Disadvantage is a popular and controversial word in India these days. In October 2007, half a million Gujars, traditionally a pastoral community of north and central India, filled the streets of several towns in the Indian state of Rajasthan demanding that they be classified by their state...

We show how an optimization algorithm can be used to approximately quan-tify the costs to users of spatial misallocation in centrally provided public goods. This method can be employed to evaluate the large programs of public good construction that have been central features of economic plans in...

Many popular social programs have limited coverage among households at the very bottom of the income and wealth distribution. If a program reaches the poor, but neglects the destitute, the (pre-program) income distribution of participants and non-participants will cross. We are interested in the...

Group loans with joint liability have been a distinguishing feature of many micronance programs. While such lending has benetted millions of borrowers, major lending insti- tutions have acknowledged their limited impact among the very poor and have recently favored individual contracts. This...

Voters in India are often perceived as being biased in favor of parties that claim to represent their caste. We incorporate this caste bias into voter preferences and examine its influence on the distributive policies and corruption practices of the two major political parties in the North...

We use village level data from the 1991 and 2001 Indian Censuses to examine how the availability of health facilities and safe drinking water at the village level affect juvenile sex ratios. In addition to controlling for village fixed effects in our estimating equation of the juvenile sex...

In this paper they show how an optimization algorithm can be used to approximately quantify the costs to users of spatial misallocation in centrally provided public goods. This method can be employed to evaluate the large programs of public good construction that have been central features of...

In this paper we provide an empirical analysis of the performance of microfinance groups, known as Self-Help groups, based on an original census we carried out in a poor area of Northern India. We examine whether traditionally disadvantaged villagers, such as members of lower castes or landless...