Andrew foster Phone: (401) 863-2537
Office: Cabinet 203
email: Andrew_Foster@brown.eduTitle: Professor and Chair Department of Economics
Professor of Community HealthDepartmental affiliation(s): Economics, Community Health, PSTC, S-4
Background info:
Andrew Foster began is connection with the field of population as an undergraduate at Princeton University where he worked as a Research Assistant in the Office of Population Research and wrote a thesis on Adolescent Subfecundity in Bangladesh. He received his PhD in Economics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1988, where he was an affiliate at the Graduate Group in Demography. He then was an Assistant Professor of Economics at University of Pennsylvania where he wan an active member of the Population Studies Center. He subsequently moved to Brown University in 1998. He currently serves as a permanent member of the NICHD SSPS Study Section and on the NAS panel on Human Dimensions of Global Change.
Research interests:
Foster is an empirical microeconomist who has worked on a variety of topics including returns to schooling, labor market failures, household division, marriage markets, environmental management, fertility change, and informal insurance mechanisms. His work is characterized by its focus on developing and testing formally specified models of household behavior and how these behaviors interact through institutions and the environment.
Current research:
Foster currently is involved in three major projects. First, in collaboration with his long-time coauthor Mark Rosenzweig at Harvard he he continues to devote considerable effort to a series of projects on economic change in rural India. These projects make use of a thirty-year representative panel from rural India. His most recent project using these data examines the role of growth in the non-farm sector in reducing poverty in rural India. In particular, he finds that non-farm growth in India has played an important role in both decreasing inter-regional inequality arising from differences in agricultural productivity growth and in decreasing levels of inequality within villages. The second project considers the effects of two recent air quality interventions in Delhi and is joint with Naresh Kumar. This paper integrates household survey data, satellite imagery and ground monitoring of air quality to determine the level and distributional consequences of attempts to relocate polluting industries and of converting vehicles to compressed natural gas. A third project examines demographic and economic change in rural Bangladesh. In collaborative work with Jane Menken, Randall Kuhn and Omar Rahman he is taking advantage of a unique 30-year vital registration system to examine the processes of household formation and division and the implications of these processes for human well-being. Finally, he has ongoing work with Vince Mor and others at the department of Community Health at Brown looking at the market for nursing home care. In a recent proposal he helped to develop a search-theoretic model of turnover in the labor market for nursing home staff that will be used to examine the costs of and potential for policy reforms addressing labor turnover.
Selected publications:
A.D. Foster and M.R. Rosenzweig, “Agricultural Productivity Growth, Rural Economic Diversity, and Economic Reforms: India, 1970-2000” Economic Development and Cultural Change, 52(3), 2004.
A.D. Foster and M.R. Rosenzweig, AEconomic Growth and the Rise of Forests. @Quarterly Journal of Economics, 118(2): 601-637, 2003.
Foster, Andrew D. “A Review of 10 Years of work on Economic Growth and Population Change in Rural India”, in Population, Land Use, and Environment, Washington, NAS press, forthcoming.
Foster, Andrew D. “Altruism, Household Co-residence and Women’s Health Investment in Rural Bangladesh”, The Social Economics of Poverty: Identities, Groups, Communities and Networks, London: Routledge, forthcoming.
A.D. Foster and M.R. Rosenzweig, AHousehold Division, Inequality and Rural Economic Growth @, Review of Economic Studies, 2002, vol. 69(4): 839-69.