This paper investigates how neighbourhood effects interacting with income inequality affect poor people's ability to access basic facilities like health care services, schooling and so on. We model this interaction by integrating consumers' income distribution with the spatial distribution of...

Using primary household data from India we estimate family utility function parameters that measure the relative importance of consumption, schooling of children and health (both physical and mental) and find that mental health is far more important than consumption or children's schooling in...

A randomly selected treatment group of households in Gurgaon, India was informed whether (or not) their drinking water had tested positive for fecal contamination using a simple test costing about $0.50. Households that were not initially purifying their water, and were told that their drinking...

This paper presents simple measures of individual and family mental health indices based on axiomatic foundations and integrates mental health into a neoclassical model that allows for proper substitution possibilities in the family preferences and quantifies its significance in family utility....

The demand for environmental quality is often presumed to be low in developingcountries due to poverty. Less attention has been paid to the possibility that lack of awareness about the adverse health effects of environmental pollution could also keep the demand low. We use a household survey...

We use the nation-wide policy of randomly allocating village council headships to women to identify the impact of female political leadership on the governance of projects implemented under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act in India. Using primary survey data, we find more program...

The National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) of India mandates 1/3rd of beneficiaries to be women and equal wages across gender. We study its impact on children's educational attainment via women's increased access to labor market opportunities. Using child level panel data, and taking...

This paper assesses the effect of transition from monthly distribution of free food grains to the daily provision of free cooked meals to school children on enrollments and attendance in a rural area of India. School panel data allow a difference-in-differences estimation strategy to address...