quality of information embedded in a specific policy instrument as a function of its duration in the system, as measured by the observable impact on resource use over time. I estimate the quality of information as a function of how long the household’s knowledge stock takes to deplete once the information flow (policy) is turned off.

Xiurou Wu

I will participate in the Tibetan Plateau Socioeconomic Survey of Pastoral Households (TP-SESPH) from late June and early July. This survey collected data on Tibetan pastoral households’ production, income (highly dependent on caterpillar fungus industry), consumption, demography, and grassland use. The survey starts in 2016 and this year is the third round.

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