Public works programs, aimed at building a strong social safety net through redistribution of wealth and generation of meaningful employment, are becoming increasingly popular in developing countries. The National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), enacted in August 2005, is one such...

An important constraint in studying intergenerational education mobility for India is the lack of data that contain information about parents' education for the entire adult population. This paper employs a novel strategy to create a unique father-son matched data that is representative of the...

To mitigate the impact of the 2008-2010 global financial crisis on vulnerable households, the Government of Latvia established Workplaces with Stipends, an emergency public works program that targeted registered unemployed people who were not receiving unemployment benefits. This paper evaluates...

This paper examines changes in the wage structure in urban India during the past two decades (1983-2004) across the entire wage distribution using the Machado and Mata (2005) decomposition approach. Real wages increased throughout the wage distribution during 1983-1993; however, it increased only in...

The tertiary-secondary (college-high school) wage premium has been increasing in India over the past decade, but the increase differs across age groups. The increase in wage premium has been driven mostly by younger age groups, while older age groups have not experienced any significant...

India's colonial legacy and linguistic diversity give English an important role in its economy, and this role has expanded due to globalization in recent decades. It is widely believed that there are sizable economic returns to English-language skills in India, but the extent of these returns is...

This paper revisits the issue of the intra-household allocation of education expenditure with the recently available India Human Development Survey which refers to 2005 and covers both urban and rural areas. In addition to the traditional Engel method, the paper utilizes a Hurdle model to...

Drawing on the nationally representative "Participation and Expenditure in Education" surveys, we document the incidence and cost of private tutoring at different stages of schooling over the last two decades in India. As private tutoring involve two decisions: a) whether to take private tuition...

In this paper, we examine the intergenerational occupational mobility in India among men born during 1945-85. Following Long and Ferrie (2013, American Economic Review), we not only distinguish between prevalence and association, but also use the Altham Statistics – which involves comparison...

Using administrative data from linked private schools from one of districts in India that matches 8,319 pupils to their subject specific teachers at the senior secondary level, we estimate the importance of individual teachers on student outcomes in the high-stake senior secondary exam (at the...