After my two months and a half journey to India for my summer internship, thanks to the support of Women and Public Policy Program, I am back in Cambridge for my second year of graduate school.

Three words that one can hear in India very often are: “It’s not possible”. In  Mumbai airport I asked for [...]

My friends from childhood, and even my brother, would say that I’m “stingy“. However, an Indian girl from Delhi I met some weeks ago, told me that I have “splurging tendencies”. It is, indeed, very confusing. What’s happening?

I realized I’m suffering from Money Illusion, which is when decisions are influenced by nominal amounts of money. [...]

Economic theory suggests than in perfect competition, firms are “price-takers”, which means that they cannot – at least in the long run – set prices, but they rely on the prices set at the market (according to supply and demand of each good). So given the prices, the firms decide on the quantity they should [...]

In Economics, the term “Free Rider” refers to a situation when an individual “consumes more than their fair share of a public resource” (from Wikipedia).

I’ve found repeated evidence of Free Riding in Thanjavur:

These pictures are taken by me in the back seat of two different auto rickshaw that took me to the office [...]

These are the main headlines in Thanjavur’s newspapers today – it says: “KING OF POP, MICHAEL JACKSON, PASSED AWAY”

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Already in India for more than two weeks I began to see some similarities with Venezuela of the 1980’s. The similarities are in terms of the labor market. I don’t know if I’m going crazy, or I’m home sick, but I will share those with you.

These are some of the kinds of Jobs that I’ve [...]

Economic theory suggests that in equilibrium, the price of a good is given by the intersection of the demand and supply curves. This means that the market chooses a quantity to be produced and a price for that good such that the consumers and producers’ surplus is zero. You may be thinking: “WHAT is this [...]

In the past two days I’ve been traveling around Chennai and some villages nearby, as part of a field trip organized by the Center for Micro Finance. Here are some pictures of the places I’ve visited so far:

A Street in Chennai

Poster in the Training Center of a Micro Finance Institution

Coconut Seller

Creativity

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This was the question I asked to two girls today in the field trips I made near Chennai to poor villages. The first one is the granddaughter of the owner of a bycile repair shop that was created with a microcredit loan. The cute girl told me that she wants to become a Doctor. Her [...]

The answer is Chennai.

I arrived yesterday morning, and since then, I have been eating lentils for breakfast, lunch and dinner. I have nothing against lentils, and they are good for lunch and dinner… but for breakfast I’m still getting used to it.

I went out yesterday to tour around the city with some friends that I [...]