Links: Obama on Global Health, Kindergarten, and the Indian Marriage Market

1. Karen Grepin provides a nice discussion on Obama's comprehensive strategy on global health. While you are there, check out her interesting piece on advocacy and neglect in the global health arena.

2. In an interesting new paper, Elizabeth Cascio finds that the introduction of kindergarten programs in the 1960s and 70s led to reduced drop out and institutionalization rates among whites but not blacks. The differential effect, she posits, might have something to do with crowding out federally funded programs helping the poorest black five year olds. I'm not so convinced about this as the mechanism, and I think there is a study waiting to happen that looks at health effects, as well.

3. A fun new paper by Abhijit Banerjee and co-authors looks at the Indian marriage market. From the abstract:

This paper studies the role played by caste, education and other social and economic attributes in arranged marriages among middle-class Indians. We use a unique data set on individuals who placed matrimonial advertisements in a major newspaper, the responses they received, how they ranked them, and the eventual matches. We estimate the preferences for caste, education, beauty, and other attributes. We then compute a set of stable matches, which we compare to the actual matches that we observe in the data. We find the stable matches to be quite similar to the actual matches, suggesting a relatively frictionless marriage market. One of our key empirical findings is that there is a very strong preference for within-caste marriage. However, because both sides of the market share this preference and because the groups are fairly homogeneous in terms of the distribution of other attributes, in equilibrium, the cost of wanting to marry within-caste is low. This allows caste to remain a persistent feature of the Indian marriage market.