Closely following recent innovations in the literature on the multidimensional measurement of poverty, this paper provides similar measures for the top of the distribution using a dual cutoff method to identify individuals, who can be considered as rich in a multidimensional setting. We use this...

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...

Inter- and intra-state disparities in levels of literacy rates in India are striking, especially for the marginalized groups of women and low caste population. The present paper offers an explanation of this disparate development in terms of elite dominance that discriminates against the...

State merit aid programs have been found to reduce the likelihood that students attend college out-of-state. Using the U.S. News & World Report rankings of colleges and universities to measure college quality and Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System data to measure enrollment, we...

An unresolved question in political science is how economic downturns affect citizens' economic left-right preferences. Existing observational studies fail to isolate the effect of economic conditions and the effect of elite framing of these conditions. We therefore designed a survey experiment...

I take advantage of a sharp discontinuity in the probability of admission to an elite university at the admission score threshold, to estimate causal returns to college education quality. I use a newly constructed dataset, which combines individual administrative records about high school,...

This paper develops a model in which the interaction of entrepreneurial investments and power of the owners of land or other natural resources determines structural change and economic development. A more equal distribution of natural resources promotes structural change and growth through two...

We examine the efficacy of affirmative action at universities whose value depends on peer and alumni networks. We study an elite Brazilian university that adopted race- and income-based affirmative action at a large scale. Using employer-employee data, we show that a key benefit of attending the...

Communism was a two-edged sword for the trustees of the former regime. Communist party members and their relatives enjoyed status and privileges, while secret police informants were often coerced to work clandestinely and gather compromising materials about friends, colleagues, and neighbors. We...

Beginning in the late 1970s, China's economy delivered the largest growth spurt in recorded history. Striking discontinuity between recent outcomes and the economic experience of the prior 200 years invites portrayal of recent events as a "China miracle" that requires neither economic nor...