Seminar: Tanika Chakraborty (IIM–Calcutta)

Dr. Tanika Chakraborty is a Professor of Economics at the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, specializing in Development Economics. Before joining IIM Calcutta, she worked at IIT Kanpur and DIW Berlin, after completing her PhD at Washington University in St. Louis. She is affiliated to IZA Bonn, CESifo Munich, and the Global Labor Organization.

Dr. Chakraborty’s research primarily focuses on informing policies that address human capital inequality, with other research interests in health economics and gender. Her work has been featured in the Journal of Development Economics, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Demography, and the Journal of Comparative Economics, among others. In addition to publishing in academic journals, she writes for print media and policy platforms such as VoxDev, Project Syndicate, and Ideas for India to reach out to a wider policy audience. She has also partnered extensively with various government bodies in India and served as an expert on the Minimum Wage committee of the Government of India.

During her Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence (Research and Teaching) Fellowship at City College, City University of New York (2025-2026), Dr. Chakraborty is expanding on her ongoing research, exploring effective ways of reducing inequalities in health, a key component of human capital. She is examining the widespread shift in healthcare delivery models, from direct public provision to public-private partnerships. She will engage with students to develop a course on health policy that combines perspectives from the US and India. The goal is to contribute to the global dialogue on rising healthcare costs and growing health inequalities.

Presenting -- 

Title: "The Roads to Hospital and Health Insurance Utilization"

Abstract: Adoption and utilization of social health insurance programs remain low in India despite high out-of-pocket health costs. While these programs subsidize private tertiary healthcare, a fundamental challenge is that majority of the households reside in rural regions, and private hospitals are mostly located in urban regions. In this paper, we examine the role of complementarity between public goods in explaining the utilization of public goods. We study whether rural road connectivity can mitigate the barriers to accessing healthcare services and improve utilization of subsidized health insurance programs. Using habitation level road construction data under the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana (PMGSY) program, a population-threshold based road allocation rule, and administrative insurance claim records from Arogyasri, we find that access to a new road increases the likelihood of making an insurance claim by 7 percentage points, from a baseline mean of 18%. At the intensive margin, our results suggest that a village registers an additional claim per year when connected by a new road, a significant increase considering a baseline mean of roughly one claim per village per year. These findings are supported by our Instrumental Variable estimates, using the discontinuity created by the habitation-level population-thresholds as an instrument. However, the complementarity-benefits accrue disproportionately to the socially-privileged groups. We explore mechanisms that could explain these heterogeneities.

Location: Hunter East 530 (in the library)