Das, Jishnu

Person:
Das, Jishnu

Development Research Group

Fields of Specialization

Health economics, Education, Gender, Health, Microeconomics, Cultural economics, India, Pakistan, Kenya, Zambia, Macroeconomic and Structural Policies

ORCID

0000-0002-5909-3585

External Links

Google

Departments

Development Research Group

Last updated: January 24, 2025

Biography

Jishnu Das is a Lead Economist in the Development Research Group (Human Development Team) at the World Bank and a Visiting Fellow at the Center for Policy Research, New Delhi. Jishnu’s work focuses on the delivery of basic services, particularly health and education. He has worked on the quality of health care, mental health, information in health and education markets, child learning and test-scores and the determinants of trust. His work has been published in leading economics, health and education journals and widely covered in the media and policy forums. In 2011 he was part of the core team on the World Development Report on Gender and Development. He received the George Bereday Award from the Comparative and International Education Society and the Stockholm Challenge Award for the best ICT project in the public administration category in 2006, and the Research Academy award from the World Bank in 2013. He is currently working on long-term projects on health and education markets in India and Pakistan.

Full item page

Publication Search Results

Now showing 1 - 10 of 50

Caseloads and Competence in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Fundamental Reassessment of the Human Resources Crisis in Primary Health Care
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-01-24) Daniels, Benjamin; Das, Jishnu; Gatti, Roberta; Yi Chang, Andres
This paper presents a fundamental reassessment of the global human resources crisis in primary health care, using nationally representative survey data from 7,915 health facilities across 10 Sub-Saharan African countries. The reassessment consists of three main parts. First, in contrast to a literature that posits pervasive health workforce shortages, the paper estimates that the median primary health care provider sees 10.9 patients each day and spends under two hours doing so. However, variation in patient loads across facilities implies that most patients visit busier facilities, and therefore the median patient experiences long wait times. Second, by combining caseload data with measures of medical competence for 14,367 individual providers, the paper demonstrates that provider caseload is very weakly correlated with medical competence. As a result, the most competent doctors in each system are nearly as likely to be underutilized as the least competent. Third, the paper assesses how much productivity is lost due to the low observed correlation between caseload and competence, by calculating potential quality improvements from matching the most competent providers to the busiest postings. Such transfers could increase the likelihood that a patient sees a provider who can correctly manage simple cases by 4.5 percentage points, or 12 percent, but with substantial variation across countries. The paper concludes that in half of the countries in the sample, there are substantial numbers of competent but underutilized providers; but in the other half, quality improvements will require a full overhaul of the training infrastructure and spatial distribution of facilities.
New Evidence on Learning Trajectories in a Low-Income Setting
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-03) Bau, Natalie; Das, Jishnu; Chang, Andres Yi
Using a unique longitudinal data set collected from primary school students in Pakistan, this paper documents four new facts about learning in low-income countries. First, children’s test scores increase by 1.19 standard deviation between Grades 3 and 6. Second, going to school is associated with greater learning. Children who drop out have the same test score gains prior to dropping out as those who do not but experience no improvements after dropping out. Third, there is significant variation in test score gains across students, but test scores converge over the primary schooling years. Students with initially low test scores gain more than those with initially high scores, even after accounting for mean reversion. Fourth, conditional on past test scores, household characteristics explain little of the variation in learning. To reconcile the findings with the literature, the paper introduces the concept of “fragile learning,” where progression may be followed by stagnation or reversals. The implications of these results are discussed in the context of several ongoing debates in the literature on education in low- and middle-income countries.
Women in the Pipeline: A Dynamic Decomposition of Firm Pay Gaps
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-06) Joubert, Clement; Das, Jishnu
This paper proposes a new decomposition method to understand how gender pay gaps arise within firms. The method accounts for pipeline effects, nonstationary environments, and dynamic interactions between pay gap components. This paper assembles a new data set covering all employees at the World Bank Group between 1987 and 2015 and shows that historical differences in the positions for which men and women were hired account for 77 percent of today's average salary difference, dwarfing the roles of entry salaries, salary growth, or retention. Forward simulations show that 20 percent of the total gap can be assigned to pipeline effects that would resolve mechanically with time.
Upping the Ante: The Equilibrium Effects of Unconditional Grants to Private Schools
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-08) Andrabi, Tahir; Das, Jishnu; Khwaja, Asim I.; Ozyurt, Selcuk; Singh, Niharika
This paper tests for financial constraints as a market failure in education in a low-income country. In an experimental setup, unconditional cash grants are allocated to one private school or all private schools in a village. Enrollment increases in both treatments, accompanied by infrastructure investments. However, test scores and fees only increase in the setting of all private schools along with higher teacher wages. This differential impact follows from a canonical oligopoly model with capacity constraints and endogenous quality: greater financial saturation crowds-in quality investments. The findings of higher social surplus in the setting of all private schools, but greater private returns in the setting of one private school underscore the importance of leveraging market structure in designing educational subsidies.
