By providing 100 days of guaranteed employment to every rural household, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) can challenge the hegemony of the landed elite as major employers in the Indian countryside and raise market wages which have long been depressed. This paper shows that...

This paper proposes a measure of the intensity of competition in labor markets on the basis of limited data. Large-scale socioeconomic surveys often lack detailed information on competitive behavior. It is particularly difficult to determine whether a worker moves between the different segments...

This paper analyzes the effects of the minimum wage on wage inequality, relative employment and over-education. We show that over-education can be generated endogenously and that an increase in the minimum wage can raise both total and low-skill employment, and produce a fall in inequality....

Using an efficiency wage model we show that over-education can be generated endogenously and that an increase in the minimum wage can raise both total and low-skill employment, and produce a fall in inequality. Evidence from the US suggests that these theoretical results are empirically...

We explore the exercise of power in perpetuating status quo institutions. We give empirical examples of the economic importance of power and offer a definition of this elusive term. We then investigate the role of power in a modern capitalist economy, borrowing ideas from the classical...

The interest of this paper is to discuss the main features that characterize the accumulation regimes that have taken place during the twentieth century in Chile. Understanding that a set of institutionalized compromises and political con icts are inherent to any capitalist society, I rely on...

This paper examines macroeconomic dynamics of household debt and housing prices. Drawing on Minsky's insights into financial instability and cycles, our framework combines household debt dynamics with behavioral asset price dynamics in a Keynesian macro model. We show that endogenous boom-bust...

The paper examines the determinants of income and wealth inequality in a Kaldorian model where the profit share adjusts to clear the goods market and the long-run output-capital ratio is constant. The approach is radically different from both the mainstream approach that stresses properties of...

Using a state-industry panel data set at the 3 digit national industrial classification (NIC) level of disaggregation for 19 major Indian states over the period 1983-84 to 2007-08, we analyze the contemporaneous and long run impacts of the rate of profit and its components - profit share,...

This paper examines the implications of different monetary and fiscal policy rules in an economy characterized by Harrodian instability. We show that (i) a monetary rule along Taylor lines can be stabilizing for low debt ratios but becomes de-stabilizing if the debt ratio exceeds a certain...