This paper analyze the colonial institutions set up by the British to collect land revenue in India, and show that differences in historical property rights institutions lead to sustained differences in economic outcomes. Areas in which proprietary rights in land were historically given to...

Politicians face high-powered electoral pressures while bureaucrats face longer-term, low powered incentives. Given constitutional constraints, what incentives do politicians employ to control bureaucrats and how do bureaucrats respond to such incentives? These issues are addressed using a...

The paper examines individuals’ abilities to identify the highly central people in their social networks, where centrality is defined by diffusion centrality (Banerjee, Chandrasekhar, Duflo, and Jackson, 2013), which characterizes a node’s influence in spreading information. It...

This study uses micro data and an OLG model to show that general equi- librium forces are critical for understanding the relationship between aggregate fertility and household savings. [BREAD WP No. 415].

This paper studies the role played by caste, education and other social and economic attributes in arranged marriages among middle-class Indians. A unique data set on individuals who placed matrimonial advertisements in a major newspaper, the responses they received, how they ranked them, and...

This paper argues that the relation between temptations and the level of consumption plays a key role in explaining the observed behaviors of the poor. Temptation goods are defined to be the set of goods that gen- erate positive utility for the self that consumes them, but not for any previous...

Increased voter ethnicization, defined as a greater preference for the party representing one's ethnic group, affects politician quality. If politics is characterized by incomplete policy commitment, then ethnicization reduces average winner quality for the pro-majority party with the opposite...

The implications of alternative ways to model decisionmaking by families for educational policy are analysed. Many of the policy implications associated with credit constraints cannot be distinguished from the implications of models of the family that differ from the conventional Barro-Becker...

Household surveys from 13 developing countries are used to describe consumption choices, health and education investments, employment patterns and other features of the of the economic lives of the “middle classes†defined as those whose daily consumption per capita is between $2 and...

This paper presents the results of two experiments conducted in Mumbai and Vadodara, India, designed to evaluate ways to improve the quality of education in urban slums. A remedial education programme hired young women from the community to teach basic literacy and numeracy skills to children...