Variations in the Quality of Tuberculosis Care in Urban India: A Cross-Sectional, Standardized Patient Study in Two Cities
(PLoS, 2018-09-25) Kwan, Ada; Daniels, Benjamin; Saria, Vaibhav; Satyanarayana, Srinath; Subbaraman, Ramnath; McDowell, Andrew; Bergkvist, Sofi; Das, Ranendra K.; Das, Veena; Das, Jishnu; Pai, Madhukar
India has the highest burden of tuberculosis (TB). Although most patients with TB in India seek care from the private sector, there is limited evidence on quality of TB care or its correlates. Following our validation study on the standardized patient (SP) method for TB, we utilized SPs to examine quality of adult TB care among health providers with different qualifications in 2 Indian cities.
In Aid We Trust: Hearts and Minds and the Pakistan Earthquake of 2005
(The MIT Press, 2017-07) Andrabi, Tahir; Das, Jishnu
In 2005 an earthquake in northern Pakistan led to a significant inflow of international relief groups. Four years later, trust in Europeans and Americans was markedly higher among those exposed to the earthquake and the relief that followed. These differences reflect the greater provision of foreign aid and foreigner presence in affected villages rather than preexisting population differences or a general impact of disasters on trust. We thus demonstrate large-scale, durable attitudinal change in a representative Muslim population. Trust in Westerners among Muslims is malleable and not a deeply rooted function of preferences or global (as opposed to local) policy and actions.
The Misallocation of Pay and Productivity in the Public Sector: Evidence from the Labor Market for Teachers
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2017-05) Bau, Natalie; Das, Jishnu
This paper uses a unique dataset of both public and private sector primary school teachers and their students to present among the first estimates in a low-income country of (a) teacher effectiveness; (b) teacher value added (TVA) and its correlates; and (c) the link between TVA and teacher wages. Teachers are highly effective in our setting: Moving a student from the 5th to the 95th percentile in the public school TVA distribution would increase mean student test scores by 0.54 standard deviations. Although the first two years of experience, as well as content knowledge, are associated with TVA, all observed teacher characteristics explain no more than 5 percent of the variation in TVA. Finally, there is no correlation between TVA and wages in the public sector (although there is in the private sector), and a policy change that shifted public hiring from permanent to temporary contracts, reducing wages by 35 percent, had no adverse impact on TVA, either immediately or after 4 years. The study confirms the importance of teachers in low income countries, extends previous experimental results on teacher contracts to a large-scale policy change, and provides striking evidence of significant misallocation between pay and productivity in the public sector.
Quality of Tuberculosis Care by Indian Pharmacies: Mystery Clients Offer New Insights
(Elsevier, 2018-01) Miller, Rosalind; Das, Jishnu; Pai, Madhukar
For many patients in India, pharmacies are their first point of contact, where most drugs, including antibiotics, can be purchased over-the-counter (OTC). Recent standardized (simulated) patient studies, covering four Indian cities, provide new insights on how Indian pharmacies manage patients with suspected or known tuberculosis. Correct management of the simulated patients ranged from 13% to 62%, increasing with the certainty of the TB diagnosis. Antibiotics were frequently dispensed OTC to patients, with 16% to 37% receiving such drugs across the cases. On a positive note, these studies showed that no pharmacy dispensed first-line anti-TB drugs. Engagement of pharmacies is important to not only improve TB detection and care, but also limit the abuse of antibiotics.
Tuberculosis Detection and the Challenges of Integrated Care in Rural China: A Cross-Sectional Standardized Patient Study
(PLoS, 2017-10-17) Sylvia, Sean; Xue, Hao; Zhou, Chengchao; Shi, Yaojiang; Yi, Hongmei; Zhou, Huan; Rozelle, Scott; Pai, Madhukar; Das, Jishnu
Despite recent reductions in prevalence, China still faces a substantial tuberculosis (TB) burden, with future progress dependent on the ability of rural providers to appropriately detect and refer TB patients for further care. This study (a) provides a baseline assessment of the ability of rural providers to correctly manage presumptive TB cases; (b) measures the gap between provider knowledge and practice and; (c) evaluates how ongoing reforms of China’s health system—characterized by a movement toward “integrated care” and promotion of initial contact with grassroots providers—will affect the care of TB patients.
Compensation, Diversity and Inclusion at the World Bank Group
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2017-05) Joubert, Clement; Das, Jishnu; Tordoir, Sander Florian
This paper examines salary gaps by gender and nationality at the World Bank Group between 1987 and 2015 using a unique panel of all employees over this period. The paper develops and implements a dynamic simulation approach that models existing gaps as arising from differences in job composition at entry, entry salaries, salary growth and attrition. There are three main findings. First, 76 percent of the $27,400 salary gap across the average male and female staff at the World Bank Group can be attributed to composition effects, whereby men entered the World Bank Group at higher paid positions, particularly in the earlier half of the sample. Second, salary gaps 15 years after joining the World Bank Group can favor either men or women depending on their entry position. Third, for the most common entry-level professional position (known as Grade GF at the World Bank Group) there is a gender gap of 3.5 percent in favor of males 15 years after entry. The majority of this gap (84 percent) is due to differences in salary growth rather than differences in entry salaries or attrition. The pattern of these gaps is similar for staff from different nationalities. The dynamic decomposition method developed here thus identifies specific areas of concern and can be widely applied to the analysis of salary gaps within firms.