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Publications (91)
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We examine how village-level social group dominance affects the educational and occupational mobility of minority and other social groups in rural India across multiple generations. We distinguish between upper caste and own-group dominance and examine the mechanisms underpinning inequality in...
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There is a dearth of evidence on the evolution of occupational health in the developing world and on the extent to which it has been influenced by (1) the pattern of structural transformation in these economies and (2) integration with global markets.In this study, I compile a rich database on...
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– Evidence from India
This paper analyses the role of tertiary education on rural development. Using census data on villages in India for 2011, we find that skilled workers have had an important impact on rural prosperity. A 1 percentage point rise in the share of the village population with tertiary education raises per...
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The study aims at bridging gaps in both theoretical and empirical literature pertaining to multigenerational persistence. From a theoretical standpoint, it argues that parental altruism is influenced by social heterogeneity rather than income-based heterogeneity. One’s position in the social...
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The extant literature on status-signalling primarily adopts Veblen’s theory of class to caste and racial identities. This study aims to adopt a more suitable theoretical lens that is more relevant not only for class identities, but also for other identities such as caste and race. By viewing...
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– The case of ‘Solar Mamas’ who bring light
This paper examines multiple facets of New Delhi’s development cooperation with countries in Africa and argues that grassroots organizations in India that find innovative, low-cost technological solutions to developmental challenges can help governments and multilateral agencies craft inclusive...
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This paper studies the education gradient associated with health reporting errors for two highly prevalent non-communicable diseases among older adults in India. We leverage a novel data set—the Longitudinal Aging Study in India (2017–18) panel survey—to unpack the sources of health reporting error...
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– A systematic literature review
This paper provides a systematic review of quantitative literature investigating the success of affirmative action policies in addressing socio-economic inequalities between ethnic groups in education and employment. We focus on two of the most influential national experiences: caste-based...
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– Evidence from India
I study the impact of school consolidation on enrolment and achievement, using its staggered roll-out in the Indian state of Rajasthan. Across the years 2014, 2016, and 2017, Rajasthan merged many of its grade 1–5 schools with grade 6–10 schools to create grade 1–10 ‘model’ schools. Twenty-three per...
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– Past and present
The paper examines the existing state of reservations, more specifically, reservation policies and reservations for government jobs for the Other Backward Classes (OBCs) in India. It discusses the progression and ramifications of these policies and how they have affected the democratization of...
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– A case of domestic workers in Delhi
Studies on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic have demonstrated that poor women have been the worst sufferers in terms of pay cuts and job losses. Women are the hardest hit also at the household level. They have to bear the brunt of constrained household budgets and have also encountered increasing...
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We investigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on income levels, poverty, and inequality in both the immediate aftermath and during the uneven recovery until December 2021 using high-frequency household survey data from India. We find that the average household incomes dropped sharply during the...
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– Evidence from India
I evaluate the impact of the right to education from the passing of the Right to Education Act in India in 2009. This Act guaranteed free education to children aged 6–14 years, including children with disabilities. Given that the school participation deficit associated with disability is large, I...
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– Interrogating capacity and response to COVID-19 in West Bengal
COVID-19 has brought to the fore the issue of state preparedness in mitigating health emergencies. This paper problematizes the received wisdom of greater state capacity in mitigating the severity of the pandemic. Based on a case study of West Bengal, a subnational state of India, it shows that...
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The affirmative action policy in India came into practice because of the generations of struggle undergone by the untouchable castes and other backward classes, who were historically excluded from education and administration. As society changed, it was inevitable that the vulnerable groups who had...
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– Evidence from India
Although formal education is often considered an indicator of political leaders’ quality, the evidence on the effectiveness of educated leaders is mixed. Besides, minimum education qualifications are increasingly being used as requirements for contesting elections, making it critical to understand...
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– Guidelines for NEP implementation
This paper documents the state of elementary education in India and China since the 1960s, key lessons for India from China’s shift in focus from ‘quantity’ to ‘quality’, and evidence-based guidelines for effective implementation of India’s New Education Policy 2020 (NEP 2020). The divergent policy...
