While it might be expected that schooling will depend positively on the economic returns to education (ER) in the local labor market, in fact there is theoretical ambiguity about the sign of the schooling-ER relationship when households are liquidity-constrained. Whether the relationship is...

India's development experience over the past fifty years suggests that the increasing importance of the services sector deserves analysis.  The literature on structural change has emphasised changing patterns of demand as an explanation for the increasing importance of the services sector.  In...

While use of contract teachers provides a low-cost way to increase teacher numbers, it raises the quality concern that these less trained teachers may be less effective.  We estimate the causal contract-teacher effect on student achievement using school fixed effects and value-added models of...

Using new and unique panel data, we investigate the role of long-term health and childhood malnutrition in schooling outcomes for children in rural India, many of whom lack basic numeracy and literacy skills.  Using data on students' performance on mathematics and Hindi tests, we examine the...

This paper identifies the effect of neighborhood peer groups on childhood skill acquisitions using observational data.  We incorporate spatial peer interaction, defined as a child's nearest geographical neighbors, into a prodiction function of child cognitive development in Andhra Pradesh,...

This paper revisits the issue of the intra-household of education with the recently available India Human Development Survey which refers to 2005 and covers both urban and rural areas.  In addition to the traditional Engel method, the paper utilizes a Hurdle model to disentangle the decision to...

The distribution dynamics of incomes across Indian states are examined using the entire income distribution rather than using standard regression approaches. The period 1965 to 1997 exhibits twin-peaked dynamics: there are two income convergence clubs at 50% and 125% of the national average...

This paper investigates the dynamic aspects of poverty and anti-poverty interventions, particularly focusing on promotional effects, i.e., the effects of helping the poor escape poverty and protective effects, i.e., the effects of preventing the non-poor from slipping into poverty. We test the...

For some observers, the dramatic growth of the services sector in India reflects rapid strides made by educated professionals.  Some others see it as the expansion of an employer of last resort.  Given this heterogeneity, the object of the paper is to analyze the nature of employment being...

Labour force participation in India is found to respond to a plurality of causal mechanisms. Employment and unpaid labour are both measured using the 1999/2000 Indian National Sample Survey. Men`s labour-force participation stood at 85% and women`s at 35%. The overall rate of labour force...