Using data from the India Human Development Survey (IHDS) 2005, we examine intergenerational occupational mobility in India, an issue on which very few systematic and rigorous studies exist. We group individuals into classes and document patterns of mobility at the rural, urban and all-India...

Purpose – To formalize and test the hypotheses that economic and political inequality tend to lower the quality of public education and thereby the overall quality of education in developing countries. Design/methodology/approach – The paper uses both international cross-section data and...

This paper formalizes ideas from classical and radical political economy on task allocation and technology adoption under capitalism. A few previous studies have attempted this, but the framework and results in this paper are different. I model labor contracts that are incomplete owing to...

We analyze polarization in India roughly in the past two and half decades using consumption expenditure data. We show that both bipolarization and multidimensional polarization (on several dimensions: caste, rural-urban, state, region) have increased since the 1990s. In the case of...

Is the poor human capital investment by rural Indian families primarily a supply side or a demand side issue? We examine school attendance and total human capital investment time (time in school plus travel time plus in-home instructional time) using the Indian Time Use Survey of 1998-1999 and...

We analyze polarization in India roughly in the past two and half decades using consumption expenditure data. We show that polarization has increased sharply since the 1990s, reversing the earlier trend. On multidimensional polarization, we show that several pre-existing cleavages (caste,...