Bangladesh has experienced the largest mass poisoning of a population in history owing to contamination of groundwater with naturally occurring inorganic arsenic. Continuous drinking of such metal-contaminated water is highly cancerous; prolonged drinking of such water risks developing diseases...

There has been a proliferation of non-state providers of education services in the developing world. In Bangladesh, for instance, Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee runs more than 40,000 non-formal schools that cater to school-drop outs from poor families or operate in villages where there's...

This paper identifies endogenous social effects in mathematics test performance for eighth graders in rural Bangladesh using information on arsenic contamination of water wells at home as an instrument. In other words, the identification relies on variation in test scores among peers owing to...

This study presents new evidence on individual and community-specific determinants of social trust using data from 96 villages in Bangladesh. We find perceived institutional trust to be positively correlated with stated inter-personal trust. At the same time, there is significant social distance...

Should inequality comparisons with ordinal variables be sensitive to alternative sorting of the categories, i.e. ascending versus descending order? We introduce the consistency property whereby an inequality or bipolarisation index regards frequency distribution r less unequal than s if and only...

Most non-monetary development indicators are bounded and many of them are presented in terms of either attainments or shortfalls. Whether an absolute approach or a relative approach should be undertaken to assess cross-country convergence of these indicators has been a subject of debate....

An already extensive literature documents the economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. A nascent literature is also beginning to detail the mental health impact. A limitation with existing work is that reported findings generally cannot be taken as causal estimates. In this study, we use a...

As is well documented, the first wave of the covid-19 pandemic, with its concomitant lockdown measures, is associated with marked deterioration of mental health in many countries. Using a quasi-experimental design and drawing on several small-area indicators, we probe the potential moderating...

This paper documents the extent of inequality of educational opportunity in India spanning the period 1983-2004 using National Sample Survey (NSS) data. We build on recent developments in the literature that has operationalized concepts in the inequality of opportunity theory (including...

A long literature on inter-distributional inequality (IDI) has developed statistical tools for measuring the extent of inequality between two groups (e.g. men versus women). Firstly, I introduce the property of group-specific disadvantage focus (GDF). Indices satisfying this property are only...