National Council of Applied Economic Research
Given that the phenomenon of capture of public programs by sections the population is rampant in developing countries, households can indulge in a strategy to improve their participating in public programs by bribing the suppliers of such programs. This is an important issue affecting both the supply of local public goods and the incidence of... Read More
Identity based voting is a second best solution adopted by households to minimize the negative effects of one’s own identity and (or) identity based coalitions. If a significant source of household welfare is one’s identity or, membership in ethnically defined groups, then politics that results will be parochial in nature. In parochial politics voting along... Read More
This study attempts to estimate and analyse the level of health-care expenditure incurred by the state governments and households in the rural sector of major states in India. It studies the interlinkage between public spending and household spending on health care. The utilisation of public and private facilities has also been analysed to provide a... Read More
This paper studies the idea (hypothesis) that increasing government spending on education should improve the quality of the education and access and thus bridge the gap between the private schools and public schools’ performance leading to indifferent choice between the school types and similar outcome. Nationally representative village, schools, and household level data from rural... Read More
Has the devolution of responsibilities and finances to local governments in India produced positive impacts on health status and incomes of men and women? Using a national data set with details on health, health seeking behavior and local governance, we estimate a system of simultaneous equations to analyze the incidence of illness via a health... Read More
This paper models the perverse impact of increased devolution of funds from higher to lower level governments (village councils or Panchayats) on tax revenues collected This paper models the perverse impact of increased devolution of funds from higher to lower level governments (village councils or Panchayats) on tax revenues collected by the latter. We show... Read More
In this paper we show that investments to improve the supply and management of water reduce the time spent in fetching water by both men and women, which in turn will lead to a reallocation of the time saved to productive activities, and result in increased incomes. Using the national ARIS/REDS panel data of the... Read More
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.
