Rice and wheat are India's staple cereal crops and there is significant regional variation in the suitability to the cultivation of each. Both are so-called 'plough-positive' crops, whose cultivation is benefited by ploughing. It has previously been argued that the ancient adoption of the...

In-group bias can be detrimental for communities and economic development. We study the causal effect of financial constraints on in-group bias in prosocial behaviors - cooperation, norm enforcement, and sharing - among low-income rice farmers in rural Thailand, who cultivate and harvest rice...

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...

What are the performance benefits of investing in human resources in a low-cost labor environment where returns to such investment are widely perceived as negligible? This paper presents a matched pair case study on the performance effect of human resource management systems at two garment...

This paper is one of the first comprehensive attempts to compare earnings in urban China and India over the recent period. While both economies have grown considerably, we illustrate significant cross-country differences in wage growth since the late 1980s. For this purpose, we make use of...

We model the consequences of parental control over choice of wives for sons, for parental incentives to educate daughters, when the marriage market exhibits competitive dowry payments and altruistic but paternalistic parents benefit from having married sons live with them. By choosing uneducated...

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...