24 August 2026 14:58

Pallavi Prabhakar to defend her PhD

On Friday, 28 August, Pallavi Prabhakar will hold a trial lecture on a prescribed topic and defend her thesis for the PhD degree at NHH.

Title of thesis

“Essays on Development Economics and Public Service Delivery”

Public programmes often face challenges in translating public resources into their intended welfare gains. In her thesis, Pallavi Prabhakar studies how informational, resource, and institutional constraints shape welfare outcomes.

The first essay examines whether informational constraints limit the effectiveness of digital transparency programmes in India. India’s largest transparency programme publicly ranks districts on development indicators, yet few citizens were aware of it, and 75 per cent overestimated their district’s relative performance. In a randomised experiment, Prabhakar provides information about districts’ declining rankings and available grievance channels. Those who initially overestimated performance update their beliefs and attend grievance workshops, while beliefs about their perceived influence over government remain unchanged. The findings highlight the importance of understanding how different dimensions of beliefs shape responses to transparency programmes.

The second essay examines how financial and non-financial constraints affect investments in early childhood. A randomised trial in Tanzania compares cash transfers, parenting support, and a cost-equivalent combination of the two. Cash transfers improve children’s nutrition and physical growth, while parenting support improves parental caregiving practices and socio-emotional development. Combining the two generates larger gains in socio-emotional development. The findings show that financial and non-financial constraints operate through distinct but complementary pathways for child development.

The third essay builds on the cash transfer intervention to examine how digital empowerment affects whether mothers nominate someone else to receive the transfer. Digitally empowered women are less likely to nominate their spouse. The findings show that digitising social protection does not necessarily ensure that targeted women receive or control transfers.

The fourth essay synthesises evidence from 39 randomised trials across 22 low- and middle-income countries. It finds that cash and nutrition interventions produce larger and more consistent improvements in children’s physical health than information-based interventions.

Taken together, the essays show that the returns to public spending depend on whether policies address the constraints that matter for the outcome in question. Effective policy therefore requires not only choosing the right intervention, but also designing it around the constraints that shape how resources translate into outcomes.