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– Uttar Pradesh’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic
A rich and growing literature illustrates the paradox of COVID-19 responses by governments across the world. States with higher levels of authority and capacity have struggled to respond effectively to COVID-19, while states with low capacity and authority have been more effective in containing the...
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During the first wave of COVID-19 infections, Kerala, a state in southern India, successfully managed to contain the pandemic. As a result, the Kerala model of managing the COVID-19 pandemic was celebrated as a success across the globe. However, at the time of writing, it looks like the celebrations...
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– Understanding it through the beginning and end of the Mahila Samakhya programme
This paper analyses the political economy of women’s-empowerment-related policy-making in India through a re-examination of the context of both the genesis and closure of a major programme, Mahila Samakhya. Mahila Samakhya, which embodied feminist philosophy and pedagogy, started in 1987 with the...
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This paper presents a critical analysis of official data related to COVID-19 in Bihar state, India, which points to the manipulation of data for political ends. The ruling party’s claim that the state managed the COVID pandemic brilliantly seems more politically motivated than scientific. We show...
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– Interrogating state capacity and its fault lines
The state of Maharashtra and the city of Mumbai have been referred to as the epidemic epicentre of India since the time of the plague of 1896 and influenza epidemic of 1918. During the COVID-19 pandemic too, the state experienced the highest cases with maximum fatalities. Against the structural...
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– Urban-to-rural labour transitions from the factory to the informal economy
The COVID-19 pandemic has escalated processes of labour transition from industrial work to the informal economy, which have always characterized the life of the working poor. Exploring urban-to-rural labour transitions through a feminist political economy lens and adopting a life-cycle approach to...
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This paper studies the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on the gendered dimensions of employment and mental health among urban informal-sector workers in India. First, we find that men’s employment declined by 84 percentage points post-pandemic relative to pre-pandemic, while their monthly earnings...
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Most studies of intergenerational mobility focus on adjacent generations, and there is limited knowledge about multigenerational mobility—that is, status transmission across three generations. We examine multigenerational educational and occupational mobility in India, using a nationally...
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– Evidence from a field experiment in India
Does information dissemination among beneficiaries of welfare programmes mitigate their implementation failures? We present experimental evidence in the context of a rural public works programme in India, where we assess the impact of an intervention that involves dissemination of publicly available...
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We measure multidimensional poverty in India using National Sample Survey Organization data from 2014–15 to 2017–18. We use income, health, education, and standard of living to measure the multidimensional poverty index (MPI). The MPI headcount declined from 26.9 to 13.75 per cent over the study...
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– The role of occupational task content
We examine data for urban workers in the non-agricultural sector across three decades, 1983–2017, and find that earnings inequality increased during 1983–2004, was largely stable during 2004–11, and decreased during 2011–17. We explore whether decline in routine jobs and change in demand for skills...
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– Evidence from India
A growing body of research shows that COVID-19 both reflects and exacerbates existing inequalities. However, there are significant gaps in this research area with respect to ‘horizontal’ or group-based inequalities in Global South countries. Lack of group-disaggregated data often contributes. In this...
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– Rational expectations of disadvantaged groups in India
This study uses data collected from school students in Mumbai to investigate how they perceive subjective expected returns for different levels of education in an environment that includes labour market discrimination. We are particularly keen to observe subjective returns to education for different...
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– An investigation of India’s employment guarantee programme
Administrative failures in anti-poverty programmes are widespread in developing countries.We focus on one such administrative failure—the persistent delay in paying beneficiaries on time in India’s iconic anti-poverty programme, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA). Using a life cycle...
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In societies where surnames are inherited from parents, we can use these names to estimate rates of intergenerational mobility. This paper explains how to make such estimates, and illustrates their use in pre-industrial England and modern Chile and India. These surname estimates have the advantage...
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– Measurement (and downward mobility) pitfalls
Limited attention has been paid to how well social mobility measures debated and used to study industrial countries perform in analysis of low-income settings. Following brief, selective reviews of the axiomatic and econometric literatures, three mobility concepts illustrate how properties that...
