Bryce Millett Steinberg

Bryce Millett Steinberg received her Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University in 2015, and a bachelor's degree from Brown University in 2009. Her work focuses on health and education in the developing world, particularly the effect of market forces and government programs on families’ decisions to invest in human capital.

Steinberg's research focuses on households' decisions to invest in education in the developing world and how market forces and government programs can affect these decisions.  Her dissertation work shows that while increased wages can be good for investment in very young children in rural India, for older children, higher wages can lead families to substitute out of human capital investment and into productive work. Positive rainfall shocks were associated with lower test scores and enrollment rates for these children, even though family incomes increased. In addition, she shows that government workfare programs that increase labor demand can have a similar effect: in rural India, a large workfare program increases dropout rates for adolescents.  These results suggest that opportunity cost of schooling matters greatly for households' decisions to invest in human capital.