India’s National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) is one of the largest public works programs globally. Understanding the impacts of NREGS and the pathway through which its impacts are realized thus has important policy implications. A three-round 4,000-household panel from...

Why do many households remain exposed to large exogenous sources of non-systematic income risk? Why don’t financial markets develop to pool these risks? This paper uses a series of randomized field experiments to test the importance of price and non-price factors in the adoption of an...

A brief outline of the economic and financial structure of the State and the various financial inclusion initiatives taken by the Reserve Bank is highlighted. But there are some policy challenges in sustaining the growth momentum. [Speech delivered at the G. B. Pant University of Agricultural...

Is the high degree of gender inequality in developing countries in education, personal autonomy, and more explained by underdevelopment itself? Or do the societies that are poor today hold certain cultural views that lead to gender inequality? This article discusses several mechanisms through...

This paper analyses interrelationships between ‘economic development’, ‘health’, and ‘environment’ in a simultaneous equations framework. The endogenous variables chosen for the model are GDPPC (per capita gross domestic product), LE (life expectancy),...

The research reported here was guided by three questions: (1) What are the current and potential patterns of mobile phone, landline, PC, and Internet café use among urban microentrepreneurs? (2) Are mobile phones, PCs, and Internet cafés related to the stability or growth of urban...