This paper proposes that India's caste system and involuntary labor were joint responses by a nonworking landowning … class to a low labor/land ratio in which the rules of the caste system supported the institution of involuntary labor. The …-century statistics on regional population/land ratios linked to anthropological measures of caste-system rigidity. Both the longitudinal …

for access to tap water in rural India. Communities that are heterogeneous in terms of caste (within the majority Hindu …We use data for 436 rural districts from the 2001 Census of India to examine whether different aspects of social … divisions help explain the wide variation in access to tap water across rural India. Studies linking social fragmentation to …

hierarchy - the caste system - affects individuals' willingness to punish violations of a cooperation norm. Although we control … for individual wealth, education, and political participation, low caste individuals exhibit a much lower willingness to … punish norm violations that hurt members of their own caste, suggesting a cultural difference across caste status in the …

We investigate the impact of community power on the practice of untouchability in rural India. We model two …-dimensional simultaneous group conflict over social norms, wherein an upper and backward (OBC) caste Hindu bloc contests the 'scheduled' castes … bloc will increase the likelihood of an upper caste or OBC Hindu household practising untouchability.An increase in that of …

observational data identification challenges remain severe. This study exploits the fact that in India people are assigned a caste …'s caste is still an important determinant for opportunities in life. Subsequently, we find that the castes at the top are …

The socio-economic status of Indian Muslims is, on average, considerably lower than that of upper caste Hindus. Muslims …

, and health worker visits in rural India. We estimate the effect of minority representation on the frequency of visits to … legislative assemblies mandated by the Constitution of India. Using data from state and village level surveys on fifteen major … medical units. On the other hand, Scheduled Caste representatives have a tendency to decrease the frequency of visits by …

of chronic malnourishment in India – that is, the difference in stunting incidence across caste and religious groups. A … larger than the India–Africa gap, but that children from the socio-economically dominant group, the upper caste Hindus, are …India is home to some 120 million children under the age of 5, 36 percent of whom are chronically malnourished. The …

rural India across the entire welfare distribution. The paper establishes that the disadvantage suffered by two historically … Other Backward Caste households with respect to general category households, and the disadvantage exists across the entire … the SC and the ST households must remain a focus of attention besides promoting a more active labor market in rural India …

Since 1989, there has been a sharp increase in the role of caste and religion in determining political fortunes at both … state and federal levels in India. As a consequence, significant intercaste and inter-religion differences in earnings have … unexplored. We address this lacuna in the literature, and explore the determinants of the differences in inter-caste and inter …