Given the intrinsically sequential nature of child birth, timing of a child's birth has consequences not only for itself, but also for its older and younger siblings. The paper argues that prior and posterior spacing between consecutive siblings are thus important measures of intensity of...

Religious and ethnic minorities across the world face partisan treatment with regard to provision of public goods, either as outcome of discriminatory practices or due to historical antecedents, such as the caste and religious divides in India. In several districts of West Bengal in India...

In the context of strikingly low literacy rates among Indian women and low caste population, the paper explores whether and how far the interests of the marginalized poor are undermined by the dominant elite consisting mainly of the landed and the capitalists. We distinguish the dominant elite...

Caste-based quotas in hiring have existed in the public sector in India for decades. Recently there has been debate about introducing similar quotas in private sector jobs. This paper uses an audit study to determine the extent of caste-based discrimination in the Indian private sector. On...

Trade unionism is a legislative system of organizing workers and raising voices for economic and social goods. As the process of global integration deepens the labour market become more flexible and fragmented, rendering collective organization more and more difficult. In this backdrop, the...

It is widely held that work by children obstructs schooling, so that working children in impoverished families will find it difficult to escape poverty. If children's school attendance and work were highly substitutable activities, it would be advisable to quell work in the interest of schooling...

Data from a range of different environments indicate that the incidence of death is not randomly distributed across families but, rather, that there is a clustering of death amongst siblings. A natural explanation of this would be that there are (observed or unobserved) differences across...

It is now stylized that, while the impact of ownership on firm productivity is unclear, product market competition can be expected to have a positive impact on productivity, thereby making entry (or contestability of markets) desirable. Traditional research in the context of entry has explored...

Since the early 1990s, the employment structure of organised manufacturing industries in India has undergone substantial changes with the steep rise in the use of contract workers in place of permanent workers. This process has led to increased wage inequality, discrimination as well as the...

Financial inclusion is the broad based delivery of banking and other financial services at affordable cost to the poorest sections of society. In India, financial inclusion emphasizes to include maximum number of people under formal financial systems. The most important part of financial...