Education
Ph.D., University of California Berkeley, 2007 (agricultural & resource economics)
M.S., University of California Berkeley, 2002 (agricultural & resource economics)
B.A. Claremont McKenna College, 2001 (economics, environmental science, & politics)
Biography
CV
Sarah Baird is a development economist whose work focuses on issues of health and risk, as well as on program evaluation. She finished her Ph.D. in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at UC Berkeley in 2007 and has spent time in the Development Research Group of the World Bank and at the Asian Development Bank.
She has worked on issues ranging from consumption risk in Vietnam to technology adoption in India to deworming in Kenya to infant mortality globally. She has conducted field work in Vietnam and Kenya and is currently working on designing a cash transfer experiment in Malawi with Craig McIntosh and Berk Özler. She plans to continue working on issues of health and risk as well as expanding to new topics particularly in the area of natural resource economics.
Current Projects
Baird is currently working on a number of projects. One paper looks at the ability of households in Vietnam to cope with an uncertain income flow. Given that households in developing countries live in high risk environments, it is important to understand to what extent households can maintain at least a subsistence level of food consumption (measured in quantities) in such a setting. Baird draws on the full-insurance literature to develop a theoretical model that is then tested using panel data from Vietnam. The findings show that although there is not perfect smoothing, households are able to smooth consumption of goods essential to their survival.
A second paper uses data from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) for 59 countries to analyze the relationship between annual changes in per capita GDP and infant mortality. Thus far the research shows that there is a strong, negative association between changes in per capita GDP and changes in infant mortality across all countries. The estimated elasticity suggests that there may have been as many as 820,000 “excess” deaths in the developing world since 1980 as a result of large, negative contractions in per capita GDP. The data used in this paper will also be used for numerous additional projects in the upcoming years.
A third project involves evaluating a randomized deworming intervention in Kenya. Baird is collecting a panel dataset of Kenyan youth from 1998 to 2008 in order to estimate the medium to long-run impacts of child health. These youths make up a subset of those included in the Kenya Primary School Deworming Project where treatment for intestinal worm infections was randomly phased in to 75 sample schools between 1998 and 2001. The current research examines the longterm impacts of the program on health and education outcomes.
In addition to these projects, Baird is also currently conducting research on technology adoption, panel survey methods, and the impact of income and schooling on the risk of HIV infection for young women. Future research will continue to focus in these areas, as well as expand to new topics, particularly in the areas of health and the environment.
Research Interests
Baird's primary research interests lie at the intersection of microeconomics, health policy, program evaluation, and economic development.