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– A comparison across different selection models
This study focuses on estimating the returns to education in non-farm self-employed businesses in the Indian context, using nationwide individual- and household-level data provided by the India Human Development Survey for the year 2011/12. Given that different studies have used different types of...
– Are non-farm jobs the driver or a brake?
The increasing proportion of non-agricultural work in rural India has commonly been associated with widening income inequality. However, our simulations from the village of Palanpur in the north suggest that without this diversification inequality might well have increased even more. From the mid...
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– Model-based simulation and case-study evidence
The North Indian village of Palanpur has been the subject of close study over a period of six decades from 1957/8 to 2015. Himanshu et al. (2018) have documented the evolution of the village economy over this period in an exhaustive study entitled How Lives Change: Palanpur, India and Development...
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Productivity and socio-economic progress are inter-connected. Economic growth funds policies that promote socio-economic progress, while the latter serves as a growth engine. A society with high mobility is one where individual achievements are influenced less by the individual’s parents and more by...
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– Poverty, vulnerability, and mobility, 1987–2012
We analyse the Indian National Sample Survey data spanning the period 1987/88–2011/12 to uncover patterns of transition into and out of different classes of consumption distribution. At the aggregate level, income growth has accelerated, accompanied by accelerating poverty decline. Underlying these...
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– Clinical observations of uncomplicated births in Uttar Pradesh, India
Objective: To evaluate the quality of essential care during normal labour and childbirth in maternity facilities in Uttar Pradesh, India. Methods: Between 26 May and 8 July 2015, we used clinical observations to assess care provision for 275 mother–neonate pairs at 26 hospitals. Data on 42 items of...
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– Experimental evidence on caste and tolerance for teacher absenteeism in India
This article contributes to the growing scholarship on how ethnic inequality can dampen the provision of public goods and services. On the one hand, it pushes beyond purely economic inequality to include status inequality between population groups. On other hand, it moves away from the provision of...
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This paper brings labour back into the literature on legal empowerment against poverty. Employing a historical lens, I outline three waves of legal movements. Each wave is distinguished by its timing, the state-level target, and the actors involved. In all three waves, legal empowerment was won, not...
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– Status inequality and vote choice in the Indian states
What explains the popularity of right-wing parties amongst the poor? This paper argues that in hierarchical societies with high social-status inequality, poor high-status voters may ally with rich high-status voters if they believe their social-status is under threat. I demonstrate this in the...
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– Evidence from India
The development of institutions of self-governance in India, and specifically the 2005 reform—the National Rural Health Mission that introduced village health and sanitation committees—provide a unique opportunity to study the effects of the strengthening of the political agency on collective...
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Using data from various rounds of the nationally representative NSSO survey between 1988 and 2012, we first construct national, state, and district-level figures for overall, within and between consumption inequality. We find an increase in inequality in India but only since 2004. We also document...
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– Comparative evidence from Ethiopia, India, Peru, and Vietnam
We investigate whether there are racial and ethnic disparities in children’s education in Ethiopia, India, Peru, and Vietnam. We find that in all the four countries, and especially in Vietnam, children from small ethnic groups have lower education attainment and cognitive ability. The gap in...
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– Caste Gaps in Earnings in Indian Small Businesses
Using the 2004-05 India Human Development Survey data, we estimate and decompose the earnings of household businesses owned by historically marginalized social groups known as Scheduled Castes and Tribes (SCSTs), and non-SCSTs across the earnings distribution. We find clear differences in...
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We study a model of human capital driven growth, where the parent’s human capital serves as a productive input in the child’s human capital production only when that of the former exceeds a minimum level required to intellectually contribute to the child’s learning. Private and public expenditures...
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– Evidence from Andhra Pradesh, India
This paper explores the intergenerational effects of parental health shocks using longitudinal data from the Young Lives project conducted in Andhra Pradesh, India. It is found that health shocks to poorer parents reduce investments in children thereby reducing their future earnings, and...
Displaying 48 of 91 results