This paper investigates the long-term determinants of Indian government bonds' (IGB) nominal yields. It examines whether John Maynard Keynes's supposition that short-term interest rates are the key driver of long-term government bond yields holds over the long-run horizon, after controlling for...

This paper explores the association between short-term migration in the household and feminization of farm management in rural India. The analysis uses a nationally representative data set covering 35,604 rural Indian households in the year 2013. There is gender disaggregated information on who...

Objective: To evaluate the quality of essential care during normal labour and childbirth in maternity facilities in Uttar Pradesh, India. Methods: Between 26 May and 8 July 2015, we used clinical observations to assess care provision for 275 mother-neonate pairs at 26 hospitals. Data on 42 items...

In this paper, we investigate the impacts of political decentralization and women reservation in local governance on institutional births and child mortality in the state of Bihar, India. Using the difference-in-differences methodology, we find a significant positive association between...

Informal eldercare is often supplied by family members, more so in Asia than in the West. Children and their parents as well as members of adjacent generations linked by marriage (in-laws) are modeled as self-interested agents offering or responding to material incentives. A first implication...

An important segment of labour regulations concerns the protection aspects of social security. These regulations provide safety nets or fall back mechanisms to enable workers to cope with crises that affect households from time to time, such as illness, employment injury, death or old age. This...

This paper undertakes an evaluation of the Labour and Environment chapters of the TPP Agreement, with a view to determining India's stand if the same or similar provisions are proposed in multilateral, plurilateral or bilateral agreements in future. Analysis in the paper shows that if TPP like...

Despite the extensive literature on distributive politics, we still lack a theory of how political and fiscal institutions interact to shape the pork‐barrelling ability of national leaders in a federal parliamentary democracy. Focusing on party system attributes and governmental incentives...

This paper investigates the determinants of export behavior among Indian manufacturing firms, focusing in particular on the role of technology, cost and imported intermediate inputs. Our evidence suggests that innovation, in particular R&D, positively affects both firms' probability to export...

On the one hand, India is a growing economy that needs skilled labour, self-employed entrepreneurs and employees to tackle its economic and social challenges. On the other hand, India faces high unemployment rates, especially among young people. Graduates from industrial training institutes...

Using primary evidence for 146 Indian manufacturing firms, I examine the types of lobbying strategies for trade policy influence and what drives firm choice for these strategies. Firms can lobby collectively in a group (Join Hands), lobby individually as a single firm (Walk Alone), or adopt a...

This paper examines the relationship between caste and gender inequality in three states in India. When households are grouped using conventional, government-defined categories of caste we find patterns that are consistent with existing literature: lower-caste women are more likely to...

This article contributes to the growing scholarship on how ethnic inequality can dampen the provision of public goods and services. On the one hand, it pushes beyond purely economic inequality to include status inequality between population groups. On other hand, it moves away from the provision...

This paper looks at household consumption and financial decisions made in a matrilineal society where women are by culture the financial household managers. This culture was strongly altered by the British in the mid-19th century in particular through christian missionaries who proclaimed that...

Substantial evidence exists that economic inequality in Asia has been growing, but the dimensions of this inequality and its growth are far less clear. This paper evaluates inequality in household incomes per capita across various demographic groups in income surveys from six middle- and...

This paper examines how impatience interacts with inequalities in economic development. We consider two distinct groups of households (i.e., with intrinsic inequality), and show that (i) under decreasing marginal impatience (DMI), an unequal society may be preferable for poor households; (ii)...

We exploit the variation in the admissions cutoffs across colleges of a leading Indian university in a regression discontinuity framework to estimate the causal effects of enrolling in a selective college on: cognitive attainment, behavioral preferences, and Big Five personality. We find that...

Social or ethnic segregation can impede the equitable allocation of public resources in developing countries. We study an under-explored dimension; the allocation of public sector teachers in India. Using a register database for 2006-12, we construct indicators for the equality of teacher...

This paper examines the size, growth, salaries, per-pupil-costs, pupil achievement levels and cost-effectiveness of private schools, and compares these with the government school sector. Official data show a steep growth of private schooling and a corresponding rapid shrinkage in the size of the...

In India, 52 98 million people live in urban slums, and 59% of slums are "non-notified" or lack legal recognition by the government. In this paper, we use data on 2,901 slums from four waves of the National Sample Survey (NSS) spanning almost 20 years to test the hypothesis that non-notified...

Despite the extensive literature on distributive politics, we still lack a theory of how political and fiscal institutions interact to shape the pork-barrelling ability of national leaders in a federal parliamentary democracy. Focusing on party system attributes and governmental incentives...

Using primary evidence for 146 Indian manufacturing firms, I examine the types of lobbying strategies for trade policy influence and what drives firm choice for these strategies. Firms can lobby collectively in a group (Join Hands), lobby individually as a single firm (Walk Alone), or adopt a...

This paper explores the association between short-term migration in the household and feminization of farm management in rural India. The analysis uses a nationally representative data set covering 35,604 rural Indian households in the year 2013. There is gender disaggregated information on who...

On November 08, 2016, India took a decisive step towards going “cashless” by suddenly announcing withdrawal of its existing currency notes of two highest denominations, namely, the Rs. 500/= and the Rs. 1000/=. The move, announced with a suddenness that took the entire nation by surprise,...

This paper brings labour back into the literature on legal empowerment against poverty. Employing a historical lens, I outline three waves of legal movements. Each wave is distinguished by its timing, the state-level target, and the actors involved. In all three waves, legal empowerment was won,...

We exploit the variation in the admissions process across colleges of a leading Indian university to estimate the causal effects of enrolling in a selective college on: cognitive attainment using scores on standardized university exams; behavioural preferences such as risk, competitiveness, and...

This paper examines how impatience interacts with inequalities in economic development. We consider two distinct groups of households (i.e., with intrinsic inequality), and show that (i) under decreasing marginal impatience (DMI), an unequal society may be preferable for poor households; (ii)...

Substantial evidence exists that economic inequality in Asia has been growing, but the dimensions of this inequality and its growth are far less clear. This paper evaluates inequality in household incomes per capita across various demographic groups in income surveys from six middle- and...

Commodity prices have become volatile over the past 2 decades, and their recent sharp decline has decreased the consumer price index inflation rates for most economies. While many Asian economies have benefited from low international oil and food prices, commodity exporters have suffered. Thus,...

This paper examines exchange rate behavior during the recent period with negative nominal interest rates. We use a daily panel of data on 61 currencies from January 2010 through May 2016, during which five economies - Denmark, the European Economic and Monetary Union, Japan, Sweden, and...

India is clearly far along in the nutrition transition. This paper shows that there have been rapid increases in the proportion of adult women in India who are overweight and obese: these increases are seen not just in urban but in rural areas as well, and there are regional specificities....

India's automotive sector has grown tremendously in the post-liberalization period. The growing domestic market, increased export opportunities and greater emphasis of vehicle manufacturers on high-quality, innovative solutions have created a context for component suppliers to ramp up their...

The food processing industry in India is a sunrise industry, which has been growing above-average and is expected to grow further. Even though India has a large agricultural sector, the food processing industry has traditionally played a small role and it is only recently that it has been...

On the one hand, India is a growing economy that needs skilled labour, self-employed entrepreneurs and employees to tackle its economic and social challenges. On the other hand, India faces high unemployment rates, especially among young people. Graduates from industrial training institutes...

This paper looks at household consumption and financial decisions made in a matrilineal society where women are by culture the financial household managers. This culture was strongly altered by the British in the mid-19th century in particular through christian missionaries who proclaimed that...