This paper is the first attempt towards directly testing the existence of status seeking behavior of the poor for a developing economy, India, with the help of a large dataset. The paper empirically validates status consciousness among the relatively poor for both rural and urban areas across...

This paper provides a simple demonstration of an empirical observation pointed out by the existing literature that the presence of informality in the production sector of an economy moderates the impact of economic shocks affecting it. We show that in the presence of informality, adverse demand...