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Contributor : Profile

Name Surname

Diane Coffey

University of Texas at Austin
coffey@utexas.edu

Diane is a demographer who studies health, nutrition, sanitation, and social inequality in India. She is an assistant professor of Sociology & Population Research at the University of Texas at Austin, a visiting researcher at the Indian Statistical Institute, Delhi, and she co-directs a research non-profit called r.i.c.e., a research institute for compassionate economics, which aims to inform policies relating to child health in India.

Posts by Diane Coffey

What the Swachh Bharat Mission did not change

On the 150th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi and 5th anniversary of the Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM), Coffey and Spears discuss findings from a field survey about changes in open defecation in rura...

  • Perspectives

भारत में बच्चों की लंबाई: नए आंकड़े, परिचित चुनौतियां

भारत के बच्चे दुनिया के सबसे नाटे बच्चों में आते हैं। देश में बच्चों की लंबाई संबंधी जटिलता और विविधता की जांच के लिए इस आलेख में राष्ट्रीय पारिवारिक स्वास्थ्य सर्वेक्षण-4 (एनएफएचएस-4) के आंकड़ों का उ...

  • लेख

Child height in India: New data, familiar challenges

Children in India are among the shortest in the world. This article uses the National Family Health Survey (NFHS-4) data to examine the complexity and diversity of child height in the country. It find...

  • Articles

Using mobile phones to measure discrimination

One aspect of human well-being that has often been overlooked in survey research on low- and middle-income countries is the extent to which prejudice and discrimination diminish social welfare. This a...

  • Articles

Despite improvements in child health, why do so many newborns still die?

The ‘Million Death Study’ shows that the death rate of under-five children in India dropped from about 90 per 1,000 to about 47 during 2000-2015. However, improvements in death rates in the first ...

  • Perspectives

Why doesn’t anybody know if Swachh Bharat Mission is succeeding?

In 2014, the Prime Minister announced a goal of eliminating open defecation by 2019. In this article, Coffey and Spears, contend that now almost two-thirds of the way through the Swachh Bharat Mission...

  • Perspectives

Maternity entitlements for healthier babies

The National Food Security Act, 2013 provides for a maternity benefit of not less than Rs. 6,000 for every pregnant and lactating mother in India. In this article, Coffey and Hathi explain why materni...

  • Perspectives

Angus Deaton's ideas for India

In a tribute to Angus Deaton, the 2015 Nobel laureate in Economics, Diane Coffey and Dean Spears – former graduate students of Prof. Deaton at Princeton University – review some of his work on th...

  • Perspectives

Is maternal health in India worse than we thought?

Since India does not have a national system to monitor health during pregnancy, the fraction of women of child-bearing age who are underweight - 35.5% - is used as a proxy for the fraction of pre-pre...

  • Articles

Switching to sanitation in South Asia: A study of health technology adoption (a seed study)

Open defecation in rural India presents a puzzle: India has far higher open defecation rates than other developing regions where people are poorer, literacy rates are lower, and water is more scarce.

  • IGC Research on India

Culture, religion and open defecation in rural north India

Open defecation in rural India is a human development emergency that is causing infant deaths, child stunting, and widespread infectious diseases. This column presents surprising qualitative and quan...

  • Articles

Short-term migration and child welfare

While much has been said about the poor working and living conditions of short-term migrants, relatively little is known of the impact of short-term migration on child welfare. This column finds that ...

  • Articles