While many studies explored impacts of political quotas for females on public goods provision, knowledge on immediate and longer term economic impacts of such interventions remains limited which is undesirable in view of the widespread adoption of such policies. We use nation-wide data from India on current outcomes and a village’s reservation status for the... Read More
Although there has been considerable interest on wage discrimination, available studies largely dealt with formal rather than informal markets that are of little relevance for the poorest. Focusing on of India’s informal labour markets leads to three findings of interest. First, gender wage discrimination is larger in informal than in formal labour markets, resulting in... Read More
This paper studies the changes in the pattern of bilateral trade between China and India consequent to China's accession to the WTO in 2001 and assesses the complementarities and challenges in trade.
This paper examines whether and to what extent changes in inheritance legislation impact women's physical and human capital investments using disaggregated household level data from India. We use inheritance patterns over three generations of individuals to assess the impact of changes in the Hindu Succession Act that grant daughters equal coparcenary birth rights in joint... Read More
Reservations enjoy great popularity to overcome deep-rooted inequality. However, in part due to a short horizon of analyses, evidence on the impact of reservations and the mechanisms through which they may work remains ambiguous. Nationally representative village- and household level data from India for the last 3 Panchayat periods allow us to explore dynamic effects... Read More
This paper explores the impacts of the amendment to the 1956 Hindu Succession Act on Hindu females’ intergenerational transfers of physical and human capital. Information on the timing of three generations’ key life events helps isolate the causal effects. Our primary estimation strategy is a difference-indifference estimator in which we compare the share of total... Read More
The differential multiple tax regime across sectors of production leads to distortions in allocation of resources thus introducing inefficiencies in the sectors of domestic production. With regard to India’s exports, this leads to lack of international competitiveness of the sectors which would have been relatively efficient under distortion- free indirect tax regime.
The youth constitutes the largest segment of the Indian population. Being the primary productive human resource, the socio-economic development of the Indian youth is directly linked to the development process. This paper attempts to observe the various demographic characteristics of the Indian youth population and determine household expenditure patterns on education and related items using... Read More
The development of rural housing in a manner that results in adequate and quality shelter for the inhabitants of Mahatma Gandhi’s “real India” is a challenge before the nation. What are the issues confronting rural housing development in India? The litany is endless.
Countries world-wide routinely collate statistics on STS performance indicators such as R&D expenditure, science publications, citations and impact, high-tech employment, and penetration of hightech goods. In parallel there have been several, but often isolated, attempts to define complementary ‘public understanding of science (PUS)’ indicators including concepts such as scientific literacy, public sentiment, interest, and attitudes. This has been... Read More