The emergence of a large and dynamic middle class raises Asia’s profile as an attractive market destination for products ranging from consumer goods to financial services. There are even hopes that the Asian consumer will replace the US as “world consumer of last resortâ€,...

Available evidence suggests high intergenerational correlation of economic status, and persistent disparities in health status between the rich and the poor. This paper proposes a novel mechanism linking the two. Health human capital is introduced into a two-period overlapping generations model....

Migration can serve as an outlet for employment, higher earnings, and reduced income risk for households in developing countries. The 2004–2005 Human Development Profile of India survey is used to examine correlations between the receipt of remittances from internal migrants and human...

Is there a gender gap in mathematics across many low- and middle-income countries? A detailed, comparable test score data is used to analyze this. Micro level data on school performance linked to household demographics shows that the gender gap appears to increase with age. It is shown that...

Inter-state diversity has been a perennial feature of Indian agriculture. The study probes if per capita income in Indian agriculture has converged across states in the last four and a half decades. It finds strong evidence in favour of beta convergence but not in favour of sigma convergence....

The Human Capital Index explores the contributors and inhibitors to the development and deployment of a healthy, educated and productive labour force, and has generated the information contained in this Report. The Index provides country rankings that allow for effective comparisons across...

This study uses micro data and an OLG model to show that general equi- librium forces are critical for understanding the relationship between aggregate fertility and household savings. [BREAD WP No. 415].

Using data on sibling pairs drawn from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, we estimate the effect of having been breastfed on high school graduation, high school grades, and college attendance. Our results suggest that breastfeeding is associated with substantial increases in...

Motivated by the concern that the recent surge in inflation could retard growth, the paper revisits the nexus between inflation and growth from the perspective of an emerging economy, India. Examining this relationship using a wavelet multi resolution analysis with varying time scale...