This paper examines the behavior of remittances over the business cycle and their potential to act as a stabilizer during periods of high business cycle volatility. Four main findings are reported. First, in theory, the cyclical behavior of remittances depends on the motives to remit. Second,...

Many countries have legislation which make it costly for firms to dismiss or retrench workers. In the case of India, the Industrial Disputes Act, 1947, requires firms that employ 50 or more workers to pay a compensation to any worker who is to be retrenched. This paper builds a theoretical model...

Some studies on child labor have shown that greater land wealth leads to higher child labor, thereby casting doubt on the hypothesis that child labor is caused by poverty. This paper argues that the missing ingredient is an explicit modeling of the labor market. We develop a simple model which...

This paper uses efficiency wage theory and the existence of community-based sharing to hypothesize that labor markets in developing countries have multiple equilibria - the same economy can be stuck at different levels of unemployment with different levels of wages. The model is meant for...

Using a model of O-ring production function, the paper demonstrates how certain communities can get caught in a low-literacy trap in which each individual finds it not worthwhile investing in higher skills because others are not high-skilled. The model sheds light on educational policy. It is...

The advance of digital technology is changing the nature of markets, enhancing the capacity of corporations to extract more consumers' surplus and lower the wages paid to workers. The rise of new technology has also diminished the efficacy of traditional laws to regulate firms and corporations....

A people's culture, norms and habits are important determinants not just of the quality of social life but of economic progress and growth. In this paper we take the view that while the importance of culture is undeniable, the innateness of culture is not. We work here with a single example and...

The paper investigates whether multi-party coalition government is better for the protection of socially backward classes, i.e. Scheduled Castes, in India. We have looked at the impact of types of government on the reduction of the gap between Scheduled Castes and Upper Castes in terms of...

This paper looks at the prospects of a demographic dividend in Africa in the near future. While acknowledging that the fertility declines which change population age structures and thus dependency ratios have been slow to begin and often seem to have stalled once they have begun, we nevertheless...

The paper studies the relation between globalization, inequality and marginalization, within and across nations. It reviews the existing evidence on globalization and global inequality and argues, using a simple theoretical model, that the two are inter-connected. It discusses policy alternative...