This paper studies the productivity impact of a contract change. The setting is a tea plantation in India. The activity in question is tea-plucking, the output from which is measurable and contractible. Payments to pluckers consist of a baseline wage, along with piece rates per kilogram of...

Relative to developed countries, there are far fewer women than men in India. Estimates suggest that more than 25 million women are "missing". Sex selection at birth and the mistreatment of young girls are widely regarded as key explanations. A decomposition of missing women by age across the...

We model inter-group conflict driven by economic changes within groups. We show that if group incomes are low, increasing group incomes raises violence against that group, and lowers violence generated by it. We then apply the model to data on Hindu-Muslim violence in India. Our main result is...

This paper studies the productivity impact of a contract change for tea pluckers in an Indian plantation. The contract, implemented at the end of a three-year cycle in which contracts are generally revised, was (a) the joint outcome of negotiations between twenty unions and plantations, (b)...

We provide an interim report on the Indian lockdown provoked by the covid-19 pandemic. The main topics — ranging from the philosophy of lockdown to the provision of relief measures — transcend the Indian case. A recurrent theme is the enormous visibility of covid-19 deaths worldwide, with...

This paper studies the productivity impact of a contract change for tea pluckers in an Indian plantation. The contract, implemented at the end of a three-year cycle in which contracts are generally revised, was (a) the joint outcome of negotiations between twenty unions and plantations, (b)...