This report is based on a prospective study which attempted to estimate the cost of treatment borne by the cancer patients at an academic tertiary public hospital. There is a lack of information about the financial burden of major illness like cancer on patient and their families. An...

Using primary household data from India we estimate family utility function parameters that measure the relative importance of consumption, schooling of children and health (both physical and mental) and find that mental health is far more important than consumption or children’s schooling in...

This paper presents simple measures of individual and family mental health indices based on axiomatic foundations and integrates mental health into a neoclassical model that allows for proper substitution possibilities in the family preferences and quantifies its significance in family utility....

This paper investigates how neighbourhood effects interacting with income inequality affect poor people's ability to access basic facilities like health care services, schooling and so on. We model this interaction by integrating consumers' income distribution with the spatial distribution of...

This paper analyses whether in developing countries mass education is the key or a highly well educated elite should be more bene?cial for growth. Using the Indian census data as a benchmark and enrollment rates of di!erent levels of schooling we compute annual attainment levels for a panel of...

An exogenously defined poverty line yields poverty headcounts between any two points in time that are a net outcome of hte two-way traffic into and out of poverty. This paper arugues that, for the rural Indian context, where housing is too lumpy and illiquid to be used for consumption smoothing...

The National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) of India mandates 1/3rd of beneficiaries to be women and equal wages across gender. We study its impact on children's educational attainment via women's increased access to labor market opportunities. Using child level panel data, and taking...

In this paper we seek to provide a resolution of the Edgeworth paradox for the case where firms are free to supply less than the quantity demanded, the residual demand function is {\it manipulable} (a generalization of the proportional one) and prices vary over a grid. We demonstrate that a...

This paper studies the effect of decentralization of management and control on forest conservation in the central Himalayas. The density of forest cover (measured with satellite images and field surveys) in forests managed by village councils is compared with that in state-managed forests and in...