NREGS (Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme) is the Indian government's flagship anti-poverty program and is one of the largest public works programmes in the world which aims to increase employment opportunities for the poor and in particular, improve women's access to the...

This paper uses the staggered implementation of a legal change in inheritance law in India to estimate the effect of women's improved access to inheritance on both police-reported and self-reported violence against women. I find a decrease in reported violence and female unnatural deaths...

This article has two goals. First, using district-level panel data we identify key determinants of violent crime, nonviolent crime, and crime against women in India, 1990-2007. Second, using district-level variation in regard to Maoist-driven social conflict, we examine how social conflict...