About Me
I am Pallavi Prabhakar, a 3rd year PhD student at the Department of Economics, Norwegian School of Economics. Affiliated with FAIR-Centre for Experimental Research on Fairness, Inequality, and Rationality, Norway, and BRAC Institute of Governance and Development (BIGD), Dhaka, my research interests span across several key areas of economics. My work is particularly focused on employing experimental methods to address development challenges in Uganda, India, and Tanzania. In India, my RCT examines the shift in voters' beliefs and political engagement when informed about their district's health, education, and infrastructure performance. In Tanzania, I am part of a team conducting a clustered multi-arm RCT with pregnant mothers, testing the impact of digital early childhood development interventions and unconditional cash transfers. Additionally, my Ugandan study investigates how privacy of information can be a mechanism for women's economic empowerment in cash transfer programs. With a background as a Visiting Fellow at CEGA, Berkeley, and the Indian Statistical Institute, along with substantial field research experience in Uganda and a developmental analyst role at Oxford Policy Management, I bring a wealth of experience to my research. Currently, I am on a research visit at CSAE, University of Oxford, under the supervision of Professor Abigail Adams Pratt.
Projects
with Ingvild Almas, Orazio Attanasio, Bet Caeyers, Pamela Jervis, Costas Meghir, Charlotte Ringdal
The success of parenting interventions in Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs) often hinges on intensive training, mentoring, and supervision of Community Health Workers (CHWs), challenging to sustain at scale. It's unclear how to cost-effectively combine cash transfers with parenting programs to enhance child development holistically. We present the study design and baseline findings of the Kizazi Kijacho Randomized Controlled Trial in Dodoma, Tanzania, addressing these gaps by testing the cost-effectiveness of (i) a parenting program by CHWs with a digital app, (ii) an Unconditional Cash Transfer (UCT) program, and (iii) a combination of both during pregnancy to age 2 – the 1st 1000 days. This research can enhance Early Childhood Development policy and programming in Tanzania and LMICs.
Successful inclusive growth policies in low and middle-income countries require effective performance by local governments. Arguably, an important reason for poor state performance is that citizens have limited information about state performance and are therefore unable to hold local governments to account. Correspondingly, we can expect that citizens with greater information about state performance are more likely to demand accountability from the state. Using a Randomised Controlled Trial (RCT) that creates exogenous variation in incentivized beliefs about the performance of the state for 2100 respondents in Jharkhand, India, this study tests whether providing information to citizens about the service performance of their district leads to them changing their beliefs about state performance, participation with the government and satisfaction with public service delivery. This study will contribute new findings to research about on political accountability, the drivers of economic development, inequality, and governance.
with Giulia Greco, Selim Guelsci, Munshi Sulaiman
This study represents one of the pioneering Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) examining the effects of cash and mobile money delivery mechanisms, along with privacy of information, on women's economic empowerment and intimate partner violence (IPV) reduction. The study targeted 2000 refugee and host women residing in mobile phone-owning households in Uganda, employing randomization to allocate participants into four treatment groups and a control group. Two treatment groups received cash transfers, while the remaining two received mobile money transfers. In one cash transfer group and one mobile money group, the transfer information was privately provided to the target woman, while in the other two groups, the information was shared with both the target woman and her spouse, following the current practice of many cash transfer programs.