We model the consequences of parental control over choice of wives for sons, for parental incentives to educate daughters, when the marriage market exhibits competitive dowry payments and altruistic but paternalistic parents benefit from having married sons live with them. By choosing uneducated...

Wealthy individuals often voluntarily provide public goods that the poor also consume. Such philanthropy is perceived as legitimizing one's wealth. Governments routinely exempt the rich from taxation on grounds of their charitable expenditure. We examine the normative logic of this exemption. We...

We investigate the impact of community power on the practice of untouchability in rural India. We model two-dimensional simultaneous group conflict over social norms, wherein an upper and backward (OBC) caste Hindu bloc contests the 'scheduled' castes (SCs) over the extent to which behavioural...

We model a contest between two groups of equal population size over the division of a group-specific public good. Each group is fragmented into sub-groups. Each sub-group allocates effort between production and contestation. There is perfect coordination within sub-groups, but sub-groups cannot...

This paper investigates the intra-household impact of an expansion in employment opportunities for women in a dual labor market, when the informal sector functions as a gateway to the formal sector. We use a variant of the Harris-Todaro framework with two-period overlapping generations to model...

We provide a case for maintaining welfare and income redistribution programs even when their adverse general equilibrium effects reduce total earnings of poor households. Using a Cournot model of intra-household decision-making, we show that even if welfare cutbacks generate large increases in...

The standard theory of anti - poverty targeting assumes individual incomes cannot be observed, but statistical properties of income distribution in broadly defined groups are known. "Indicator targeting" rules are then derived for the forms of transfers conditioned on group membership of...

There exist large variations in juvenile sex ratios across districts and social groups in India. Economic and cultural factors have been advanced as contending explanations for these variations. We propose a household optimization model that integrates cultural explanations with economic ones....